gniyepoc

Let me know how you’re feeling: every place, every person, every moment must be unique, and I know it doesn’t give your personhood justice, but I like to think that I know you (the important parts at least, of what makes you), and if there’s anything ----e doesn’t lack, it’s the passion for life and reflection. You told me before that you want to share with others (let it be the world!), that life is beautiful, and that each of us has the will and power to choose our road to happiness, and it matters little how we get there, how we struggle; if by foot, by motorbike, by hitch-hike, by truck, the hell with the road!- by yacht, by plane, by rocket, we can eventually get there. I’ve come to believe that the mind is not part of our ordinary hominal relation with time. What I mean is that although our bones will brittle, hair ashen, and skin wrinkle, the mind can jump from one “age” to another, it can travel to the deepest corners of our fantasies, to the farthest galaxies of our imagination. And I trust that whenever you reflect about your existence, labored by your experiences, that who you are must have changed. You mind must have explored just as much ground as your feet, and I don’t want to miss out any of it. Share any random footnote, no need for any chronological order, I hate order, am born in chaos, share even the tiniest scribbles along the margins. I’m better, still struggling with my own illness but I’m getting close to acceptance. I guess, in a way, we’re both standing at opposite sides of a balancing beam: I explore intangible worlds like the past, family history, my troubled mind, you explore the world of reality outside it (and within of course). I’m Dostoevsky’s Dreamer. True. I’ve become more compassionate, which I know I’ve always been, and I suffer/ed exceptional guilt hiding it.

Copeying

“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can't help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year. I feel I know you so well that I couldn't have known you better if we'd been friends for twenty years. You won't fail me, will you? Only two minutes, and you've made me happy forever. Yes, happy. Who knows, perhaps you've reconciled me with myself, resolved all my doubts.

When I woke up it seemed to me that some snatch of a tune I had known for a long time, I had heard somewhere before but had forgotten, a melody of great sweetness, was coming back to me now. It seemed to me that it had been trying to emerge from my soul all my life, and only now-

If and when you fall in love, may you be happy with her. I don't need to wish her anything, for she'll be happy with you. May your sky always be clear, may your dear smile always be bright and happy, and may you be for ever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart. Isn't such a moment sufficient for the whole of one's life?”

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

how depressing truth is

...that you no longer have any way out, that you will never become a different man; that even if there were still time and faith enough to change yourself, you probably would not even wish to change; and if you wished, you would do nothing about it anyway, because, in fact, there is perhaps nothing to change to.

-          Notes from Underground, 7. Fyodor Dostoevsky.

oh internet

hi tag.

well, i once promised i would never just stop replying if i wanted to end things with you. i would writing and tell you... so i guess that is what i am doing now. i’m sorry if that is hard for you.

but you know i will always be just a fantasy to you. i don’t blame you at all... cause i am much better a fantasy than a reality and you know that and i know that too. but with the chat room closed and my finally realizing this, i think it is time i tried rejoining the real world. what i want i can’t have... cause i want you. and not just as your mistress. i want all of you. you must know that. and you know i’ll never really have you. you practically said so in that e-mail... the one where you were talking about the two of us out there in the sky outside the airplane window... somewhere where we can finally be together, and you were right... we can’t exist in the real world.

oh, tag. i kept waiting for you to tell me something about you i really wouldn’t like. or maybe say something really jerky. then we could just have a fight and you could call me a slut like my husband used to and that would be the end. but it didn’t happen. i told you to stop being so sweet. but you wouldn’t. so here i am.

i need to start meeting real people. try to find a guy down here. i don’t want to... but i know i have to. and i need to forget you if i’m going to try.

i don’t know why i’m saying all of this... except i’m sorry i did this to you. i showed you someone who wasn’t real and got you to like it, maybe even love it, but tag there is nothing there... i see that now... i am not that person, there is no one like the person you thought i was, and you should forget that person because she doesn’t exist.

