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"Dans l'Orient désert..." Il faut être dans un désert. Car celui qu'il faut aimer est absent.

"In the oriental desert..." One must be in a desert. For whom we must love is absent.

Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la Grâce

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therapy isn't working i need to be exiled to siberia and sentenced to death by firing squad only for my sentence to be commuted at the last possible moment

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“For I have indeed been torn from all my roots, even from the earth that nourished them, more entirely than most in our times. I was born in 1881 in the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg Monarchy, but you would look for it in vain on the map today; it has vanished without trace. I grew up in Vienna, an international metropolis for two thousand years, and had to steal away from it like a thief in the night before it was demoted to the status of a provincial German town. My literary work, in the language in which I wrote it, has been burnt to ashes in the country where my books made millions of readers their friends. So I belong nowhere now, I am a stranger or at the most a guest everywhere. Even the true home of my heart’s desire, Europe, is lost to me after twice tearing itself suicidally to pieces in fratricidal wars. Against my will, I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the most savage triumph of brutality in the chronicles of time. Never—and I say so not with pride but with shame—has a generation fallen from such intellectual heights as ours to such moral depths.”

― Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

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Appendix: Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Albert Camus

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Nikita Gill, from Your Heart is the Sea: Poems; "A Conversation With The Sun God,"

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Wings of Desire, 1987

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In truth, the sadness and anxiety of existence has no reason. But that is its reason: that it has none. That it can hover over and in anything and everything and yet, refuses to properly justify itself. And because of this, we experience it. If it had a reason, it wouldn’t be so sad or miserable. Sadness, anxiety, and misery with an explanation is easy. Easy to track, source, justify, and potentially overcome. Sadness and anxiety with no clear reason is impossible. It’s like fighting air. And so, the absurd reasonless-ness of it becomes the worst possible reason.

Robert Pantano, Notes from the End of Everything

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i can always relate to a girl who wants to leave

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“Desire is impossible: it destroys its object. Lovers cannot be one, nor can Narcissus be two.”

—Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (tr. Emma Crawford & Mario von der Ruhr)

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Simone de Beauvoir, from a diary entry featured in Diary of a Philosophy Student

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Boris Pasternak, from a poem titled "Bacchanalia," featured in Poems: 1955-1959

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“When I was 26, I went to Indonesia and the Philippines to do research for my first book, No Logo. I had a simple goal: to meet the workers making the clothes and electronics that my friends and I purchased. And I did. I spent evenings on concrete floors in squalid dorm rooms where teenage girls—sweet and giggly—spent their scarce nonworking hours. Eight or even 10 to a room. They told me stories about not being able to leave their machines to pee. About bosses who hit. About not having enough money to buy dried fish to go with their rice.

They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know how to use them.”

So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?

It took a very long time for him to understand the question. When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.

This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.

These very different understandings of social change came up again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would give talks about the need for international protections for the right to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”

Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”

The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy, is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.

The irony is that people with relatively little power tend to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power. The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand structural changes.

In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal work— to others.”

- Naomi Klein

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Ursula K. Le Guin, “Author’s Note” from The Left Hand of Darkness

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'you are not serious people' is a phrase that has done so much. thank you logan succession

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I remember once sort of sitting down and thinking, ‘I am terribly depressed and this can not go on…’ and then I thought, ‘Well, you can do two things. You can kill yourself or you can get interested in absolutely everything.’ I read the newspaper every day; I read scientific books and geographical books and historical books and books in other languages, as well as the books that professionally I had to read, and suddenly the world became wonderful. 

AS Byatt, 1936-2023 (x)

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I post some of my favourite sections from Lynch on Lynch this weekend. You must read

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Simone de Beauvoir, from a diary entry featured in Diary of a Philosophy Student