vexations

“I go to bed and before falling asleep I talk to Lucas in my head the way I have for many years. What I tell him is just about what I usually do. I tell him that if he's dead he's lucky and I'd very much like to be in his place. I tell him that he got the better deal, that it is I who is pulling the greater weight. I tell him that life is totally useless, that it's nonsense, an aberration, infinite suffering, the invention of a non-God whose evil surpasses understanding.”
― Ágota Kristóf, The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels

“He renders himself so flat that many people pass by every day without ever seeing him. He does still have something of a voice left, true, and uses it to draw attention; but it is no different from a noise in a lamp or a stove, or the odd irregular dripping of water in a cave. And the world is so ordered that there are people who are forever passing by, their whole lives long, in that interval when he moves on, making less of a sound than anything else that moves, like the hand of a clock, like the shadow of the hand of a clock, like time itself.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten—that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts, nothing matters. It means that everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a wild, random, baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody. But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose—a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory. In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn’t understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived. It is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when we die. But if you can take something from that internal collection and share it—with one person or with the larger world, on the page or in a story recited—it takes on a life of its own.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“The existence of the terrible in every particle of the air. You breathe it in as part of something transparent; but within you it precipitates, hardens, acquires angular, geometrical forms in among your organs; for all the torments and horrors suffered at places of execution, in torture chambers, in madhouses, in operating theatres, under the arches of bridges in late autumn – all this is possessed of a tenacious permanence, all of it persists and, jealous of all that is, clings to its own frightful reality. People would prefer to be able to forget much of it; sleep files away gently at the grooves in the brain, but dreams drive it away and trace the lines anew. And they wake, panting, and dissolve the gleam of a candle in the dark, and drink in the half-lit solace as if it were sugared water.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge