shadows

At the cost of our innocence we acquire the consciousness of our estrangement from the objective world. The tragic nature of human existence, the fate a reflective soul experiences when it realizes that there is no meaning to its pain, is the profane birthright of our haunted self-awareness.


Beyond the vanity of hope lies the comfort of disillusionment.

Our most profound defiance is not directed outward to the political world of systems and hierarchies. It is, rather, directed at the terror of our own being. By giving our vision lucid form, we assert the power of the creative will over the self's ever degenerative, ever present, impulses towards oblivion and chaos.

Hoping for nothing except the very remote we seek repose in the equivocal mystery of infinity.

from: Giacomo Leopardi

Man (like the other animals) is not born to enjoy life, but only to perpetuate life, to communicate it to others who come after, to conserve it. Neither he himself, nor life, nor any object of this world is actually made for him, but on the contrary, he exists completely for life. terrifying, but a true proposition and the final word of all metaphysics. Existence is not for the existing - even if it offers some good, that is pure chance. That which exists does so for the sake of existence; this is its real, manifest end. Existing things exist because they do; an existing individual is born and exists because one continues to exist, and existence conserves itself in him and after him. This all becomes clear when we recognize that the pure, true end of nature is the conservation of the species and not the conservation or felicity of individuals, a felicity which does not really exist in the world, either for individuals or the species. From this one must necessarily arrive at last to the general, summary, supreme, and terrible conclusion above mentioned. (Bologna, March 11, 1826)

from: The Journal Intime

To descend without murmuring the stream of destiny, to pass without revolt through loss after loss, and diminution after diminution, with no other limit than zero before us - this is what is demanded of us. Involution is as natural as evolution. We sink gradually back into the darkness, just as we issued gradually from it. The play of faculties and organs, the grandiose apparatus of life, is put back bit by bit into the box. We begin by instinct; at the end comes a clearness of vision which we must learn to bear with and to employ without murmuring upon our own failure and decay. A musical theme once exhausted, finds its due refuge and repose in silence.
...And life consists in repeating the human type, and the burden of the human song, as myriads of my kindred have done, are doing, and will do, century after century. To rise to consciousness of this burden and type is something, and we can scarcely achieve anything further.
To rebel against fate - to try to escape the inevitable issue - is almost puerile. When the duration of a centenarian and that of an insect are quantities sensibly equivalent - and geology and astronomy enable us to regard such duration from this point of view - what is the meaning of all our tiny efforts and cries, the value of our anger, our ambition, our hope? For the dream of a dream it is absurd to raise these make-believe tempests.
To be a conscious monad - a nothing which knows itself to be the microscopic phantom of the universe: this is all we can ever attain to.

Henri-Frederic Amiel

from: Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941)

Philosophers have paid little attention to the idea of nought. And yet it is often the hidden spring, the invisible mover of philosophical thinking. From the first wakening of reflection, it is this that pushes to the fore, right under the eyes of consciousness, the torturing problems, the questions that we cannot not gaze at without feeling giddy and bewildered. I have no sooner commenced to philosophize than I ask myself why I exist; and when I take account of the intimate connection in which I stand to the rest of the universe, the difficulty is only pushed back, for I want to know why the universe exists; and if I refer the universe to a Principle immanent or transcendent that supports it or creates it, my thought rests on this principle only a few moments, for the same problem recurs, this time in its full breadth and generality: Whence comes it, and how can it be understood, that anything exists? Even...when matter has been defined as a kind of descent, this descent as the interruption of a rise, this rise itself as a growth, when finally a Principle of creation has been put at the base of things, the same question springs up: How - why does this principle exist rather than nothing?
Our life is thus spent in filling voids, which our intellect conceives under the influence, by no means intellectual, of desire and of regret, under the pressure of vital necessities...