-       lisa33, 240. Dan Allan.

reference: Allan Dan. 2003. lisa33. USA: Viking Penguin.

KAFKA

“…on the contrary, one is alone, a perfect stranger to everyone, and merely an object of curiosity.”

-       Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings. Franz Kafka.

far away

I’ll open my suitcase and unfold my life
like a blanket. In the dark country I will lie
all night and wonder how this came to be:

the one light left in the world
is your window, somewhere in the land

of thin rain and expensive trains.

- Love in the Dark Country, Kapka Kassabova

puzzles

Time is tricky. You have whole months, even years, when nothing changes a speck, when you don't go anywhere or do anything or think one new thought. And then you can get hit with a day, or an hour, or half a second, when so much happens it's almost like you got born all over again into some brand-new person you for damn sure never expected to meet.

-          Life is Funny, E.R Frank

Mask

Our description of freedom, since it does not distinguish between choosing and doing, compels us to abandon at once the distinction between the intention and the act. The intention can no more be separated from the act than thought can be separated from the language which expresses it.

- Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sarte (1905 -1980)

absolute. orgasm. society.

                “I am proud that he had chosen me to give him pleasure and that it was he who had been my choice. It was not—as it is for most of you—an act of casual indulgence and mutual contempt. It was the ultimate form of our admiration for each other, with full knowledge of the values by which we made our choice. We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies, those who do not leave their values to empty dreams, but bring them into existence, those who give material form to thoughts, and reality to values—those who make steel, railroads and happiness. And to such among you who hate the thought of human joy, who wish to see men’s life as chronic suffering and failure, who wish men to apologize for happiness—or for success, or ability, or achievement, or wealth—to such among you, I am now saying: I wanted him, I had him, I was happy, I had known joy, a pure, full, guiltless joy, the joy you dread to hear confessed by any human being, the joy of which your only knowledge is in your hatred for those who are worthy of reaching it. Well, hate me, then—because I reached it!”

-          Atlas Shrugged, 781. Ayn Rand.

--

...then she felt, when it hit her throat, that which she knew only as an upward streak of motion that released and united her body into a single shock of pleasure—then she knew nothing but the motion of his body and the driving greed that went reaching on and on, as if she were not a person any longer, only a sensation of endless reaching for the impossible—then she knew that it was possible, and she gasped and lay still, knowing that nothing more could be desired, ever.

-          Atlas Shrugged, 876. Ayn Rand.

--

                “You have heard no concepts of morality but the mystical or the social. You have been taught that morality is a code of behavior imposed on you by whim, the whim of a supernatural power or the whim of society, to serve God’s purpose or your neighbor’s welfare, to please an authority beyond the grave or else next door—but not to serve your life or pleasure. Your pleasure, you have been taught, is to be found in immorality, your interests would best be served by evil, and any moral code must be designed not for you, but against you, not to further your life, but to drain it.

-          Atlas Shrugged, 925. Ayn Rand.

--

It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live.

-          Atlas Shrugged, 928. Ayn Rand.

Justice, People, and Genius

                “Now you see, that’s the cruelty of conscientious people. You wouldn’t understand it—would you?—if I answered that real devotion consists of being willing to lie, cheat, and fake in order to make another person happy—to create for him the reality he wants, if he doesn’t like the one that exists.”

                “No,” he said slowly, “I wouldn’t understand it.”

                “It’s really very simple. If you tell a beautiful woman that she is beautiful, what have you given her? It’s no more than a fact and it has cost you nothing. But if you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty. To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She’s earned it, it’s a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake—and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem.”

-          Atlas Shrugged, 284. Ayn Rand.

--

                “Why yes, I can,” said Midas Mulligan when he was asked whether he could name a person more evil than the man with a heart closed to pity. “The man who uses another’s pity for him as a weapon.”

-          Atlas Shrugged, 294. Ayn Rand.

--

                “Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another—their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.”

-          Atlas Shrugged, 383. Ayn Rand.

--

                “Genius is a superstition, Jim,” said Dr. Ferris slowly, with an odd kind of emphasis, as if knowing that he was naming the unnamed in all their minds. “There’s no such thing as the intellect. A man’s brain is a social product. A sum of influences that he’s picked up from those around him. Nobody invents anything, he merely reflects what’s floating in the social atmosphere. A genius is an intellectual scavenger and a greedy hoarder of the ideas which rightfully belong to society, from which he stole them. All thought is theft.

-          Atlas Shrugged, 499. Ayn Rand.

life, purpose, morality, justice

                “The philosophers of the past were superficial,” Dr. Pritchett went on. “It remained for our century to redefine the purpose of philosophy. The purpose of philosophy is not to help man find the meaning of life, but to prove to them that there isn’t any.”

-          Atlas Shrugged, 127. Ayn Rand.

--

                “What is morality?” she asked.

                “Judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price. But where does one find it?”

-          Atlas Shrugged, 168. Ayn Rand.

--

“That’s your cruelty, that’s what’s mean and selfish about you. If you loved your brother, you’d give him a job he didn’t deserve, precisely because he didn’t deserve it—that would be true love and kindness and brotherhood. Else what’s love for? If a man deserves a job, there’s no virtue in giving it to him. Virtue is the giving of the undeserved.”

-          Atlas Shrugged, 197. Ayn Rand.

--

                “What I feel for you is contempt. But it’s nothing, compared to the contempt I feel for myself. I don’t love you. I’ve never loved anyone. I wanted you from the first moment I saw you. I wanted you as one wants a whore—for the same reason and purpose. I spent two years damning myself, because I thought you were above a desire of this kind. You’re not. You’re as vile an animal as I am. I should loathe my discovering it. I don’t. Yesterday, I would have killed anyone who’d tell me that you were capable of doing what I’ve had you do. Today, I would give my life not to let it be otherwise, not to have you be anything but the bitch you are. All the greatness that I saw in you—I would not take it in exchange for the obscenity of your talent at an animal’s sensation of pleasure. We were two great beings, you and I, proud of our strength, weren’t we? Well, this is all that’s left of us—and I want no self-deception about it.”

-          Atlas Shrugged, 238. Ayn Rand.

seduction

                They came to a clearing. It was a small hollow at the bottom of a shaft made of straight rock hillsides. A stream cut across the grass fluid. The sound of the water stressed the silence. The distant cut of open sky made the place seem more hidden. Far above, on the crest of a hill, one tree caught the first rays of sunlight.

                They stopped and looked at each other. She knew, only when he did it, that she had known he would. He seized her, she felt her lips on his mouth, felt her arms grasping him in violent answer, and knew for the first time how much she had wanted him to do it.

                She felt a moment’s rebellion and a hint of fear. He held her, pressing the length of his body against hers with a tense, purposeful insistence, his hand moving over her breasts as if he were learning a proprietor’s intimacy with her body, a shocking intimacy that needed no consent from her, no permission. She tried to pull herself away, but she only leaned back against his arms long enough to see his face and his smile, the smile that told her she had given him permission long ago. She thought that she must escape; instead, it was she who pulled his head down to find his mouth again.

                She knew that fear was useless, that he would do what he wished, that the decision was his, that he left nothing possible to her except the thing she wanted most—to submit. She had no conscious realization of his purpose, her vague knowledge of it was wiped out, she had no power to believe it clearly, in this moment, to believe it about herself, she knew only that she was afraid—yet what she felt was as if she were crying to him: Don’t ask me for it—oh, don’t ask me—do it!

                She braced her feet for an instant, to resist, but his mouth was pressed to hers and they went down to the ground together, never breaking their lips apart. She lay still—as the motionless, then the quivering object of an act which he did simply, unhesitatingly, as of right, the right of the endurable pleasure it gave them.

