Philosophy

"To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep, No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd."

"There is no justice in this world. No single punishment can correct an injustice, because what is past cannot be changed, and those to whom injustice was done remain with their loss. But even if justice were attained in some other world, for what was lost in this one, if in some other world those who had been injured had returned to them what they had lost here, that is not a return of their life’s fulfillment; it is only consolation. What is lost at a certain moment can never again be compensated, because what is lost was needed at the moment it disappeared."

"Why need we weep over parts of our life? the whole of it calls for tears: new miseries assail us before we have freed ourselves from the old ones. You, therefore, who allow them to trouble you to an unreasonable extent ought especially to restrain yourselves, and to muster all the powers of the human breast to combat your fears and your pains. Moreover, what forgetfulness of your own position and that of mankind is this? You were born a mortal, and you have given birth to mortals: yourself a weak and fragile body, liable to all diseases, can you have hoped to produce anything strong and lasting from such unstable materials? Your son has died: in other words he has reached that goal towards which those whom you regard as more fortunate than your offspring are still hastening: this is the point towards which move at different rates all the crowds which are squabbling in the law courts, sitting in the theatres, praying in the temples. Those whom you love and those whom you despise will both be made equal in the same ashes."

"Birth is metaphysical injury. Healing takes time – the span of one’s life."

"Whithersoever he moves he straightway becomes conscious of his weakness, not being able to bear all climates, falling sick after drinking strange water, breathing an air to which he is not accustomed, or from other causes and reasons of the most trifling kind, frail, sickly, entering upon his life with weeping: yet nevertheless what a disturbance this despicable creature makes! what ideas it conceives, forgetting its lowly condition! It exercises its mind upon matters which are immortal and eternal, and arranges the affairs of its grandchildren and great-grandchildren, while death surprises it in the midst of its far-reaching schemes, and what we call old age is but the round of a very few years."

"What then, Marcia, is it that grieves you? is it that your son has died, or that he did not live long? If it be his having died, then you ought always to have grieved, for you always knew that he would die. Reflect that the dead suffer no evils, that all those stories which make us dread the nether world are mere fables, that he who dies need fear no darkness, no prison, no blazing streams of fire, no river of Lethe, no judgment seat before which he must appear, and that Death is such utter freedom that he need fear no more despots. All that is a phantasy of the poets, who have terrified us without a cause. Death is a release from and an end of all pains: beyond it our sufferings cannot extend: it restores us to the peaceful rest in which we lay before we were born. If anyone pities the dead, he ought also to pity those who have not been born. Death is neither a good nor a bad thing, for that alone which is something can be a good or a bad thing: but that which is nothing, and reduces all things to nothing, does not hand us over to either fortune, because good and bad require some material to work upon. Fortune cannot take hold of that which Nature has let go, nor can a man be unhappy if he is nothing. Your son has passed beyond the border of the country where men are forced to labour; he has reached deep and everlasting peace. He feels no fear of want, no anxiety about his riches, no stings of lust that tears the heart in guise of pleasure: he knows no envy of another's prosperity, he is not crashed by the weight of his own; even his chaste ears are not wounded by any ribaldry: he is menaced by no disaster, either to his country or to himself. He does not hang, full of anxiety, upon the issue of events, to reap even greater uncertainty as his reward: he has at last taken up a position from which nothing can dislodge him, where nothing can make him afraid."

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."

"If we picture to ourselves roughly as far as we can the sum total of misery, pain, and suffering of every kind on which the sun shines in its course, we shall admit that it would have been much better if it had been just as impossible for the sun to produce the phenomenon of life on earth as on the moon, and the surface of the earth, like that of the moon, had still been in a crystalline state."

"We can also regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness. At all events even the man who has fared tolerably well, becomes more clearly aware, the longer he lives, that life on the whole is a disappointment, nay a cheat, in other words, bears the character of a great mystification or even a fraud."

"Our susceptibility to pain is wellnigh infinite; but that to pleasure has narrow limits."

"In such a world where there is no stability of any kind, no lasting state is possible but everything is involved in restless rotation and change, where everyone hurries along and keeps erect on a tightrope by always advancing and moving, happiness is not even conceivable. It cannot dwell where Plato's 'constant becoming and never being' is the only thing that occurs. In the first place, no one is happy, but everyone throughout his life strives for an alleged happiness that is rarely attained, and even then only to disappoint him. As a rule, everyone ultimately reaches port with masts and rigging gone; but then it is immaterial whether he was happy or unhappy in a life which consisted merely of a fleeting vanishing present and is now over and finished."

