last entry

I am currently trying to divide my essay into sections that will fully address aspects of human consciousness, religion, and, mostly, my personal life. Here are a few passages for some sections (with a few BG&E quotes):

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First and foremost, I thank my mother for giving birth to me, for allowing me to exist and to write these lines. For those keen souls attuned to paradoxes, let it be clear: my love for my mother is not irony, nor is it something that can be dissected or reduced by language.

It’s also not only recognize the empathy as a child - the thought that one does not begin to decay only upon entering the narrow framework of civilization; the process begins at the very first moment of life. From the first cry torn from the refuge of the womb, one is cursed - cursed by the sheer fact of existence.

A mother - both of her child and of civilization-bears suffering even before the child draws breath. She endures the primal torment civilization imposes. And yet, the one carried forward by life, the one born of her, will never witness the long nights of agony she endured in silence.

My mother gave birth to “me” out of nothingness. This act is not something to be judged by our tired categories of right or wrong, which we often use as idle amusement or to pass time in vain. I live to feel a separation between myself and the world, rather than being the world. Whether being born is a sin or a surplus - language cannot reach that place. Perhaps nothing can ever truly be grasped; we only come to realize that we cannot grasp it. 

In the end, my love for my mother transcends right and wrong, surpasses language itself. It is a love rooted in the deepest part of being, a love of instinct, not one shaped by culture or civilization.

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People often cite Vinci’s Vitruvian Man as an ideal model, a perfection made by divine hands. But I see no meaning in that. What kind of body holds so much blood that every brutal death not only tears apart flesh but also shatters the reason of those who witness it?

And what meaning is there in a god who speaks, who judges, condemns, and casts us into a world beyond, filled with remorse? God must be silent. For the very moment He speaks, He succumbs to the limits of language, the inevitable flaw of any Creator...

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All those who attempt to explain why the wise prefer solitude often offer little more than surface-level observations. They rely mostly on the linguistic exchanges between the believer and those deemed wise, while overlooking something far more essential than language: the inner feeling and perception of the one who possesses that wisdom.

We must first understand what it is that we call wisdom, and why we deem it necessary at all - or, as Nietzsche once wrote: "Why not untruth instead? And uncertainty? Even ignorance?" What is it within us that assigns such weight to wisdom?

A lot of young people today secretly hold onto a certain attitude mostly as a way to show off to those they see as average or clueless. They throw around phrases like "God is dead" or "Life is meaningless," thinking that if they just mess with words enough, twist meanings just a little, they can confuse people and make them feel helpless in the face of things they can’t quite grasp. Only in doing so do they feel themselves a reflection of the authority figures, dazzling and derailing others just at the threshold of paths they might have otherwise taken - paths leading toward the secret craving for recognition that none dare admit.

For these young people, drifting and trying to find shelter in all this, it’s not that they deserve blame. It’s just that, in the same time they spend building up this wall of words, they could have, with the same longing, let themselves fall into softer things: into tears, into tenderness, into opening their hearts to love.

At this point, the young may no longer need to read further. I simply wish them the courage to break free from the cocoons spun under the name of intellect. Yet what am I wasting my time writing here for?

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"There are three kinds of people who suffer: those who know nothing, those who are trying to know, and those who already know. And in that order, it’s the last who suffers most. They suffer because of the truth, and along with it, the heavy, surplus knowledge they never asked for, collected painfully over the years at the cost of their health and sanity, just to preserve it whole.

The truth rests everywhere so subtly, yet so relentlessly real, that it tears through every surface of appearance, and with each step they leave behind fragments they can never gather up again, every small break feeling like a waste. Now, knowing itself becomes nothing but the ability to measure how near or far something stands from reality - a scale where the truth remains utterly unmoving." 

But the problem arises here: how can something truly be the truth? “My truth” and “your truth”? Or are these just clever turns of phrase, carefully prepared in advance? Whichever side we end up taking, there’s at least one thing we can be sure of. That's deep inside, we are always longing to express ourselves - to be understood, to be met with sympathy - and yet language fails us.

I know there will be those who frown and paradoxically accuse me of indulging in what is known as noble and avant-garde - the so-called the strange, the extraordinary. Some, in their nature, find pleasure in the flesh and in all things close to life, while others are imprisoned by the very idea of being "avant-garde."

I understand that among us, there are those who quietly hide their own avant-garde - a kind of difference for which society has no words except labels like "deviant" or "flawed." But I do not wish to call it a flaw.

Those who struggle through life with this merciless lucidity are not granted any blessing or special favor over the crowd. No one chooses the "intelligence of seeing things as they are" without first being forced into it, down to the very betrayal of their own cells, which from the beginning were already alone. Their bodies, even at the smallest level, are lonely. And so, trapped in a civilization diseased by its own culture, can they ever truly stop asking themselves whether death might be better than life?

When I say, “for those born under heavy distorted...” - heavy based on what, exactly? Maybe this, too, is just a mistaken way of speaking, a scholarly way of saying, “to force the subject back into the crude life of mankind.” Maybe, if I stood next to that person, we would quietly laugh at every word, every suit, every building - and maybe, together, we would simply point to the noose and end it all.

There’s no such thing as “normal” or “abnormal” according to the measurements of the majority. It’s only about being a human among other humans - not a rat among rats. Because there is a difference between animals and humans. Animals don’t worry about whether or not they desire. If they don’t, they still live. And if they live and then die, they die in a way that, to humans, looks no different than a rat crushed on the road, whether it heterosexual or heavily distorted. From the outside, it’s just a dead rat either way.

Thus, the disordered belong to nature wherever they are. But within human civilization, they must run back and forth, only to die in cold estrangement. Once he is here, how pitiful it is that he cannot tie himself to the surface things. And so, out of the fear of being cast aside, he turns instead to something that demands more thought, something that appears more "ethical" - like empathy based on theory, or the endless pursuit of knowledge.

But he never truly chose these things. He never truly wanted them. From beginning to end, it was only the desperate wish to belong, to be part of a civilization his very cells could hardly absorb.

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Why choose that kind of wise-sounding empathy anyway? Maybe it only makes sense when there’s no one around you actually have to face, one by one. Am I empathetic because I’m wise? Because I understand so much? How pitiful that sounds.

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I have existed in life without a single "if only" that could undo what has already happened.
I have been forced to live within an affinity that consumes itself, within a kind of wisdom that unconscious deficiency drove me into, and amid the absurdity of the external world.
Everything is accidental, disastrous, and in the end, what we call social life seems determined only to strip away whatever scraps of happiness I might still have.

It is strange that I have managed to avoid a complete distortion of perception without achieving anything nobler - as if a still-functioning mind chose to watch its own collapse rather than put an end to it. Surely, any lingering remnant of reason should have understood that suicide would be the final act of decency. And yet, here I am, tying myself to life, forced to pretend to reason with the flies while every neuron inside quietly fractures.

An exile, banished from my own homeland by existence itself. Was there ever a moment when I did not long for that place?
No.
It is death I long for.

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Every choice human being strives instinctively for a citadel and a secrecy where he is saved from the crowd, the many, the great majority-where he may forget "men who are the rule," be- ing their exception-excepting only the one case in which he is pushed straight to such men by a still stronger instinct,; as a seeker after knowledge in the great and exceptional sense. Anyone who, in intercourse with men, does not occasionally glisten in all the colors of distress, green and gray with disgust, satiety, sympathy, gloominess, and loneliness, is certainly not a man of elevated tastes; supposing, however, that he does not take all this burden and disgust upon himself voluntarily, that he persistently avoids it, and remains, as I said, quietly and proudly hidden in his citadel, one thing is certain: he was not made, he was not predestined, for knowledge. If he were, he would one day have to say to himself: "The devil take my good taste! but the rule is more interesting than the exception-than myself, the exception!" And he would go down,' and above all, he would go "inside."

The long and serious study of the average man, and conse- quently much disguise, self-overcoming, familiarity, and bad contact (all contact is bad contact except with one's equals)-this constitutes a necessary part of the life-history of every philosopher, perhaps the most disagreeable, odious, and disappointing part. If he is fortunate, however, as a favorite child of knowledge should be, he will encounter suitable shortcuts and helps for his task; I mean so-called cynics, those who simply recognize the animal, the commonplace, and "the rule" in themselves, and at the same time still have that degree of spirituality and that itch which makes them talk of themselves and their likes before witnesses-sometimes they even wallow in books, as on their own dung. 

Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty; and the higher man must listen closely to every coarse or subtle cynicism, and congratulate himself when a clown without shame or a scientific satyr speaks out precisely in front of him.

There are even cases where enchantment mixes with the disgust-namely, where by a freak of nature genius is tied to some such indiscreet billygoat and ape, as in the case of the Abbe Galiani, the profoundest, most clear-sighted, and perhaps also filthiest man of his century-he was far profounder than Voltaire and consequently also a good deal more taciturn. It happens more frequently, as has been hinted, that a scientific head is placed on an ape's body, a subtle exceptional understanding in a base soul, an occurrence by no means rare, especially among doctors and physiologists of morality. And whenever anyone speaks without bitterness, quite innocently, of man as a belly with two requirements, and a head with one; whenever anyone sees, seeks, and wants to see only hunger, sexual lust, and vanity as the real and only motives of human actions; in short, when anyone speaks "badly- and not even "wickedly"-of man, the lover of knowledge should listen subtly and diligently; he should altogether have an open ear wherever people talk without indignation. For the indignant and whoever perpetually tears and lacerates with his own teeth himself (or as a substitute, the world, or God, or society) may indeed, morally speaking, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense they are a more ordinary, more in- different, and less instructive case. And no one lies as much as the indignant do.

- BG&E

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I pictured a scene where I was sitting on a cliff with someone whom I didn’t need to speak. The cliff faced the sea, and the sky, just as blue as the water, had already fallen into twilight. Yet what I was looking at was not the sea, not the cliff, but rather the feeling of the person sitting next to me. Their presence carried something more elusive, more mysterious, than anything I could experience alone. I wasn’t certain what it was that made me shiver, but I was sure that they felt it far more deeply than I did.

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Nietzsche is not for the optimist who can barely understand him, nor for the naively youth who at twenty, resents something and approaches him carelessly, without sinking into Nietzsche’s hard-earned maturity. He must have once carried in himself a deep contempt for every human act and way of life, living in constant hatred of mankind. He must have thrown the bone far away just to escape the chaotic barking, and only then, in the silence, questioned the very act of throwing it. Only with such experiences can he truly grasp the subtlety in each of Nietzsche’s sentences...

For those of us living in an age of constant change and an overabundance of media information, it does not follow that our philosophers truly cherish or perceive things as we do, or that their feelings mirror our own.
This is a kind of imposing a subjective reading of the times, and perhaps what we truly crave is for someone to speak aloud the things we ourselves need to say, rather than to dive into the contexts of the opus or the historical processes that supposedly led us here.

With Nietzsche, the ability to dismantle arrogant young minds with every sentence is something impossible to overlook.
Rather than listening to critics who accused him of being harsh and dangerously radical, we can clearly see that he was never truly like that. On the contrary, he was remarkably compassionate, meticulously exploring every aspect, and only in the end did he truly mock Socrates, suggesting that Socrates was the one who had corrupted the youth, rather than allowing us to lazily imagine that Nietzsche simply hated everything and had declared from the outset that Socrates deserved the hemlock...

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I feeling that there are many men silently wishing to end their lives without the humiliation of it.
Not by a rope, nor by a pill, but by their habits.
They do not need to announce their departure from the world; it is hidden in the small, daily acts:
in each sleepless night, in each overflowing glass of liquor, in each forgotten meal, in each moment spent hesitating to say no, or each quiet retreat inward, wondering why they still remain here.
All of it, each small gesture, is a fragile way of erasing themselves from the boredom of existence.

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He longed to understand her, as if beauty could only exist through complete understanding. But what was it that he truly desired? In truth, it was not understanding that he sought, but the very impossibility of it - the untouched mystery that made her beautiful. Any desire that crossed this threshold would turn into mere possession, a desperate attempt to imprison her within the narrow confines of his own perception. And once that happened, once the mystery was broken and laid bare, all that would remain was disgust, disappointment.

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Each person walks within their own tunnel - uniquely designed, inviolable to anyone but themselves. At times, two individuals may seem to travel side by side, clearly sensing one another through what the eyes see and the ears hear. Yet inevitably, each will veer into their own separate tunnel. Then arises the anxiety, the vague intuition: Is the other still behind me, or have they already emerged into the open, sunlit sky? But by what means could one truly perceive and grasp the actions of another beyond the thick, impenetrable walls? Instinctively, the mind turns inward, clinging to its own illusions, and in doing so, fear and disorientation may arise, causing one to stumble against railings or unseen obstacles. Yet as a human being, one's sole task is to remain attentive to their own path. Regardless of the turbulence of emotion or the labyrinthine thoughts that cloud the mind, the one thing a person must always hold onto is the wish that the other, wherever they are, encounters no hindrance - whether their tunnel is illuminated or shrouded in darkness.

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The next sixty years of my life were not because I possessed anything of value at seventeen, nor because I had hope or a valid reason to continue. It was simply because death still demanded more time from me before it would finally appear.

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In the years of youth, whether we play games, smoke, or have sex, it’s no different from the time when we choose to read, exercise, or live ascetically. In middle age, whether we bicker with our wives and still quietly prepare a meal for them, or rush to manage money and take our children to school, it’s no different from the time when we still choose to read, exercise, or live ascetically. Though we may recognize the difference between toil and leisure, between scarcity and abundance of time, in the end, it all becomes one - part of the same surplus of time spent waiting for death.

Those who blur these boundaries are grateful descendants, while those who have not yet can only hope that soon they will.

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I have never understood why people are so terrified of ghost stories. If there truly were wandering spirits lingering around us, then they deserve our pity far more than our fear.

A faded existence, clinging desperately to the world of the living, unable to truly die, yet no longer fully human. If I were to encounter a ghost, I think I would laugh at its foolishness. What in this world is truly frightening, when even these spirits, clothed in the shapes we have embroidered onto them, are nothing but ignorance that should leave them ashamed? One day, even demons and phantoms will grow weary of their own dull existence - of the tedious cycle of scaring humans. And then, like all other things in this life, they too will fade away, swallowed by the very void they once resisted. What will remain in the end will not be fear, nor the trace of something dreadful, but simply a ridiculous, pathetic waste.

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“The more a psychologist—a born and inevitable psychologist and unriddler of souls—applies himself to the more exquisite cases and human beings, the greater becomes the danger that he might suffocate from pity. He needs hardiness and cheerfulness more than anyone else. For the corruption, the ruination of the higher men, of the souls of a stranger type, is the rule: it is terrible to have such a rule always before one’s eyes. The manifold torture of the psychologist who has discovered this ruination, who discovers the whole inner hopelessness of the higher man, this eternal “too late” in every sense, first in one case and then almost always through the whole of history—may perhaps lead him one day to turn against his own lot, embittered, and to make an attempt at self-destruction—may lead to his own “corruption.”

In almost every psychologist one will perceive a telltale preference for and delight in association with everyday, well-ordered people: this reveals that he always requires a cure, that he needs a kind of escape and forgetting, away from all that with which his insights, his incisions, his “craft” have burdened his conscience. He is characterized by fear of his memory. He is easily silenced by the judgments of others; he listens with an immobile face as they venerate, admire, love, and transfigure where he has seen—or he even conceals his silence by expressly agreeing with some foreground-opinion. Perhaps the paradox of his situation is so great to some that precisely where he has learned the greatest pity coupled with the greatest contempt, the crowd, the educated, the enthusiasts learn the greatest veneration—the veneration for “great men” and prodigies for whose sake one blesses and honors the fatherland, the earth, the dignity of humanity, and oneself, and to whom one refers the young, toward whom one educates them.

And who knows whether what happened in all great cases so far was not always the same: that the crowd adored a god—and that the “god” was merely a poor sacrificial animal. Success has always been the greatest liar—and the “work” itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the “work,” whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have created it; “great men,” as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction; in the world of historical values, counterfeit rules.

… with souls in which they usually try to conceal some fracture; often taking revenge with their works for some inner contamination, often seeking with their high flights to escape into forgetfulness from an all-too-faithful memory; often lost in the mud and almost in love with it, until they become like the will-o’-the-wisps around swamps and pose as stars—the people may then call them idealists—often fighting against a long nausea, with a recurring specter of unbelief that chills and forces them to languish for gloria and to gobble their “belief in themselves” from the hands of intoxicated flatterers—what torture are these great artists and all the so-called higher men for anyone who has once guessed their true nature!

It is easy to understand that these men should so readily receive from woman—clairvoyant in the world of suffering and, unfortunately, also desirous far beyond her strength to help and save—those eruptions of boundless and most devoted pity which the multitude, above all the venerating multitude, does not understand and on which it lavishes inquisitive and self-satisfied interpretations. This pity deceives itself regularly about its powers; woman would like to believe that love can achieve anything—that is her characteristic faith. Alas, whoever knows the heart will guess how poor, stupid, helpless, arrogant, blundering, more apt to destroy than to save is even the best and profoundest love!

it is possible that underneath the holy fable and disguise of Jesus’ life there lies concealed one of the most painful cases of the martyrdom of knowledge about love: the martyrdom of the most innocent and desirous heart, never sated by any human love; demanding love, to be loved and nothing else, with hardness, with insanity, with terrible eruptions against those who denied him love; the story of a poor fellow, unsated and insatiable in love, who had to invent hell in order to send it to those who did not want to love him—and who finally, having gained knowledge about human love, had to invent a god who is all love, all ability to love—who has mercy on human love because it is so utterly wretched and unknowing. Anyone who feels that way, who knows this about love—seeks death.

But why pursue such painful matters? Assuming one does not have to.”

- BG&E

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