Unabridged Manuscripts

Resilience, strength, and hope. Let's hope these three are things that can be restored & refined again and again. And again. What a grave danger it would be if they are not! If they are things that you can run out of eventually, that would be a good day to die! Lelit Thoughts

https://bookquotes.art.blog/2024/11/20/notes-from-the-floor/

Moments demise Life wilts & dies. But not everything is confined with time, Nor imprisoned within the shelves of years. It's only loosely fastened. It's up to us to unravel and unwind and make the universe feel as if eternity subsisted. In madness, all seem to be lost. In chaos, nothing seems to subside. All seem to override The bitter and the cold, Only to burn the wild. Reveal the shadow Just to spite what had been. So, instead I let the world fall apart around me and watch myself crumble like cities burning to the ground. I let the ashes fall like a snow flake In a darkened winter. and just hope that one day I can find enough parts of me in the rubble to rebuild all that I used to be Rants in Agony

It's not always the dark you wait to pass It's not always the dark side of the day you wait to subside Some days, it's the light The sound, the bright side of the day You wait to alleviate For you not to see the scars in full brightness For you not to speculate The realms of your life For you to shut down the roars of the abyss For you coexist with the disdain Sometimes. Some days It's the light that's full of pain, people, It's the light that's the enemy. So you wait for the sun to set The light to go away So that you can breath You can think You can be free in the painful world Less pain, less of stimuli with yourself Rants in Agony

Only the Awake Dreams Life, Death, and Hope. The trio with a complexity of their own. And a God complex each can project on each other. Life always seem to win until death get to her and stop her ultimately. Meanwhile hope remains overshadowing both by imposing herself on both. Ultimately, none of them beats the complex knot they seem to enjoy abounding on themselves. She has resilience, they say. That’s supposedly Life. Hope is not always a nice company to keep around. She can be too much of herself to be unbiased and help her survive. Not to mention, she abandons her post more than she is supposed to. She sides with the agony of death and shows off that she’s residing in death more than life. Oh the betrayal! They say 'She has gone through much worse and she survived. She can go through another of those times again. That's what resilient people do after all.' But then, might there be a limit for resilience itself? Have they considered that at all? Life ponders. It is a wonder everyone has an opinion how Life is supposed to be. Yet no one has ever figured it out yet. And she is neither awake nor asleep to think clearly. She doesn’t sleep, so she barely dreams. Nor she is never awake to dream properly. It’s not a tie she is wasting her strength on. She is just attempting to survive whatever it is. Any fellow wanderer would understand this if not empathize after all?! For resilience might be lost, but not a wander and a wonder to keep yourself awake, alive, aware. Wishing all the luck upon you fellow wanderer! The quiet days within the madness.

“I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, 'I exist.' In thousands of agonies -- I exist. I'm tormented on the rack -- but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar -- I exist! I see the sun, and if I don't see the sun, I know it's there. And there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Symptoms of our self-ignorance abound. We are irritable or sad, guilty or furious, without any reliable sense of the origins of our discord. We destroy a relationship that might have been workable under a compulsion we cannot account for. We fail to know our professional talents in time. We pass too many of our days under mysterious clouds of despair or beset by waves of persecution.

“What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.” Reads &Quotes

The theory of the weakness of strength invites us to be calm and forensic about the most irritating aspects of those we live around. There is no comfort in being told that these aspects are not real or significant. The consolation comes in not viewing them in isolation, in remembering the accompanying trait that redeems them and explains the friendship, in recalling that a lack of time management might have its atonement in creativity or that dogmatism might be the offshoot of precision. It is always an option to move away and find people who will have new kinds of strengths, but—as time will reveal—they will also have new, fascinating, and associated kinds of weaknesses. Kindness is built out of a constantly renewed and gently resigned awareness that weakness-free people do not exist.

In the 1870s, when he was living in Paris, the American novelist Henry James became a friend of the celebrated Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, who was also living in the city at that time. James was particularly taken with the unhurried, tranquil style of the Russian writer’s storytelling: He spent a long time on every sentence, weighing different options, changing, polishing, until—at last—everything was perfect. It was a hugely ambitious, inspiring approach to literature. But in personal and social life, these same virtues could make Turgenev an aggravating companion. He was almost impossible to pin down for an appointment, writing florid, nuanced letters of apology for his delays and changes of plan. James would invite him for lunch for 1 p.m., Turgenev would agree, then suddenly change his mind twenty minutes before, sending a note to say that he’d had to leave town on an urgent trip. Eventually he’d make an appointment that seemed to work, but would show up an hour and a half late. James might have been tempted to end the friendship forthwith, but he had the wisdom not to interpret Turgenev’s disastrous timekeeping as an isolated part of his personality, but rather to see it as an emanation of the very same side of his character that enabled him to produce some of the greatest literary works of the age. The same trait might generate Fathers and Sons and, around appointments, six cancelled meetings. Musing in a letter about Turgenev’s greatness as a writer and his trickiness as a friend, James remarked that the Russian novelist had thoroughly exhibited the “weakness of his strength.” Reads & Quotes

The real purpose of tragedy is not to teach us to be kind to fictional creations; it is to encourage us to apply a complex lens to the travails of all those around us and, crucially at points, to ourselves. Without having any of the dramatic talent of a Sophocles or Shakespeare, we need to tell our own stories of loss and error with some of the same generosity that they employed, thereby holding on to what can often feel, especially at our lowest points, like a hugely improbable idea: that though we have failed, however stupid our mistakes, we remain deserving of that gracious and grand epithet, a gift from the Greeks to all humankind: a “tragic failure.” Reads & Quotes

I am dreaming that I am awake. -Margaret Atwood Read Review Here

Where does responsibility for success and failure lie? Nowadays, the answer tends to be: squarely with the individual concerned. That’s why failure isn’t just hard (as it has always been); it is a catastrophe. There is no metaphysical consolation, no possibility of appealing to the idea of “bad luck,” no one to blame but oneself. Suicide rates climb exponentially once societies become modern and start to hold people profoundly responsible for their biographies. Meritocracies turn failure from a misfortune to an unbudgeable verdict on one’s nature. We trust that the world is more or less just, and that, the odd exception aside, people will secure roughly what they deserve. Those who are condemned and broken did something wrong; those who succeeded worked hard and were good. The status of a person has to be a more or less reliable indicator of their effort and decency. Reads & Quotes

THE IMPORTANCE OF A BREAKDOWN One of the great problems of human beings is that we’re far too good at keeping going. We’re experts at surrendering to the demands of the external world, living up to what is expected of us and getting on with the priorities defined by others around us. We keep showing up and doing our tasks—and we can pull off this magical feat for up to decades at a time without so much as an outward twitch or crack. Until suddenly, one day, much to everyone’s surprise (including our own), we break. The rupture can take many forms. We can no longer get out of bed. We fall into silence. We develop all-consuming social anxiety. We refuse to eat. We babble incoherently. We lose command over part of our body. We are compelled to do something extremely scandalous and entirely contrary to our normal behavior. We become wholly paranoid in a given area. We refuse to play by the usual rules in our relationship: We have an affair, ramp up the fighting, or otherwise poke a very large stick in the wheels of daily life. Breakdowns are hugely inconvenient for everyone and so, unsurprisingly, there is an immediate rush to medicalize them and attempt to excise them from the scene, so that business as usual can resume. But this is to misunderstand what is going on when we break down. A breakdown is not merely a random piece of madness or malfunction; it is a very real—albeit very inarticulate—bid for health and self-knowledge. It is an attempt by one part of our mind to force the other into a process of growth, self-understanding and self-development that it has hitherto refused to undertake. If we can put it paradoxically, it is an attempt to jump-start a process of getting well—properly well—through a stage of falling very ill. The danger, therefore, if we merely medicalize a breakdown and attempt to shift it away at once is that we will miss the lesson embedded within our sickness. A breakdown isn’t just a pain, though it is that too of course; it is an extraordinary opportunity to learn. The reason we break down is that we have not, over years, flexed very much. There were things we needed to hear inside our minds that we deftly put to one side; there were messages we needed to heed, bits of emotional learning and communicating we didn’t do, and now, after being patient for so long, far too long, the emotional self is attempting to make itself heard in the only way it now knows how. It has become entirely desperate—and we should understand and even sympathize with its mute rage. What the breakdown is telling us above anything else is that it must no longer be business as usual; that things have to change or (and this can be properly frightening to witness) that death might be preferable. Why can’t we simply listen to the emotional need calmly and in good time, thus avoiding the melodrama of a breakdown? Because the conscious mind is inherently lazy and squeamish and so reluctant to engage with what the breakdown eventually has to tell it with brutality. For years, it refuses to listen to a particular sadness, or is in flight from a dysfunction in a relationship, or pushes desires down very far beneath the surface. In the midst of a breakdown, we often wonder whether we have gone mad. We have not. We’re behaving oddly, no doubt, but beneath the agitation we are on a hidden yet logical search for health. We haven’t become ill; we were ill already. Our crisis, if we can get through it, is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and constitutes an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis. It belongs, in the most acute and panicked way, to the search for self-knowledge. Reads & Quotes

