“After so much imposture, so much fraud, it is comforting to contemplate a
beggar.

He, at least, neither lies nor lies to himself: his doctrine, if he has one, he
embodies; work he dislikes, and he proves it; wanting to possess nothing, he
cultivates his impoverishment, the condition of his freedom.

His thought is resolved into his being and his being into his thought. He has
nothing, he is himself, he endures: to live on a footing with eternity is to
live from day to day, from hand to mouth. Thus, for him, other men are
imprisoned in illusion.”

— Emil Cioran

“We live in a habitat of unrealities—not of earth, air, water, and wildlife—and
cradling illusion trounces grim logic every time.”

-Thomas Ligotti

"But as life goes on...all these different versions of truth become a little
pathetic.

Each person thinks that he has the formula for triumphing over life's
limitations and knows with authority what it means to be a [human], and he or
she usually tries to win a following for his or her particular patent.

Today we know that people try so hard to win converts for their point of view
because it is more than merely an outlook on life: it is an immortality formula,
(a denial of death.)

-- Ernest Becker

"Americans are attached to violence. They attach themselves to processed
violence, out of cans.

They're TV-hypnotized.

TV is the invisible protective shield against bare reality. Twentieth Century
culture's disease is the inability to feel the reality.

People cluster to TV, soap operas, movies, theatre, pop idols, and they have
wild emotions over symbols, but in the reality of their own lives, they're
emotionally dead."

~ Jim Morrison

"Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement
that lie, you instrument your own undoing."

~ Ernest Becker

We are born as innocents.
We are polluted by
advice.

—Henry David Thoreau

"They never live. They are like the sheep in the fields, that have their noses
to the ground, and anticipate only the thrill of increase."

-- D.H. Lawrence

“I want to be anonymous. I don’t know how you get involved with uninvolvment,
but I don’t want to be involved. My ambition is to be completely forgotten.”

~Bob Kaufman

The great beer swiggin' poet, Charles Bukowski, was born on this day in 1920:

"amazing how death wins hands down
amazing how much credence is given to idiot forms of
life

amazing how laughter has been drowned out
amazing how viciousness is such a constant

I must soon declare my own war on their war
I must hold to my last piece of ground
I must protect the small space I have made that has
allowed me life

my life not their death
my death not their death

this place, this time, now
I vow to the sun
that I will laugh the good laugh once again
in the perfect place of me
forever.

their death not my life.”

― Charles Bukowski

“The present period is one of those when everything that seems normally to
constitute a reason for living dwindles away, when one must, on pain of sinking
into confusion or apathy, call everything in question again.

The triumph of authoritarian and nationalist movements should blast almost
everywhere the hopes that well-meaning people had placed in democracy…

We are living through a period bereft of a future. Waiting for that which is to
come is no longer a matter of hope, but of anguish.”

— Simone Weil

"Each day we demand more from society so that we can demand less from
ourselves."

--Nicolás Gómez Dávila

"There is only one choice at the end of this century: Eastern barracks or
Western brothel."

--Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“All literature is contemporary to the reader who knows how to read.”

— Nicolás Gómez Dávila

"Without walking and the contemplation of nature which is connected with it,
without this equally delicious and admonishing search, I deem myself lost, and I
am lost."

-- Robert Walser

"Tattoos aren't meant for everybody
and they're too goddamn good
for some people."

—Lyle Tuttle

“Religion has failed us because long ago it separated us from Nature, which we
now call Our Mother, and made us worship things. History has failed us because
long ago it convinced us that by reason we could absent ourselves from the pain
of life and reach harmony, peace, and plenty.

Science has failed us because it bedded down with wealth, became technocracy,
and made so many things that clutter up our lives. We have nothing left but this
Ecology…

We can imagine nothing, not a single thing. We reach instead for memories,
memories of our future. Instead of going west, we will escape to the moon, the
planets, safety beyond the farthest star.

Instead of liberal social legislation we will have liberal environmental
legislation, a little tinkering with landfills, a ban on disposable everything,
car pools, passive solar design in housing, abundant devices for contraception,
mass tree plantings.

We will not question our world, but polish its edges. We will use our memories.
And crawl toward our future. And ...

“It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing
too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same result.”

— John Fowles