“[T]he light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”
— Samuel Beckett, from Waiting for Godot (Grove Press, 2011)
“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, in a letter to his brother, M. M. Dostoevsky, August 16, 1839
“And you, are you asleep ? Or at your window ? Are you thinking of the one who think of you ? Are you dreaming ? What is the color of your dream ?”
— Gustave Flaubert, from a letter to Louise Colet (August 1846)
“Anxiety is when we must know something we do not know. There is no creation without anxiety. There is always anxiety. Anxiety is the sign of the new Real. A Real, which is an excess of Real. Anxiety indicates that there is really something new for the subject.” -Badiou, The European Graduate School, August 2012
I think I’ve defined anxiety as a memory of the future. And indeed, the anxious is someone who remembers, who sees, no, who has seen, what can happen to him.
Notebooks Emil Cioran
The other day at the Collins’ house, I said that all Romanians were imposters. Mounir Hafez asks me the question: “Do you consider yourself to be one?” – “In a sense, yes,” I replied, without being able to elaborate.
What I would have liked to say to him is that an imposter is anyone who, by excess of lucidity or for some other reason, cannot identify with anything.
In my mind, the imposter is not the one who voluntarily gives himself to what he is not - but the one who fails at being the expression of nothing, who keeps too great a distance from everything he trusted to be able to embody an idea or an attitude.
He is the man of simulacra, not deliberately but fatally. It should be added that, in everyday language, this is not what is meant by imposture, which always means a desire to deceive.
Notebooks Emil Cioran
“We have all heard it said that one picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, if this statement is true, why does it have to be a saying? Because a picture is worth a thousand words only under special conditions—which commonly include a context of words in which the picture is set.”
“There is no way for one person to “grasp” another as he might “grasp” a mathematical theorem or a principle of economics.”
— Walter Ong
“Contact with the past is contact with the living present, continuous with that past, precisely because it has realized all the developments that intervene between the past and its present, the developments that make the past present to it.”
— Walter Ong