Figment

#aeon #essay https://aeon.co/essays/my-pilgrimage-to-mecca-in-the-age-of-the-golf-cart-and-mall "I’d found myself in Mecca, trying to catch a break from the existential dread of my day-to-day life – the constant round of applying for jobs I didn’t really want because it wasn’t sustainable to write full-time, going on first date after first date, trying to find love on apps that were designed for failure, doomscrolling social media while caught in a dopamine trap, and staring at my laptop screen while waiting for some revelation to break through the fog in my mind and string itself into life-changing words. My 30s were closing in, and I felt the noose of squandered potential around my neck. One of my most frequent prayers comes from a verse in the Quran that narrates Moses’ escape from Egypt: ‘Rabbi inni lima anzalta ilayya min khairin faqir’ (‘My Lord, indeed I am in absolute need of whatever good You send down’). I have always been comforted by the notion that a divine power was looking after me, that something out there existed beyond the constraints of time and space – omnipresent, omnipotent – and yet closer to me than my jugular vein, as my Holy Book would tell me. My rationale for the trip was that this kind of spiritual sugar rush would allow me to find my footing in the secular world. My worshipful hope was that God would be impressed by my performed devotion, and divine intervention would set my worldly affairs straight. And though I felt a sense of renewed worship in making my pilgrimage, that break from the ordinary world never came." - Taken from the Article @figmentera

#fragments #philosophy #fernando_pessoa "I’m a sullen strategist who, having never won a battle, has learned to derive pleasure from mapping out the details of his inevitable retreat on the eve of each new engagement." - The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa @figmentera

#fiction #the_hobbit #tolkien "Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature. I don't know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum-as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face. He had a little boat, and he rowed about quite quietly on the lake: for lake it was, wide and deep and deadly cold. He paddled it with large feet dangling over the side, but never a ripple did he make. Not he. He was looking out of his pale lamp-like eyes for blind fish, which he grabbed with his long fingers as quick as thinking. He liked meat too. Goblin he thought good, when he could get it; but he took care they never found him out. He just throttled them from behind, if they ever came down alone anywhere near the edge of the water, while he was prowling about They very seldom did, for they had a feeling that something unpleasant was lurking down there, down at the very roots of the mountain. They had come on the lake, when they were tunnelling down long ago, and they found they could go no further; so there their road ended in that direction, and there was no reason to go that way-unless the Great Goblin sent them. Sometimes he took a fancy for fish from the lake, and sometimes neither goblin nor fish came back." - The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien @figmentera

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#philosophy #cioran The ascetics, who renounced life and fled into the desert, were convinced that they had overcome all human weaknesses. The belief that they had access to a subjective eternity gave them the illusion of total liberation. Nonetheless, their condemnation of pleasure and their contempt for humanity betray their inability to actually free themselves. Were I to withdraw into the most fearsome desert, renounce everything, and live in absolute solitude, still I would never dream of despising men and their pleasure. Since I cannot really enter eternity through renunciation and solitude, since I shall die like the rest, why despise them, why call my way the only true one? - E.M.Cioran @figmentera

#philosophy #cioran WHY NOT EXPLODE? Isn't there enough energy in me to shake the world, enough madness to do away with light? Isn't chaos my only joy, and isn't the elan which will cause my downfall my only pleasure? Are not my flights falls, and is not my explosion my love? Can I only love through self-destruction? Could it be that I am totally forbidden knowledge of the pure states? Can there be so much poison in my love? Have I not fought death long enough? Should Eros also be my enemy? Why is it that, when love is reborn in me, I become so afraid that I am ready to swallow the entire world in order to stop my love from growing? My predicament: I want to be disappointed in love so that I will have more reasons to suffer. Only love reveals to you your true degradation. Can the man who has looked death in the face still love? Can he still die of love? - E.M.Cioran @figmentera

#fragments #love "There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless-it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell." - C.S. Lewis @figmentera

#play #shakespeare #edvard_munch “In sooth I know not why I am so sad. It wearies me, you say it wearies you But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born, I am to learn...” - The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare Painting: Consolation by Edvard Munch, 1894 @figmentera

