Luciana’s Reviews > Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature > Status Update

Cioran knew it: “why fear the nothing in store for us when it is no different from the nothing which preceded us”

“To ask ‘how shall I live?’ is to presume that life itself is desirable in the first place.”

“We’re all deluded, vainly searching ways
To make us happy by the length of days”.

“[Ophelia] shows up as a ‘document in madness’, […] prompting a diagnostic scrutiny that depersonalizes her plight.” This “leaves permanently open the question of how much agency [she] did or did not express through that death”.

“j’aspire au repos éternel; la survie ne m’attire aucunement.”

“a posthumous mode of virtual superiority toward organic life” : “life is a joke and death is the last laugh”.

“The foam of the sea” : “an agent of silencing and mortal conclusion” connoting “a standard memento mori poetica of the solitary life as a fragile bubble”.