-          Atlas Shrugged, 105. Ayn Rand.

here and change

The old man looked as if he had noticed the sudden stop and understood it; but he did not start discussing it; he said, instead, “I don’t like the thing that’s happening to people, Miss Taggart.”

                “What?”

                “I don’t know. But I’ve watched them here for twenty years and I’ve seen the change. They used to rush through here, and it was wonderful to watch, it was the hurry of men who knew where they were going and were eager to get there. Now they’re hurrying because they are afraid. It’s not a purpose that drives them, it’s fear. They’re not going anywhere, they’re escaping. And I don’t think they know what it is that they want to escape. They don’t look at one another. They jerk when brushed against. They smile too much, but it’s an ugly kind of smiling: it’s not joy, it’s pleading. I don’t know what it is that’s happening to the world.” He shrugged. “Oh, well, who is John Galt?”

                “He’s just a meaningless phrase!”

                She was startled by the sharpness of her own voice, and she added in apology, “I don’t like that empty piece of slang. What does it mean? Where did it come from?”

                “Nobody knows,” he answered slowly.

                “Why do people keep saying it? Nobody seems able to explain just what it stands for, yet they all use it as if they knew the meaning.”

                “Why does it disturb you?” he asked.

                “I don’t like what they seem to mean when they say it.”

                “I don’t, either, Miss Taggart.”

                                 -          Atlas Shrugged, 64. Ayn Rand.

fiction

I seem to be both a theoretical philosopher and a fiction writer. But it is the last that interests me most; the first is only the means to the last; the absolutely necessary means, but only the means; the fiction story is the end. Without an understanding and statement of the right philosophical principle, I cannot create the right story; but the discovery of the proper knowledge to be used for my life purpose; and my life purpose is the creation of the kind of world (people and events) that I like—that is, that represents human perfection....This is why, I think, the idea of writing a philosophical nonfiction book bored me. In such a book, the purpose would actually be to teach others, to present my idea to them. In a book of fiction the purpose is to create, for myself, the kind of world I want and to live in it while I am creating it; then, as a secondary consequence, to let others enjoy this world, if, and to the extent that they can.
                               - Introduction; Atlas Shrugged, 6. Ayn Rand.

--

There are times when a fictional work is actually more factual. One can take it to a literary or a contingent sense, but the great and beautiful thing about fiction is how the mind can enter such new realm where one can experience something unique and interesting. When I read fiction, the ideas that raises are new and worth thinking about, the endless possibilities teaches not only creativity but also the lovely bearing of existence.

you are here.

"Why does everyone want to own me?" Pippa mumbles. She's got her head in her hands. "Why do they all want to control my life—how I look, whom I see, what I do or don't do? Why can't they just let me alone?"

"Because you're beautiful," Ann answers, watching the fire lick her palm. "People always think they can own beautiful things."

-      A Great and Terribly Beauty, Libba Bray

yourself

"I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am. "

-      Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides.

a page of shadows

The most unfortunate invalids on earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood has been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn’t sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others with less serious ailments.

- Marquez , A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

moment

It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand.

-      A Father’s Story, Andre Dubus

beauty

Lua kisses her.

Just softly on the lip.

And she kisses back.

Sometimes people are beautiful.

Not in looks

Not in what they say.

Just in what they are.

- I am the Messenger, Markus Zusak

as a whole.

"Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that chasing it is such a fool’s errand, is that happiness isn’t a goal in itself but is only an aftereffect. It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed to — by which I don’t mean ethically correctly so much as just consciously, fully engaged in the business of living. In this respect it resembles averted vision, a phenomena familiar to backyard astronomers whereby, in order to pick out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space just next to it; if you look directly at it, it vanishes. And it’s also true, come to think of it, that the only stars we ever see are not the “real” stars, those cataclysms taking place in the present, but always only the light of the untouchable past."

-      Averted Vision, Tim Kreider