Nil desperandum, amor...

“When your presence become what everyone else receives

I believe then you’ll see how much and what I mean.”

Monday’s Excerpts – The Art of Living by Epictetus

     One book read like a religious text, more so than The Greatest Show on Earth, for it offers wisdom purely directed at what is affectionately described so commonly as “the soul,” The Art of Living has aided me so thoroughly in approaching life like a banquet and realizing that all events are impersonal, even death. Of all things I hold close and dear in the privacy of my mind, The Art of Living is one of the few burning as brightly as it has from the beginning, not to go out with a whisper any time soon. These are a few of my favorite excerpts.

This Week’s Book: The Art of Living by Epictetus

Events Don’t Hurt Us, But Our Views of Them Can
Things themselves don’t hurt or hinder us. Nor do other people. How we view these things is another matter. It is our attitudes and reactions that give us trouble.
    Therefore even death is no big deal in and of itself. It is our notion of death, our idea that it is terrible, that terrifies us. There are so many different ways to think about death. Scrutinize your notions about death—and everything else. Are they really true? Are they doing you any good? Don’t dread death or pain, dread the fear of death or pain.
    We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them. (Page 10)

—————

The Right Use of Books
Don’t just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents. (Page 97)

—————

Never Casually Discuss Important Matters
Take care not to casually discuss matters that are of great importance to you with people who are not important to you. Your affairs will become drained of preciousness. You undercut your own purposes when you do this. This is especially dangerous when you are in the early stages of an undertaking.
    Other people feast like vultures on our ideas. They take it upon themselves to blithely interpret, judge, and twist what matters most to you, and your heart sinks. Let your ideas and plans incubate before you parade them in front of the naysayers and trivializers.
    Most people only know how to respond to an idea by pouncing on its shortfalls rather than identifying its potential merits. Practice self-containment so that your enthusiasm won’t be frittered away. (Page 110)

Books finished this past week...
★★★☆☆ The End of Faith by Sam Harris
★★★☆☆ Psychiatry for Beginners by Brizer
★★★★☆ SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable by Bruce Hood

(All title links link back to my webpages of them on Goodreads.com, a great library/reviewing/rating website for readers. Check it out, and add me as a friend if you decide to join!)

Racionalidad~.

     I feel I’m losing my ability to rationalize when it’s probably the spectral opposite. I feel as if I’m barreling through, gaining strength and will over my conscience at premature pace, but as if neurologically I’m convinced that it just isn’t true. How can you be sure what to believe when both arguments are spoken by you?

We are; Unsaved

Chances are high that if you’re reading this, I truly and honestly think you would be more beneficial amongst the dead. But don’t worry your pretty selfish head, I’m reading this too.

WhydoIbreakdowneverysinglefuckingnightofmylifehauntedbythememoriesofallofyou?

The Self of the Sadist

     I hate not knowing what’s next. It’s the stem of my anxiety, blossoming into countless beautiful irrationalities to the sadist. Someone reigning over the rain I’m left under to wade through the unknown. It’s not the abyss nor the galaxy, it’s the absolute unknown. Someday, I might just collide into another, and then? One day this human descent into annihilation? Who knows, it’s all a piece of the feared unknown.

     I’m trying to grip myself, decapitating the condescending fears. I’m afraid of sharks/tornadoes/the unknown, they had become virtues when their result respected vices.

     In the words of one winged creature to another unbeknown:

if you can hear this, don’t assume…

Climbing Mount Improbable

     A black mass of emotions, that’s what I am these days. I think it’s all the encompassing, grasping and clasping me shut and tight away from the world. Another brick in the wall, unjustly so. The further I push the higher I build—climbing, well, maybe…
     I suppose what I’ve arrived at here is my own Mount Improbable, and I suppose what I have to do is climb.

For Your Facial Manifestation,

     I have uncertainty on doing this alone although everything until now has been, obviously not saving your raping gaping holes poking the opposite of happiness into my everything of but what a dark matter.

     I’m on the precipice of unchanged trembling with fear of almost the Room 101 with no no puppy to save me. I received “ticket for two” when what I really requested was a ticket for one.

     My forsaken dance of the fucking death by dial toll is what we once knew as our tender romance of the tender ages, four by maybe five accusations—none deserving the ripe credibility they have grown: cruelty is never a gorgeous gore, no matter the tone.

     When I said that everything is forever changing and nothing is unstoppable, what I really meant to scream at the very top of the tightrope of my lungs was “ME, for man is BVT A WORM.”

 

143rd Day of the Year

I1 l1o2v3e4 y1o2u3

(:

Special Blast of(f) Space

I know more about myself than all those who simply do not know this about me: that I am in love.

Part Four: Maxims and Interludes. Section 163.

Love brings to light the exalted and concealed qualities of a lover –

what is rare and exceptional in him: to that extent it can

easily deceive as to what is normal in him.

Not Dead, Yet Dying

     Do you know the rights 

to finding me?

     Today was the day. The only thing coming in my mouth this leap is on an exit to existence, beyond the world I believed to be the only. Nightmares of your faceless stares, reversion into your kingdom for hours on end—you are not the only thing. Earlier gate calls might have saved us all.

 

Part Four: Maxims and Interludes. Section 89.

Terrible experiences make one wonder whether

he who experiences them is not something terrible.

when you have a face, i'll have a mouth.

     In the outside, Tonnie didn’t dare act the way he let himself act when he was in his own house.

     She looked over her right shoulder, over her left. She felt the emptiness at her back. The whole world, except for Tonnie’s house, was the outside.

     That was an idea she had never had before. She pictured the whole world — round — like a picture in a book, with the Australians hanging off by their feet and smiling, and the Japanese sticking out of one side, smiling. She pictured how little a dot Tonnie’s home made on that globe. Everything except for that tiny little dot wasn’t his.

     All the rest —

     Not that she thought the rest of the world was perfect, or even easy, or even safe. Just, it wasn’t Tonnie’s.

     And there was so much of it. So much more of the rest than there ever could be of Tonnie’s.

     She could almost see how much.

     The door started to open, and terror reached out for her, reached up from her belly to grab on to her heart.

     Tish wrapped her hand around that picture of how much world stretched out around the few square feet of house that Tonnie owned. She wrapped her hand around the idea and held it out in front of her, like a knife.

One Last Run

I will never ever ever be able to run far fucking enough away from…

For Truth, Not Martyrdom

    Sometimes I’m not sure why I keep up the ravenous. I shouldn’t have to search for reminders, yet I find myself seeking them in crevices of high and low only to emerge from the median empty handed as beautiful as usual with bruises on my ego. It’s where I’ll always be within or without you, somewhere stuck in the limbo of your absence.

Trio No. 2 in Catastrophic Minor

    It’s the point when life itself becomes your own Hell, no longer is your prison the single skin but the room you inhabit, the area you’re contained within. Encompassing the best we know, we lose ourselves in our false realities and insecurities, dwelling to the frequency we twiddle at. Am I red or am I blue, losing myself to the depths I know, infinite in the sense that I will never stop or begin for I expand from the central point in equal ratio to all my other pieces. The farther I throw the longer I gasp for breath, and when does my crunch take place? Collisions are the only thing keeping me connected to myself, I should be grateful.

Trip Three

     I cannot recall a single time in life where I woke up and immediately began crying. I’m not saying this to hurt anyone or to ride out on a guilt trip disguised as a white horse. I want everyone to understand what COSA18 has meant to me this past—almost—year. It’s a place I can turn to where I can paint my feelings away in the only form I don’t ravenously think—words.
     My thoughts craft themselves as images, likely a candidate reason why math has proven to be difficult for me my entire life. I cannot recall a day from history when words floated through my head. It’s all images, pictures, metaphors for real life. Island of self-deceit, a galaxy, the abyss… these are three forms in which my inner self manifests to represent the core of whatever I am. It’s not consciously chosen, and I’m positive it was helped along by what I know and believe in. Thank you, subconscious.

     I am a single galaxy existing in multiple events of space-time waiting to collide with another who considers themselves just as great or greater as I manage. I want a collision of worlds, absolute annihilation of the horrid and welding of the better, perfect globes. Dwarf stars and exploding thus collapsing supernovas: worm holes to a better place.

     “Lost on an island,” a common description of one’s life journey. A home base, a safe landing space for the extreme in betweens. A location for my tightrope far enough away from the cheering and jeering crowds... I don’t dance for entertainment or praise, but to prove to myself that I still can after everything that’s occurred. The sands are deceitful and card-carrying mood rings, but how they are so tiny grains of me.

     Grasped best—the abyss. My dwelling basement, but I created it there in its place and depth, adjusting the light bulbs as I move along. Left in its existence in case I've lost sight of the importance of life, should I ever need a gaze for recollection of demons, I flick a coin in and watch the city burn beneath me once more.

Sharp Invitations

    “No, not everything—tomorrow you will come,” Cincinnatus said aloud, still trembling from his recent swoon. “What shall I say to you,” he continued thinking, murmuring, shuddering. “What will you say to me? In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you—on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsmen and straining my goose neck—even then. And afterwards—perhaps most of all afterwards—I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I, and turn ourselves in such a way that we form one pattern, and solve the puzzle: draw a line from point A to point B... without looking, or, without lifting the pencil... or in some other way... we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn. If they do this kind of thing to me every morning, they will get me trained and I shall become quite wooden.”