Infinite Resignation

The more I talk to people, the less I see the point in conversation. I’ve often been in the midst of a conversation and have suddenly, unwillingly, been extracted mysteriously from it, as if I were observing the whole thing with a strange sense of detached melancholy, like an out-of-body experience.

“…the stammerings of an old man who does not seem to have achieved a full psychic victory over an awkward adolescence…”

“What can be usefully postponed can be even more usefully abandoned” (Epictetus).

Nietzsche once defined “not being able to wait” as one of our most typically human qualities. In culture as in history, all tragedies and comedies are simply the result of someone not being able to wait. If Medea had simply taken the day off? If Hamlet had put things off for even longer? If Arjuna has called the whole thing off? But not being able

like this – “not being able to wait” itself cannot wait. How, then, should we understand an instantaneous, on-demand, twenty-first-century, “global” culture such as ours, constituted almost exclusively by waiting? Waiting for the subway, waiting for lunch, waiting for a friend, waiting at the airport, waiting to be called, waiting to not hurt, wait

Sometimes I’m asked if I’m a pessimist. I need to find a clever answer to this question. Or make up a good joke. But the truth is that I am a pessimist… except when writing about pessimism. I’ve managed to make pessimism a form of therapy.

pessimism also has its own ontological argument: existence is that beyond which nothing worse can be conceived.

There is a special kind of Purgatory that involves waiting for something not to happen.

Knowledge exists in inverse proportion to meaning. ~