We can know with a reassuring certainty what is beautiful or ugly, right or wrong, good or bad, why it is so and how far it is so [...] And yet! Notwithstanding this, men have been turning about for thousands of years in the same circle of follies, errors and abuse, neither their own experiences nor those of others have made them any more sensible.

from Dark Mirrors

by Arno Schmidt

not about
—from

perhaps the real issue for humanity is the impossibility to not care

Your sense of unity, only perceptible to you, is a sheen on the surface, not a deeper layer of reality.

David Weisman

that in addition to those familiar dark shadows
there are those luminous as well

If man is once again to come into the vicinity of Being, he must first learn to exist in namelessness. He must recognize equally the seduction of the public and the powerlessness of the private. Before he speaks, he must allow himself again to be spoken to by Being and risk the danger that in being spoken to he will have little or rarely anything to say.

Martin Heidegger

Art is the persistence of illusion in a disillusioned world. 

Theodor Lipps

The social body is occupied merely with safeguarding itself and could not care less about a life that has been damaged.

Jean Améry

Regard every man first and foremost as a being who exists only as a consequence of his culpability and whose life is an expiation of the crime of being born.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Man is hungry for beauty. There is a void.

Oscar Wilde

Somewhere, free of joy, there is nothing.

Bram  van Velde

thing not as object
but as revelation

to elevate the gaze
even when looking down

The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision. Tears and not sight are the essence of the eye. 

Jacques Derrida

The foundation is not something obscure, neither is it light which becomes perceivable only when it shines upon the thing which bathes in its light, nor is it the thing itself as a “transcendent phenomenon”, but it is an immanent revelation which is a presence to itself, even though such a presence remains “invisible.”

Michel Henry

Yes . . . I like . . . I like their . . . their illogicality . . . their burning illogicality – the flame . . . the flame . . . Which consumes all our filthy logic . . .

Samuel Beckett to Charles Juliet

Just 'cause you feel it, doesn't mean it's there.

Thom Yorke

One is only ever exiled from oneself 
and personal pain is of little concern. 
After all to wail within is not 
to wail for everyone.


But if living is such
then marching enraged 
under the windows of past contempt 
will allow one to say 
"us", "all of us."

Pierre Lepori
translated by Michael Twed

that which is closest
often seems most distant