#fiction #the_hobbit #tolkien "Gandalf knew that something unexpected might happen, and he hardly dared to hope that they would pass without fearful adventure over those great tall mountains with lonely peaks and valleys where no king ruled. They did not. All was well, until one day they met a thunderstorm-more than a thunderstorm, a thunder-battle. You know how terrific a really big thunderstorm can be down in the land and in a river-valley; especially at times when two great thunderstorms meet and clash. More terrible still are thunder and lightning in the mountains at night, when storms come up from East and West and make war. The lightning splinters on the peaks, and rocks shiver, and great crashes split the air and go rolling and tumbling into every cave and hollow; and the darkness is filled with overwhelming noise and sudden light." - The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien @figmentera

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“Is it thy will, thy image should keep open My heavy eyelids to the weary night? Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken, While shadows like to thee do mock my sight? Is it thy spirit that thou send'st from thee So far from home into my deeds to pry, To find out shames and idle hours in me, The scope and tenor of thy jealousy? O, no! thy love, though much, is not so great: It is my love that keeps mine eye awake: Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat, To play the watchman ever for thy sake: For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere, From me far off, with others all too near.” - William Shakespeare "The Lovers I", By René Magritte , 1928 @figmentera

#fragments "You're on earth. There's no cure for that." - Samuel Beckett @figmentera

#philosophy #fragments #nietzsche Many die too late, and a few die too early. The doctrine still sounds strange: “Die at the right time!” - Nietzsche @figmentera

#philosophy #cioran "Love has so many faces, so many aspects, and so many deviations that it is hard to find a typical form for it. Any science of love will look first for love's original manifestation. As one speaks of love between the sexes, love of God, for nature or for art, one can also speak of enthusiasm as a form of love. Which form is the essential one from which all others derive? Theologians maintain that it is the love of God and that all other manifestations are but pale reflections of this fundamental love. Pantheists with esthetic tendencies believe that it is the love of nature, and pure esthetes, the love of art. Similarly, for biologists it is pure sexuality without affection and for metaphysicians it is the feeling of universal identity. Yet not one of them will be able to prove that the form he defends is the most typical, because in the course of history that form has varied so much that nobody today could define it with any certainty. As for me, I believe that the quintessential form of love is that between a man and a woman, not only sexuality but a rich network of affective states. Has anyone ever committed suicide in the name of God, nature, or art? Love grows in intensity when it fastens on the concrete; one loves a woman for what makes her different, unique in the world: nothing can replace her at the height of passion." - On the Heights of Despair, E.M.Cioran @figmentera

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#poetry #seema_yasmin Polymath by Seema Yasmin "If one man can take four wives And the testimony of two women is equal to one man Then by that algebra I will have two lovers One woman and one man Or two women and no man If haraam means forbidden And haram means sacred space Then harem is an inbetween place Unholy and holy Temple where I frolic with my two wives" @figmentera

The Torment of Saint Anthony Artist : Michelangelo Year : 1487 @PeintureEtVie @figmentera

The Torment of Saint Anthony Artist : Michelangelo Year : 1487 @PeintureEtVie @figmentera

#poetry #kaveh_akbar What Use Is Knowing Anything If No One Is Around by Kaveh Akbar "What use is knowing anything if no one is around to watch you know it? Plants reinvent sugar daily and hardly anyone applauds. Once as a boy I sat in a corner covering my ears, singing Qur’anic verse after Qur’anic verse. Each syllable was perfect, but only the lonely rumble in my head gave praise. This is why we put mirrors in birdcages, why we turn on lamps to double our shadows. I love my body more than other bodies. When I sleep next to a man, he becomes an extension of my own brilliance. Or rather, he becomes an echo of my own anticlimax. I was delivered from dying like a gift card sent in lieu of a pound of flesh. My escape was mundane, voidable. Now I feed faith to faith, suffer human noise, complain about this or that heartache. The spirit lives in between the parts of a name. It is vulnerable only to silence and forgetting. I am vulnerable to hammers, fire, and any number of poisons. The dream, then: to erupt into a sturdier form, like a wild lotus bursting into its tantrum of blades. There has always been a swarm of hungry ghosts orbiting my body—even now, I can feel them plotting in their luminous diamonds of fog, each eying a rib or a thighbone. They are arranging their plans like worms preparing to rise through the soil. They are ready to die with their kind, dry and stiff above the wet earth."   @figmentera