Tanner Allison

“When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master.”
― Benedict de Spinoza

“In his theory of tragedy, Nietzsche captured the delicate balance, in the genuinely tragic, between the creation of forms and the dissolving of forms. Our individual lives, Nietzsche suggests, are transitory and in some sense illusory, ephemeral shapes that emerge from the energy that is the universe and that, in short order, are reabsorbed into the oneness. The enriching tragic in life can be missed in two ways. We can attribute ourselves and our productions an illusory permanence, like a deluded builder of sandcastles who believes his creation is eternal. Or, alternatively, we can be defeated by our transience, unable to build, paralyzed as we wait for the tide to come in. Nietzsche envisions the tragic man or woman, living life to the fullest, as one who builds sandcastles passionately, all the time aware of the coming tide. The ephemeral, illusory nature of all form does not detract from the surrender to the passion of the work; it enhances and enriches it.
The genuinely romantic reflects this subtle blend of qualities that Nietzsche discovered in the tragic. The lover builds the castles of romance as if they would last forever, knowing full well they are fragile, transitory structures. And the splitting Freud termed "psychical impotence" is an effort to reduce the risk by segregating permanence from adventure. Those boring, sturdy castles over there will last forever; these other fanciful castles are only one-night stands. But in that splitting, something very important is lost. For authentic romance is tragic in Nietzsche's sense. It ends in death; it is never simply stable; at its best it comes and goes, perpetually lost and rediscovered. "Love dies or else lovers die," notes Harold Bloom in his discussion of Romeo and Juliet, "those are the pragmatic possibilities." Romantic passion requires a surrender to a depth of feeling that should come with guarantees. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees. Life and love are inevitably difficult and risky, and to control the risk we all struggle to locate and protect sources for both safety and adventure, often in different relationships.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time

“It was one thing to realize you were shoveling shit against the tide, another to give up the enterprise before you got soiled.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

“Here John Shell and his numerous clan of brothers and sisters lived far past the century mark while flagrantly violating the sacred tenets of modern medicine. This leathery old mountaineer loved fat pork and its artery-clogging cholesterol. He smoked and chewed tobacco from daylight to dark, without incurring a trace of lung or throat cancer. He lived in a drafty log cabin and bathed only when it suited him. Yet he managed to live to the ripe old age of a century and a quarter. Of his somewhat less fortunate brothers and sisters who shared his mode of living the shortest-lived of them reached only eighty-nine.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area