Bokelskere.no

Victims. Victims of a transitional period of morality. That is what we both certainly are.
The revolution must be taking place somewhere, but the old morality persists unchanged in the world around us and lies athwart our way. However much the waves on the surface of the sea may rage, the water on the bottom, far from experiencing a revolution, lies motionless, awake but feigning sleep.

Most of us are not directly responsible for strip mining and extractive agriculture and other forms of environmental abuse. But we are guilty nonetheless, for we connive in them by our ignorance. We are ignorantly dependent on them. We do not know enough about them; we do not have a particular enough sense of their danger. Most of us, for example, not only do not know how to produce the best food in the best way - we don’t know how to produce any kind in any way. Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understand how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato. And for this condition we have elaborate rationalizations, instructing us that dependence for everything on somebody else is efficient and economical and a scientific miracle. I say, instead, that it is madness, mass produced.

Imagine an ancient city that built a high wall to protect it from the wild torrents of an adjacent river. Centuries later, though the river had long dried up, the city still invested considerable resources in maintaining that wall.

"Yes, eternal recurrence means that every time you choose an action you must be willing to choose it for all eternity. And it is the same for every action not made, every stillborn thought, every choice avoided. And all unloved life will remain bulging inside you, unlived through all eternity. And the unheeded voice of your conscience will cry out to you forever."
....
"So, as I understand it, eternal recurrence promises a form of immortality?"
"No!" Nietzsche was vehement. "I teach that life should never be modified, or squelched, because the promise of some other kind of life in the future. What is immortal is this life, this moment. There is no afterlife, no goal toward which this life points, no apocalyptic tribunal or judgement. This moment exists forever, and you, alone, are your only audience."

The wedding-ring on her finger had authorized her to become acquainted with pleasure; her senses had grown demanding; at thirty-five, in the prime of her life, she was no longer allowed to satisfy them. She went on sleeping beside the man whom she loved, and who almost never made love to her any more: she hoped, she waited and she pined, in vain.

"But surely" - and Nietzsche shook his clenched fists - "you must realize that there is no reality to any of your preoccupations! Your vision of Bertha, the halo of attraction and love that surround her - these don't really exist. These poor phantasms are not part of nominal reality. All seeing is relative, and so is all knowing. We invent what we experience. And what we have invented, we can destroy."
Breuer opened his mouth to protest that this was exactly the kind of exhortation that was pointless, but Nietzsche plunged on.
"Let me make it clearer, Josef. I have a friend - had one - Paul Ree, a philosopher. We both belive that God is dead. He concludes that a life without God is meaningless, and so great is his distress that he flirts with suicide: for convenience, he wears at all time a vial of poison around his neck. For me, however, godlessness is an occasion for rejoicing. I exalt in my freedom. I say to myself, `What would there be to create if gods existed?´ You see what I mean? The same situation, the same sense data - but two realities!"

A cosmic perspective always attenuates tragedy. If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.

Men jeg kunne teksten enda det ikke var noen som sang den, sa Inga. Og dette står det i den: Hele mitt jeg er oppfylt av din ensomhet.
Jeg tidde. Det var selvfølgelig det som var feilen: at jeg tidde. Men det låste seg for meg. Jeg kunne ikke for det.

He’d also observed that part of this success was the product of being alone. ‘I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.’

And Nora felt similarly, in that moment. Although she had only been left alone for an hour at this point, she had never experienced this level of solitude before, amid such unpopulated nature.

She had thought, in her nocturnal and suicidal hours, that solitude was the problem. But that was because it hadn’t been true solitude. The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wilderness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.