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You have to keep telling yourself this is real. That this is the truth. Or you're dead. —Officer, Second Lives
BODE: Why'd you stop looking?
RAY: It had to stop, I couldn't look forever.
BODE: We don't stop looking. It's who we are.
For The Dark
I saw nothing. Unbearable nothing. Cold, dead, space. Light from a dead past moving closer and closer. Everything moving together, everything moving apart. It was so cold. I could feel my feet. Everything was so heavy. I was no longer up there, I was down here... —Raymond Olbers, For The Dark
RAY: You're looking for something that's past.
BODE: It's all past. The farther we look, the deeper we see into the past. Light moves slow up there.
For The Dark
[ 00 00 00 ]
Notebooks. Stacks of black notebooks. Hundreds of pen inks drained. Years of life. I could open them, but I don't.
[ 10 10 09 ]
Some times I feel I'm standing on the edge of time, other times buried in infinity.
[ 02 24 09 ]
Up at 4am, on the flight to Dallas at 6am followed by 13 hours to Japan. I hope the drugs kick in soon.
I walk off the plane. Life is hell. No currency. Unexplainable trains. I'm hoping for death.
The kindness of strangers in a strange land and I breathe for the first time in Japan.
[ 01 06 09 ]
There is a blank space. Days I forgot the days I saw. I am missing something.
[ 06 31 08 ]
I am sick. I am tired. I am full of life.
[ 10 06 05 ]
I'm afraid to write because I'm afraid of losing time, of saying the wrong thing, that the thoughts won't work out.
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...
William Gibson
Neuromancer
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the
beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Walt Whitman
Song of Myself
We have forgotten to observe. Instead of observing, we do things according to patterns. —Andrei Tarkovsky
…there are moments in life when all habitual ideas, rules and relationships are involuntarily re-evaluated. Moments of the highest tension and the greatest attention to life. It is as if you throw yourself wide open, and each new thought, each image that penetrates you, draws after it dozens and hundreds of others, similar and dissimilar. As if the current catches you and only strong muscles are able to withstand the force. These are the moments of maximum self-surrender, of a maximally full and passionate life. —Sergei Paradjanov
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Shakespeare
Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19-28
'Most men will not swim before they are able to.' Is that not witty? Naturally, they won't swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won't think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what's more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.
Hermann Hesse
Steppenwolf
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
H.P. Lovecraft
The Call of Cthulhu
When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of space of which I am ignorant, and which knows me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there, why now rather than then.
Blaise Pascal
Pensees
If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes.
Cormac McCarthy
Blood Merdian
He was free, free for everything, free to act like an animal or like a machine... He could do what he wanted to do, nobody had the right to advise him... He was alone in a monstrous silence, free and alone, without an excuse, condemned to decide without an excuse, condemned to decide without any possible recourse, condemned forever to be free.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The Age of Reason
The Woodcarver
Khing, the master carver, made a bell stand
Of precious wood. When it was finished,
All who saw it were astounded. They said it must be
The work of spirits.
The Prince of Lu said to the master carver:
"What is your secret?"
Khing replied: "I am only a workman:
I have no secret. There is only this:
When I began to think about the work you commanded
I guarded my spirit, did not expend it
On trifles, that were not to the point.
I fasted in order to set
My heart at rest.
After three days fasting,
I had forgotten gain and success.
After five days
I had forgotten praise or criticism.
After seven days
I had forgotten my body
With all its limbs.
"By this time all thought of your Highness
And of the court had faded away.
All that might distract me from the work
Had vanished.
I was collected in the single thought
Of the bell stand.
"Then I went to the forest
To see the trees in their own natural state.
When the right tree appeared before my eyes,
The bell stand also appeared in it, clearly, beyond doubt.
All I had to do was to put forth my hand and begin.
"If I had not met this particular tree
There would have been
No bell stand at all.
"What happened?
My own collected thought
Encountered the hidden potential in the wood;
From this live encounter came the work
Which you ascribe to the spirits."
Chuang Tzu
from The Way of Chuang Tzu by Thomas Merton
After all, perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent. —Albert Camus
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