albin james’s Reviews > Ghosts in the Mirror > Status Update

It is a common illusion: the instinct to hoard (knowledge or anything else) is part of the will to power, which is the say, the instinct for pelf-preservation. Only later, much later, do you realize that the things you've accumulated are ranged on the side of death.

Just as one could hardly have stayed in the French Communist Party for twenty long years (long because strewn with recurring traps and bitter pills) without a steadfast militance, a partisan spirit ready to swallow anything, so I think I see in myself a very ancient refusal of all militant faith, an a fortiori refusal of engagement as Sartre defined it. {I wonder how he felt about militant non-violence}

....an attempt at least to keep up appearances by replacing the incomprehensible explosion of atoms, of black holes and impasses, with a reassuring, clear, unequivocal constellation woven so closely that we'd no longer hear death howling between the stitches, amidst broken threads hastily reknotted. No objection to this grandiose, unnatural project? ... No objection, really?

The entire system of the novel in the last century, with its cumbersome machinery of continuity, linear chronology, causality, noncontradiction, was actually a last-ditch attempt to forget the disintegrated state we were left in when God withdrew from our souls,