Sublime

Kafka’s “The Burrow,” a tale of creaturely existence reduced to the obsessive and anxious pursuit of self-preservation, is one of the bleakest portrayals in literature of life as a solitude cut off from any mutuality. It is a dark prospectus of human life in the absence of community or civil society, at a furthest remove from the collective forms o

Jean-Jacques Rousseau defined civilization as when people build fences.

Man’s identification with his idea of himself gives him a specious and precarious sense of permanence. For this idea is relatively fixed, being based upon carefully selected memories of his past, memories which have a preserved and fixed character. Social convention encourages the fixity of the idea because the very usefulness of symbols depends up

We just want to ride, dude. Gratis. To the Reunion. We just want to do the bare unavoidable minimum. Pay taxes, die. Sternberg has resentment even he can’t see, it’s so deep inside. So an ugly mood, and a desperate need to evacuate his body. It’s loathsomely real, I’m afraid. But what’s to be done?

One of these was the haiku poet Taneda Santoka.