Solemn Sadness

...the solemn sadness that dwells in all great things - in high mountains and in great men, in profound nights and in eternal poems.

Fernando Pessoa

Reading

“There are worse crimes than burning books,” Joseph Brodsky said. “One of them is not reading them.”

The Pleasure Of Life

We eat, excrete, sleep, and get up;
This is our world
All we have to do beyond that
Is to die.

Ikkyu Sojun - (1394-1481)

Works of Art

"Against our real world, which, by its very nature, is fleeting and worthy of forgetting, works of art stand as a different world, a world that is ideal, solid, where every detail has its importance, its meaning, where everything in it -- every word, every phrase -- deserves to be unforgettable and was conceived to be such." ·

THE CURTAIN An Essay in Seven Parts By Milan Kundera

Is anything worse

ELECTRA: Is anything worse than death?
AEGISTHUS: Life, if you wish to die.

Seneca - Agamemnon

To Read

To read a dense, deep passage in a novel, to enter into that world and believe it to be true - nothing makes me happier, nothing binds me more to life. I also prefer it if the writer is dead, because then there is no little cloud of jealousy to darken my admiration. The older I get, the more convinced I am that the best books are by dead writers."

Orhan Pamuk

All my tendencies are deadly ones

All my tendencies are deadly ones, he once said to me, everything in me has a deadly tendency to it, it's in my genes. He always read books that were obsessed with suicide, with disease and death, I thought while standing in the inn, books that described human misery, the hopeless, meaningless, senseless, world in which everything is always devastating and deadly.

Quote from The Loser by Thomas Bernhard

My melancholy

I have one intimate confidant—my melancholy. In the midst of my joy, in the midst of my work, she waves to me, calls me . My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known, what wonder, then, that I love her in return.
—Søren Kierkegaard (from Either/Or)

A Gloomy View

There is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one's efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims (tr. T. Bailey Saunders)

The Melancholic

Dissimulation, secretiveness appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself--these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation.

Susan Sontag - Under the Sign of Saturn

Nothing Lasts

Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.

- Henri Frederic Amiel

Sadness

“There is melancholy in the wind and sorrow in the grass”

Charles Kuralt

The Church of the Non-Believers

MY FRIENDS, I MUST ASK YOU AN IMPORTANT QUESTION TODAY: Where do you stand on God?

It's a question you may prefer not to be asked. But I'm afraid I have no choice. We find ourselves, this very autumn, three and a half centuries after the intellectual martyrdom of Galileo, caught up in a struggle of ultimate importance, when each one of us must make a commitment. It is time to declare our position.

This is the challenge posed by the New Atheists. We are called upon, we lax agnostics, we noncommittal nonbelievers, we vague deists who would be embarrassed to defend antique absurdities like the Virgin Birth or the notion that Mary rose into heaven without dying, or any other blatant myth; we are called out, we fence-sitters, and told to help exorcise this debilitating curse: the curse of faith.

The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it's evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there's no excuse for shirking.

Three writers have sounded this call to arms. They are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. A few months ago, I set out to talk with them. I wanted to find out what it would mean to enlist in the war against faith...more here

In Time

We need be careful how we deal with those about us, when every death carries to some small circle of survivors, thoughts of so much omitted, so little done -- of so many things forgotten, and so many more which might have been repaired! There is no remorse so deep, as that which is unavailing; if we would be spared its tortures, let us remember this, in time.

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, chap. 33

The End of the World As They Know It

What do Christian millenarians, jihadists, Ivy League professors, and baby-boomers have in common? They’re all hot for the apocalypse...more here

A Metaphysical Materialist

Who was the real Walter Benjamin? Was it the otherworldly aesthete who believed, along with the German Romantics, that literature has a redemptive purpose, and who was indifferent to whether a literary work was actually read, since it is ultimately a metaphysical end in itself?

Or was the real Benjamin the self-proclaimed "strategist in the literary struggle," the follower of Bertolt Brecht who, during the 1920s and '30s, became enamored of Soviet literature and film, with their odes to factory work and agricultural collectivization, dismissing art for art's sake as an unconscionable bourgeois indulgence in an age of class struggle?

Or was it the passionate Kabbalist, the friend of Gershom Scholem who proclaimed that his interpretive ideal was the Talmudic doctrine according to which every Torah passage contained forty-nine levels of meaning; who pronounced, without a trace of irony, that any philosophy that could not foretell the future by reading coffee grounds was worthless; who, following the fall of France in 1940, argued that Marxism could prevail only if it enlisted the help of theology; and who claimed that the goal of revolution was not so much the emancipation of future generations as the resurrection of vanquished ancestors? ...more here

Melancholy

Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad.
- Victor Hugo

Melancholy sees the worst of things,--things as they may be, and not as they are. It looks upon a beautiful face, and sees but a grinning skull.
- Christian Nestell Bovee

Here rests his head upon the lap of earth,
A youth, to fortune and to fame unknown;
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy marked him for her own.
- Thomas Gray,
Elegy in a Country Churchyard--The Epitaph

Hence, all you vain delights,
As short as are the nights
Wherein you spend your folly!
There's nought in this life sweet,
If man were wise to see 't,
But only melancholy,
Oh, sweetest melancholy!
- Dr. William Strode, Song in Praise of Melancholy,
as given in Malone's Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, manuscript no. 21

Quotes related to books, reading

Anyone who has a book collection wants for nothing.

--Cicero

Books are carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculations at a standstill.

--Barbara Tuchman

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

--S.I. Hiyakawa

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

--Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996)

The book must of necessity be put into a bookcase. And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, must be catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil!

--William Gladstone

Read in order to Live.

--Gustave Flaubert

Life

I laugh and I cry, and I’m haunted by
Things I never meant or wished to say.

Bob Dylan

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Death

Newsflash: we're all going to die. But here are 20 things you didn't know about kicking the bucket...more here