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“[...] I have no sense of proportion, I know; my words and gestures do not express my ideas—they are a humiliation and abasement of the ideas, and therefore, I have no right—and I am too sensitive. Still, I believe I am beloved in this household, and esteemed far more than I deserve. But I can’t help knowing that after twenty-four years of illness there must be some trace left, so that it is impossible for people to refrain from laughing at me sometimes; don’t you think so?”

— Prince Myshkin in Part 3, Chapter 2 of The Idiot.

[inertescapist]

“I learned that just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn’t find the proof. It was just a feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force - a wild pain and decay - also accompanies everything.”

— David Lynch

[inertescapist]

"There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself."

― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

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Simone Weil's 'The List of Temptations (to be read daily)' from her diary

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Poem by the 12thc warrior poet Xin Qiji 辛棄疾, who was sidelined during peacetime, demoted, drifting through a decade of minor posts in remote lands.

Poetry, then, as that which is left unsaid.

“My, what a cool and lovely autumn.”

[inertescapist]

Past Lives (Celine Song, 2023)

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“The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.” ― Georges Bataille

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The first simulated image of a black hole was calculated with an IBM 7040 computer using 1960 punch cards and hand-plotted by French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet in 1978.

[inertescapist]

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

— W.B. Yeats

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Lingering is another time-consuming practice. Perception that latches on to information does not have a lasting and slow gaze. Information makes us short-sighted and short of breath. It is not possible to linger on information. Lingering on things in contemplation, intentionless seeing, which wold be a formula for happiness, gives way to the hunt for information. Today, we pursue information without gaining knowledge. We take notice [nehmen Kenntnis] of everything without gaining any insight [Erkenntnis]. We travel [fahren] across the world without having an experience [Erfahrung].  Byung-Chul Han. 2022. Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld. Cambridge: Polity Press.

[inertescapist]

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being", Milan Kundera (translated by Michael Henry Heim)

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"I long to believe in immortality. I shall never be able to bid you an entire farewell."

-John Keats

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"Yes, nothing prevents one from dreaming, in the very hour of exile, since at least I know this, with sure and certain knowledge: a man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

- Albert Camus

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Ernesto Sabato, from his novel titled “The Tunnel,” originally published c. May 1948

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Franz Kafka, from an excerpt featured in "Kafka: The Tremendous World I Have Inside my Head,"

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Martha Argerich

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Edna St. Vincent Millay, from a diary entry featured in Rapture & Melancholy; The Diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay