Status Updates From De wetten van de melancholi...

Growing old is an adjective. We enter into the adjectives of old age—slow, boundless, hazy, cold, or transparent like glass.
There is also a mathematics of aging,..
We change the world’s proportions over the years. Those younger than we are grow ever more numerous, while the number of those older than we are declines menacingly.
Aging requires a certain audacity. It may not be audacity, but resignation.

...Now, as I page through them distractedly to kill time, I finally realize it—melancholy is slowly swamping the world . . . Time has somehow gotten stuck and autumn doesn’t want to give way, every season is autumn. Global autumn . . . Traveling doesn’t cure sorrow, either. I need to look for something else.
The saddest place is the world.

And thus my journeys naturally came to an end . . . I returned to the saddest place in the world, shattered. All that remained from several years of hotels, airports and train stations were a couple of notebooks filled with hastily jotted impressions...

We can only wonder what sense of time and the eternal the ones who came before us had, in the dark night of the primeval, living in their flimsy huts, outliving their flimsy huts, outliving their hearths, moving from place to place, measuring out their lives in days and nights, in lighted and extinguished fires

Even if you weren’t born in Versailles, Athens, Rome, or Paris, the sublime will always find a form in which to appear before you. If you haven’t read Pseudo Longinus, haven’t heard of Kant, or if you inhabit the eternal, illiterate fields of anonymous villages and towns, of empty days and nights, the sublime will reveal itself to you in your own language.

Let me write, write, write, let me record and preserve, let me be like Noah’s ark, not me, but this book. Only the book is eternal, only its covers shall rise above the waves, only the beasts inside, between its pages swarming with life, will survive. And when they see the new land, they will go forth and multiply.

If something is enduring and monumental, what is the point of putting it in a capsule? Only that which is mortal, perishable, and fragile should be preserved, that which is sniffling and lighting matchsticks in the dark . . . Now that’s what will be in all the boxes in the basement of this book.

In the dying light of the day I once again feel that inrush of obscure sorrow and fear, true savage fear, for which I have no name. I quickly put on my coat, pull on a hat with ear flaps, I could easily pass as either hip or homeless, that suits me fine, I’m invisible in any case.

At first you don’t get it. Then you start checking to see whether your phone battery has died. A sharp absence at five in the afternoon. At first it lasts around an hour, then it gets shorter. But it never disappears. Just like with the cigarettes you quit smoking years ago, but which you keep dreaming about.

In the newspapers I processed a while back, it said that “unfriend” was the word of the year for 2009. It feels like that’s all I’ve been doing these past ten years. Over time, friends have been disappearing in different ways. Some suddenly, as if they had never existed. Others gradually, awkwardly, apologetically . . . They stop calling.

And the next day I moved the most basic necessities for living into the basement. I spend most of my time down here. I feel at home. I mostly use the floor above as an alibi. If you put some effort into appearing normal, you can save yourself a lot of time, during which you can be what you want to be in peace.

Earlier, I would at times feel the need to shut myself up in the dark, letting nothing awaken the empathy, to just sit like that in the healing darkness of the nothingness. To keep myself from scattering, to stop the influxes of other people’s sorrows and stories.
The only thing I want now is to remember a few days with that physical intensity of childhood, when I lived out everyone else’s story as my own.

Once I could be in everything, be everything. Now, in the ineptness of my mature years, I wanted to gather up everything, as a small compensation for that which I had lost.
The aging of an empath is a strange and painful process. The corridors toward others and their stories, which once were open, now turn out to be walled up. House arrest in your own body.

... I don’t know anyone like him—translucent, yet simultaneously opaque. I would pass through him like thin air or run into a glass wall. But despite this, or perhaps precisely because of it, he was the only one I could call a friend.

Why does Gaustine continue to be important to me? I’ve rarely had friends. Empathy predisposes you to closeness with people, but not in my case, when the weight of others’ sorrows pressed down on me like a sickness. No women, no relationships, no friendships. But Gaustine seemed to be made of a different time and different matter...

The room, lit up by the autumn sun, has come alive. One ray passes right through the massive glass ashtray on the table, breaking the light down into its constituent colors. Even the long-dead, mummified fly next to it looks exquisite and sparkles like a forgotten earring. The Brownian motion of the dust specks in the ray of light. The first mundane proof of atomism and quantum physics, we are made of specks of dust.

In stories, especially those told by loved ones, there was always some blind spot, a momentary gap, a weak point, incomprehensible sorrow, longing for something lost or that had never taken place, which pulled me inside, into the dark galleries of the unspoken. There were such secret galleries and corridors in every story.

Later the myth will transform the child into a monster, so as to justify the sin of his abandonment, the sin against all children, whom we will abandon in the future.