Adam > Recent Status Updates

"When we face the vanity of our best efforts, their triviality, their involvement in illusion, we become desperate. And then we are tempted to do anything as long as it seems to be good. We may abandon a better good with which we have become disillusioned, and embrace a lessor one with a frenzy that prevents us from seeing the greater illusion."

"People are constantly trying to use you to help them create an illusion by which they live. Especially various collective illusions."

"Meanwhile I have a hard time appearing cheerful and sociable. I can't say I've tried too hard, either. Complete disgust with the stupid mentality we cultivate in our monasteries. Deliberate cult of frustration and nonsense. Professional absurdity. Isn't life absurd enough already without our adding to it our own fantastic frustrations and stupidities?"
:)

On Napoleon:
"Never to the end of his life could he understand goodness, beauty, or truth, or the significance of his actions which were too contrary to goodness and truth, too remote from everything human, for him ever to be able to grasp their meaning. He could not disavow his actions, belauded as they were by half the world, and so he had to repudiate truth, goodness, and all humanity.”

"Dear God, how was it possible? How had I, with the wings of youth and poetry, come to this? Art and travel and the glow of ideals--and now this! How had this paralysis of hatred against myself and everyone else, this obstruction of all feeling, this mud-hell of an empty heart and despair crept over me so softly and so slowly?"

Finally reading this one after years of being prejudice against Kerouac because of Bukowski, having now lived long enough to damn well form my own dislikes.

Incredibly interesting thus far.

Switched to the Maude translation from the Kropotkin and started over. I got halfway through the Kropotkin and was like, "Where the hell is Tolstoy?" A friend sent me a copy of the Maude translation and it is like reading an entirely new book, one actually written by Tolstoy (as I have read a lot of his other works but have been saving this one for a long time). Absolutely stunning so far and worth starting over.

Live long and prosper.

I had no idea this book would be so equally unsettling AND hilarious! Slow read but really enjoying it.

Where have you been all my life, you book of bones? I'm absolutely in love.