Pessimistic Passage of the Day...

B

Bleak&Icy

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Just imagine it: an online anthology of pessimistic quotations, assembled by Ligottians, growing daily like a (insert horrible simile here)... A collection of quotations devoted entirely to negativity! Taken from literature, philosophy, science, art -- any place where a solitary neigh-sayer has expressed the wretchedness of life, who has recorded the nightmares of the organism. I humbly submit the first quotation, to get things rolling doomward:

"The idea of a world where human life might be artificially prolonged has a nightmare quality yet gives no glimpse of anything beyond that slight delay. Death is waiting in the long run, made necessary by multiplying and teeming life."
-- Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality
 
Can donkeys neigh? Nay. But what of mules, which is how I feel? gveranon, you are a terrible terrible terrible person, and for that very reason I refuse to edit my post. Let my equine cry stand as a testimony to your meanness (and my drunkennessness). :o

If possible my pessimism has deepened.
 
Well, I guess I should make a constructive contribution to this thread. Here are three quotations by Nicolas de Chamfort. I got these off the internet and don't know who the translator was.

"It must be admitted that there are some parts of the soul which we must entirely paralyze before we can live happily in the world."

"Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death."

"The world either breaks or hardens the heart."
 
“'Droll think life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be.’”--Joseph Conrad, from Heart of Darkness
 
"From the cosmic point of view, to have opinions or preferences at all is to be ill; for by harbouring them one dams up the flow of the ineluctable force which, like a river, bears us down to the ocean of everything's unknowing. Reality is a running noose, one is brought up short with a jerk by death. It would have been wiser to co-operate with the inevitable and learn to profit by this unhappy state of things - by realising and accommodating death! But we don't, we allow the ego to foul its own nest. Therefore we have insecurity, stress, the midnight-fruit of insomnia, with a whole culture crying itself to sleep."
From 'The Avignon Quincunx' by Lawrence Durrell ('Constance' 1982)

“The paradise garden is a magical place. We can only dream when there, but we cannot dream of it.”
--D.F. Lewis (Weirdtongue 2006)

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A great idea for a thread, b&i.
The most depressing/pessimistic thing that happened to me today was finding myself quoting from myself. Sad, indeed.

des
 
"The most depressing/pessimistic thing that happened to me today was finding myself quoting from myself."
Nemonymous - TLO 13/5/08
 
"Nothing can be explained. The world only knows how to do one thing, to roll over and kill you, as a sleeper kills his fleas. That would be a stupid way to die, I said to myself, to let myself be crushed like everybody else. To put your trust in men is to get yourself killed a little." -- Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night (trans. R. Manheim).
 
Just found another quote related to the Aickman quote above:

"I think I've never been happier in my whole life then during the last two years - this seems to have no end."
-- Yellowish Haze, "Pessimistic Passage of the Day..." thread at TLO
​
 
Here is a lovely, lonely, forlorn, doleful, dismal, melancholy poem by American poet James Wright titled, "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota." Don't be deceived by the dazzling beauty; it carries a nasty sting in its tail!

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
 
From an interview with Tor Ulven, loosely translated:
No one decides to become who they become. You do not know who you are until you are someone, and then you are someone for a while, and then you are someone else. Always someone else. Or you are no one.

(...)

Currently there is a lot of talk about becoming so-called whole persons, whatever that is. We have no chance of doing so. We will keep limping our way through life, because there is always something we lack. In every situation, at any time. Whoever we are. No need, no desire is ever definitely satisfied.​
 
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Viva June said:
From an interview with Tor Ulven, loosely translated: No need, no desire is ever definitely satisfied.
Click to expand...


Indeed. Like this thread's title 'pessimistic passage of the day' when I sit on the lavatory in the morning and hope. :)

Actually, this is ONE brilliant thread. Thanks, b&i.
 
I like this topic. I think I posted this already on TLO, but it is perfect for this thread. It is from our good friend Cioran.

"To hope is to contradict the future."
-E.M. Cioran
 
Nemonymous said:
Viva June said:
From an interview with Tor Ulven, loosely translated: No need, no desire is ever definitely satisfied.
Click to expand...


Indeed. Like this thread's title 'pessimistic passage of the day' when I sit on the lavatory in the morning and hope. :)
Click to expand...
Ah yes, the horrors of physical existence. It is never the end of (the) matter: there will always be yet another day and yet another toilet, and when the defecation to end all defecations comes at last, you will be sorry to go.

Fecal philosophy? I smell a new university department.
 
Thanks, Matthew, for launching “Pessimistic Passage of the Day.” May this thread continue to expand! Reading through the passages here is like viewing scattered family snapshots . . . Though they are randomly assembled and belong to different eras, they reveal undeniable resemblances and, taken together, constitute a lineage.

As TL points out in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, this lineage can be traced back to the eighteenth century, to writers like La Rochefoucauld and the Marquis de Sade. To these I would add Jonathan Swift. In this excerpt from A Tale of A Tub (published 1704), Swift anticipates Peter Wessel Zapffe, who identifies distraction as the means through which we maintain our illusions and keep the darkness at bay:

Those Entertainments and Pleasures we most value in Life, are such as Dupe and play the Wag with the Senses. For, if we take an Examination of what is generally understood by Happiness, as it has Respect, either to the Understanding or the Senses; we shall find all its Properties and Adjuncts, will herd under this short Definition: That, it is a perpetual Possession of being well Deceived.
 
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