November 2009
64 posts
“Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it any more. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them. I am quite at ease this evening, quite solidly terre-a-terre in the world.”
—Jean-Paul Sartre (via wahnbriefe)
“I am free and that is why I am lost.”
—Franz Kafka (via myserendipities) (via dondante)
“How hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!… There can be no peace without hope.”
—Albert Camus (via myserendipities)
The Absurd according to Camus is merely the struggle to find meaning where none exists
Absurdity in Camus's L'Etranger.
The trial is absurd in that the judge, prosecutors, lawyers and jury try to find meaning where none is to be found. Everyone, except Meursault, has there own ‘reason’ why Meursault shot the Arab but none of them are, or can be, correct. In life there are never shortages of opinion as to why this or that thing occurred. How close do any of them get to the meaning behind action?
L'Etranger.
It’s worth noting that L’Etranger is sometimes translated as The Outsider but this is inaccurate. Camus does not want us to think of Meursault as ‘the stranger who lives ‘outside’ of his society’ but of a man who is ‘the stranger within his society’. Had Meursault been some kind of outsider, a foreigner, then quite probably his acts would have been accepted as irrational evil. But Meursault was not an outsider; he was a member of his society – a society that wants meaning behind action.
the light leapt off the steel and it was like a long, flashing sword lunging at my forehead. at the same time all the sweat that had gathered in my eyebrows suddenly ran down over my eyelids, covering them with a dense layer of warm moisture. my eyes were blinded by this veil of salty tears. all i could feel were the cymbals the sun was clashing against my forehead and, indistinctly, the dazzling spear still leaping up off the knife in front of me. it was like a red-hot blade gnawing at my eyelashes and gouging out my stinging eyes. that was when everything shook. the sea swept ashore a great breath of fire. the sky seemed to be splitting from end to end and raining down sheets of flame. my whole being went tense and i tightened my grip on the gun. the trigger gave, i felt the underside of the polished butt and it was there, in that sharp but deafening noise, that it all started. i shook off the sweat and the sun. i realized that i’d destroyed the balance of the day and the perfect silence of this beach where i’d been happy. and i fired four more times at a lifeless body and the bullets sank in without leaving a mark. and it was like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness.
The Outsider; Albert Camus
“It is as if he had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like, without ever discovering there are such things as mirrors.”
—Walter Benjamin on Franz Kafka. (via dailymeh:unburyingthelead) (via vruz)
“It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.”
—Andre Breton
“Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.”
—Blaise Pascal, Pensees, 1670
“The world is beautiful, but has a disease called Man.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
“Like all dreamers, I confuse disenchantment with truth.”
—Jean–Paul Sartre (via samsaramotel) (via lafave) (via smut-to-go)
“Man stands alone in the universe, responsible for his condition, likely to remain in a lowly state, but free to reach above the stars.”
—Walter Kaufmann (Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre)
“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.”
—Søren Kierkegaard (The Sickness Unto Death) (via shynessisnice)
“Angst, sometimes called dread, anxiety or even anguish is a term that is common to many existentialist thinkers. It is generally held to be the experience of our freedom and responsibility. The archetypal example is the experience one has when standing on a cliff where one not only fears falling off it, but also dreads the possibility of throwing oneself off. In this experience that “nothing is holding me back”, one senses the lack of anything that predetermines you to either throw yourself off or to stand still, and one experiences one’s own freedom.”
—
Wikipedia: Existentialism, Angst
I think this happened today. It was kind of fun. (A lot better than if it had happened at night.)
(via brentgilliard)
and they say wikipedia isn’t a good source.
