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The Path of Grief: & the Imagined Future

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Piper Winifred

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“You ape, you're teasing me so as to get the better of me. Shut up, you can't understand anything. If there is no God, then l am God. You know, I never was able to understand this particular point of yours: why should you be God?' If God exists, then all will is his, and I can't escape his will. If he does not exist, then all will is mine, and I am obliged to proclaim self-will. 'Self-will? And why are you obliged?' 'Because all will has become mine. Can it really be that no one on this entire planet, once having put an end to God and having developed a belief in self-will, will dare to proclaim self-will, in the fullest possible sense? It's like a poor man who's received an inheritance and is frightened by it and doesn't dare come near the bag full of money, regarding himself as too feeble to possess it. I want to proclaim self-will. Even if I'm the only one, I'll do it.' 'So go ahead and do it.' I am obliged to shoot myself because my self-will in the fullest possible sense for me is to kill myself. "But look, you're not the only one to kill yourself; there are many suicides." "With good reason. But to do it without any reason, solely for self-will, I'm the only one.' 'You know what,' he observed irritably, "if I were in your place, to show self-will I would kill someone else, and not myself. You could become useful. I'll show you who, if you're not afraid. Then perhaps you won't have to shoot yourself today. We could reach an understanding." "To kill someone else would be the lowest point of my self-will, and that's where you reveal who you are completely. I'm not you: I want the highest point, and I'll kill myself." 'He's worked this out all by himself,' Pyotr Stepanovich muttered angrily. I am obliged to proclaim disbelief,' Kirillov was walking about the room. 'For me there is no higher idea than the non- existence of God. Human history is behind me. Man has done nothing but invent God in order to live without killing himself; that's the essence of world history to this point. I am the only one in world history who hasn't felt like inventing God for the allow first time. Let people find that out once and for all.”

PhilosophyAtheismIdentityDespairPsychologicalRebellionExistentialMetaphysicsIntrospectionSelf Will
Book:Demons
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“Kirillov remained silent. 'You know what, in my opinion, your belief is even stronger than a priest's.' In whom? In Him? Listen.' Kirillov stopped pacing, and stared straight before him with a fixed and ecstatic look. 'Listen to a great idea. There was a certain day on earth, and in the centre of the earth stood three crosses. One man on a cross believed to such an extent that he said to another: "Today you will be with me in paradise." The day ended, both died, they went and they found nothing - neither paradise nor resurrection. What had been said proved unjustified. Listen: this man was the highest on the entire earth, he comprised that which allowed it to live. The entire planet, with everything on it, is nothing but madness without that man. There has never been one like Him, either before or after, even by virtue of a miracle. The miracle is that there never has been nor will there be another such man, ever. And if that's so, if the laws of nature didn't spare even This One, didn't even spare his miracle, but compelled even Him to live amidst a lie and to die for a lie, then it follows that the entire planet is a lie and rests on a lie and on a stupid joke. It follows that the very laws of the planet are a lie and a farce put on by the Devil. What's there to live for, answer me, if you are a man?”

PhilosophyBeliefReligiousDespairMadnessRadicalHuman ConditionExistentialIntrospectionMetaphysical
Book:Demons
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“She could have been there all along, he felt, but for some unknown, unarticulated reason, she had never lifted a finger to put her poems into circulation. It was the thing that had baffled him most about her, for in all other ways Anna was a person who stood up for herself and fought hard for what she believed in, and she knew damned well that her poems were good. Doubts, yes, despairing moments, yes, but what writer or artist doesn’t live in that shifting territory between confidence and self-contempt? The proof was in the fact that she had always shared her poems with him, not because he ever asked her but because she wanted to, either reading them out loud or handing him small sheafs of six or seven at once, and again and again he had responded to her new work by saying it was time to get off her ass and start publishing them, which was invariably followed by a diffident shrug from Anna, who sometimes added “You’re right” or “One of these days” or “We’ll see”, depending on her mood.”

PoetryDespairPoemsWriterSelf Contempt
Book:Baumgartner
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“En kykene olemaan samalla tavalla kiitollinen elämästä, vaan olen aina vailla jotakin ja oloni on jatkuvasti jollain lailla viallinen ja syyllinen, en tiedä mitä tahdon mutta kaipaan silti jotain, en halua perhettä mutten elää yksinkään, minua ei haluta mennä elämässäni eteenpäin mutten osaa jäädä paikoilleni, en millään jaksaisi enää nähdä asioiden eteen vaivaa mutten viitsi heittäytyä toimettomaksikaan, en tahdo ottaa mistään vastuuta mutta haluan silti tuntea itseni tärkeäksi.”

LostDespair
Book:Lehmä synnyttää yöllä
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“Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.”

LifeLonelinessDespairBig City
Book:O Pioneers!
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