Faust thus expresses a very dangerous form of despair, a despair that is partly wise, because it’s alert to the dissolution of all form, and yet very foolish, because it refuses to acknowledge or seek harmony with the deeper patterns underlying that dissolution.
Carolyn Elliott, Awaken Your Genius: A Seven-Step Path to Freeing Your Creativity and Manifesting Your Dreams [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
she had spent a few minutes performing her standard thinking-and-calming ritual: eating toast. And yet, not merely eating toast; eating toast as a meditative practice.
Phoenix Baker, Mittens: A story about two women falling in love and doing really weird things to each other [Amazon]
The struggle is so (beat) pointless. We live exactly as insects, and yet we look on them with horror, because they are us without justification, without the endless need to do things. The conscious mind is a freak accident, a program for double-checking cause-and-effect logic extended far beyond its purpose, an anti-virus program gone out of control.
Alan Ryker, When Cthulhu Met Atlach-Nacha [Amazon]
Below lay the tomb world, the immutable cause-and-effect world of the demonic. At median extended the layer of the human, but at any instant a man could plunge—descend as if sinking—into the hell-layer beneath. Or: he could ascend to the ethereal world above, which constituted the third of the trinary layers. Always, in his middle level of the human, a man risked the sinking. And yet the possibility of ascent lay before him
Philip K Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
And yet it is not for the happiness of others, but for personal happiness, that one embraces the ethics of Epicurus. We should find some distance from the incessant urgings of desire for our own psychic health.
Luke Slattery, Reclaiming Epicurus [Amazon]
