Status Updates From Uno, nessuno e centomila

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“bensì per qualche cosa che non c’è e che vi mettiamo noi; per qualche cosa che dia senso e valore alla vita: un senso, un valore che qua, almeno in parte, riuscite a perdere, o di cui riconoscete l’affliggente vanità. E vi vien languore, ecco, e malinconia. Capisco, capisco. Rilascio di nervi. Accorato bisogno d’abbandonarvi. Vi sentite sciogliere, vi abbandonate.”

“Diciamo dunque che è in noi ciò che chiamiamo pace. Non vi pare? E sapete da che proviene? Dal semplicissimo fatto che siamo usciti or ora dalla città; cioè, sì, da un mondo costruito: case, vie, chiese, piazze; non per questo soltanto, però, costruito, ma anche perché non ci si vive più così per vivere, come queste piante, senza saper di vivere; (…)”

“Without others’ eyes to confirm the reality of what’s before us, our eyes no longer know what they’re seeing, and our very identity is lost; because what we believe to be the most intimate part of ourselves, our consciousness, is really others in us; we cannot see ourselves with our own eyes.”

“And a body prone to scrutiny has to get away from it all and take a walk.”

“All because I wanted to show the world I might be someone other than the man they imagined me to be.”

“… since your old friend occupied one reality and the new one another, so profoundly incompatible that an alarm went off alerting you to the fact that, if you spoke to one the other would stand there staring at you dumbfounded; he wouldn’t recognize you anymore…”

“… because a single reality wasn’t provided for us and doesn’t exist, and we have to provide it for ourselves if we want to live… And life doesn’t remain fixed. It can’t stay in one place. If it stops tomorrow, it’s the end of the world.”

“Once we realize that all of our selves are not in a given act, it would therefore be an atrocious injustice to judge us on any one act alone, to hold us accountable, trussed up and hung from the gallows, our whole existence summed up in a moment.”

“Once an act is performed, that’s it; there’s no way to change it… the act nevertheless endures, becomes a prison.”

“… your life being the result of actions, of seed heedlessly thrown by a man, your father; your presence in the world deriving from that seed, making you the involuntary fruit of that man, attached to that branch, grown from those roots.”

“… others knew me, each in their own way, according to the reality that they had given me, each seeing a Maggot who wasn’t me (to me), while I could never be myself for myself; and instead was a multitude of Maggots, each of them more real than I was, because I had zero, I repeat, zero reality for myself,”

“You think that houses are the only things that get built? I’m endlessly building myself and building you, while we’re engaged in the same process. And this assembly endures until the material of our feelings crumbles and the cement of our will is exhausted.”

A deep need to be rid of yourself. To feel yourself dissolving, to shed yourself. I understand, I understand.

“… because in the city one can’t live as these plants do, unaware of living; so one lives instead for something that doesn’t exist, that we’ve invented; something that gives meaning and value to life, a meaning and value that here, at least to some degree, you manage to shake off, or whose oppressive vanity you recognize.”

My reality isn’t any more true than yours…

“But his much responsibility do we bear if word, in and of themselves, are empty? Empty. Though in speaking to me you fill them with your intentions; and I, as I take them in, fill them with my own intentions. We think we understand each other; but we don’t at all.”

“I’m a stranger I can’t see except by chance, in a random instant. A stranger that others see and know, and I cannot.”

My feelings have a nose….