Inner Voices Somewhere in our minds, removed from the day to day, there sit judges. They watch what we do, study how we perform, examine the effect we have on others, track our successes and failures—and then, eventually, they pass verdicts. These determine our levels of confidence and self-compassion; they lend us a sense of whether we are worthwhile beings or, conversely, should not really exist. The judges are in charge of our self-esteem. The verdict of an inner judge doesn’t follow an objective rule book or statute. Two individuals can end up with wildly different verdicts on the esteem they deserve even though they may have done and said much the same thing. Certain judges simply seem more predisposed than others to lend their audiences an essentially buoyant, warm, appreciative, and generous view of themselves, while others encourage them to be hugely critical, disappointed, and sometimes close to disgust or ready for self-destruction. A good internal voice is rather like (and just as important as) a genuinely decent judge: someone who can separate good from bad but who will always be merciful, fair, accurate in understanding what’s going on, and interested in helping us deal with our problems. It’s not that we should stop judging ourselves; rather that we should learn to be better judges of ourselves. Reads & Quotes

Communication Can we patiently and reasonably put our disappointments into words that, more or less, enable others to see our point? Or do we internalize pain, act it out symbolically or discharge it with counterproductive rage? When other people upset us, do we feel we have the right to communicate or must we slam doors and fall silent? When the desired response isn’t forthcoming, do we ask others to guess what we have been too angrily panicked to spell out? Or can we have a plausible second go and take seriously the thought that others are not merely wilfully misunderstanding us? Do we have the inner resources to teach rather than insist? Reads & Quotes

Kindness Without ill intention, most people are not quite kind; they are intermittently jealous, bored, vindictive, keen to prove a point, or distracted by their own lives. Kindness is not [just] merely pleasant. Knowing that we have someone on our side is designed to lend us the courage to face up to experiences we normally evade. In a sufficiently calm, reassuring, and interested environment, we can look at areas of vulnerability we are otherwise too burdened to tackle. We can dare to think that perhaps we were wrong or that we have been angry for long enough; that it might be best to outgrow our justifications or halt our compulsion to charm others indiscriminately. The kindness of another gives us the security needed to probe constructively at our scared, puzzling, evasive minds. Quotes

In the seventeenth century, the Dutch developed a tradition of painting that depicted ships in violent storms. These works, which hung in private homes and in municipal buildings around the Dutch Republic, had an explicitly therapeutic purpose: They were delivering a moral to their viewers, who lived in a nation critically dependent on maritime trade, about confidence in seafaring and life more broadly. Ludolf Bakhuysen painted Warships in a Heavy Storm around 1695. The scene looks chaotic in the extreme: How could the ships survive? But they were designed for just such situations. Their hulls had been minutely adapted through long experience to withstand the tempests of the northern oceans. The crews practiced again and again the maneuvers that could keep their vessels safe. They knew about taking down sails at speed and ensuring that the wind would not shred the mast. They understood about shifting cargo in the hull, tacking to the left and then abruptly to the right, and pumping out water from the inner chambers. They knew to remain coolly scientific in responding to the storm’s wilful, frantic motions. The picture pays homage to decades of planning and experience. One can imagine the older sailors on the ship saying to a terrified novice, with a laugh, that just last year, off the coast of Jutland, there was an even bigger storm—and slapping him on the back with paternal playfulness as the youth was sick overboard. Bakhuysen wanted us to feel proud of humanity’s resilience in the face of apparently dreadful challenges. His painting implies that we can all cope far better than we think; that what appears immensely threatening may be highly survivable. All this the caregiver teaches, usually without reference to ships and Dutch art—just by their way of keeping on. Morning Reads

Ludolf Bakhuysen, Warships in a Heavy Storm, c. 1695.