Charles

“One possible way to escape this unbearable state of uncertainty and the paralyzing feeling of one’s own insignificance is the very trait which became so prominent in Calvinism: the development of a frantic activity and a striving to do something. Activity in this sense assumes a compulsory quality: the individual has to be active in order to overcome his feeling of doubt and powerlessness. This kind of effort and activity is not the result of inner strength and self-confidence; it is a desperate escape from anxiety. ― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (Open Road Media March 26, 2013) First published January 1, 1941.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“WHOEVER you are, I fear you are walking
the walks of dreams,
I fear those realities are to melt from under your
feet and hands;
Even now, your features, joys, speech, house,
trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume,
crimes, dissipate away from you,
Your true soul and body appear before me,
They stand forth out of affairs—out of commerce,
shops, law, science, work, farms, clothes, the
house, medicine, print, buying, selling, eating,
drinking, suffering, begetting, dying,
They receive these in their places, they find these
or the like of these, eternal, for reasons,
They find themselves eternal, they do not find that
the water and soil tend to endure forever —
and they not endure.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you,
that you be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,


— Walt Whitman, “Poem of You, Whoever You Are,” Selected Poems 1855-1892 (Stonewall Inn Editions September 20, 2000) First published October 1, 1980.”
― Walt Whitman, Selected Poems 1855-1892

“Go blind today already:
eternity is too full of eyes–”
― Paul Celan, Breathturn

“You used to believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because you then would have reasons to be sad. When you were still young, your suffering was inconsolable because you believed it to be unfounded. (…) You were not surprised to feel yourself ill adapted to the world, but it did surprise you that the world had produced a being who now lived in it as a foreigner. Do plants commit suicide? Do animals die of hopelessness? They either function or disappear. You were perhaps a weak link, an accidental evolutionary dead end, a temporary anomaly not destined to burgeon again.”
― Édouard Levé, Suicide