"What a difference there is between our beginning and our end! The former in the frenzy of desire and the ecstasy of sensual pleasure; the latter in the destruction of all the organs and the musty odour of corpses. The path from birth to death is always downhill as regards well-being and the enjoyment of life; blissfully dreaming childhood, light-hearted youth, toilsome manhood, frail and often pitiable old age, the torture of the last illness, and finally the agony of death. Does it not look exactly as if existence were a false step whose consequences gradually become more and more obvious?"

"The most perfect phenomenon of the will-to-live, which manifests itself in the exceedingly ingenious and complex mechanism of the human organism, must crumble to dust, and thus its whole essence and efforts are in the end obviously given over to annihilation. All this is the naïve utterance of nature, always true and sincere, that the whole striving of that will is essentially empty and vain. If we were something valuable in itself, something that could be unconditioned and absolute, it would not have non-existence as its goal."

"States of human happiness often resemble certain groups of trees which look very beautiful when seen from a distance; but, if we go up to them and walk among the trees, that beauty vanishes. We do not know where it was and are standing between trees. This is the reason why we so often envy the position of others."

"This vanity finds its expression in the whole form of existence; in the infinite nature of time and space as opposed to the finite nature of the individual in both; in the transitory and passing present moment as reality's sole mode of existence; in the dependence and relativity of all things; in constant becoming without being; in constant desire without satisfaction; in the constant interruption of efforts and aspirations which constitutes the course of life until such obstruction is overcome. Time and the fleeting nature of all things therein, and by means thereof, are merely the form wherein is revealed to the will-to-live, which as the thing-in-itself is imperishable, the vanity of that striving. Time is that by virtue whereof at every moment all things in our hands come to naught and thereby lose all true value."

"On considerations such as the foregoing, we can certainly base the theory that to enjoy the present moment and to make this the object of our life is the greatest wisdom because the present alone is real, everything else being only the play of thought. But we could just as well call it the greatest folly; for that which in the next moment no longer exists, and vanishes as completely as a dream, is never worth a serious effort."

"If from contemplating the course of the world on a large scale and especially from considering the rapid succession of generations of people and their ephemeral mock-existence we turn and look at human life in detail as presented say by the comedy, then the impression this now makes is like that of a drop of water, seen through a microscope and teeming with infusoria or that of an otherwise visible little heap of cheese-mites whose strenuous activity and strife make us laugh. For, as in the narrowest space, so too in the briefest span of time, great and serious activity produces a comic effect."

"The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other."

"Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life—the craving for which is the very essence of our being—were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing. But as it is, we take no delight in existence except when we are struggling for something; and then distance and difficulties to be overcome make our goal look as though it would satisfy us—an illusion which vanishes when we reach it; or else when we are occupied with some purely intellectual interest—when in reality we have stepped forth from life to look upon it from the outside, much after the manner of spectators at a play. And even sensual pleasure itself means nothing but a struggle and aspiration, ceasing the moment its aim is attained. Whenever we are not occupied in one of these ways, but cast upon existence itself, its vain and worthless nature is brought home to us; and this is what we mean by boredom."

"I cannot help but feel the suffering all around me, not only of humanity but of the whole of creation. I have never tried to withdraw myself from this community of suffering. It seemed to me a matter of course that we should all take our share of the burden of pain which lies upon the world."

"Nature flatly contradicts herself, according as she speaks from the particular or the universal, from inside or outside, from the centre or the periphery. Thus nature has her centre in every individual, for each one is the entire will-to-live. Therefore, even if this individual is only an insect or a worm, nature herself speaks out of it as follows: "I alone am all in all; in my maintenance is everything involved; the rest may perish, it is really nothing." Thus nature speaks from the particular standpoint, from that of self-consciousness, and to this is due the egoism of every living thing. On the other hand, from the universal standpoint, from that of the consciousness of other things, and thus from that of objective knowledge, for the moment looking away from the individual to whom knowledge adheres,—hence from outside, from the periphery, nature speaks thus: "The individual is nothing and less than nothing. I destroy millions of individuals every day for sport and pastime; I abandon their fate to chance, to the most capricious and wanton of my children, who harasses them at his pleasure. Every day I produce millions of new individuals without any diminution of my productive power; just as little as the power of a mirror is exhausted by the number of the sun’s images that it casts one after another on the wall. The individual is nothing.""

"This world is the battle-ground of tormented and agonized beings who continue to exist only by each devouring the other. Therefore, every beast of prey in it is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of torturing deaths. Then in this world the capacity to feel pain increases with knowledge, and therefore reaches its highest degree in man, a degree that is the higher, the more intelligent the man. To this world the attempt has been made to adapt the system of optimism, and to demonstrate to us that it is the best of all possible worlds. The absurdity is glaring. However, an optimist tells me to open my eyes and look at the world and see how beautiful it is in the sunshine, with its mountains, valleys, rivers, plants, animals, and so on. But is the world, then, a peep-show? These things are certainly beautiful to behold, but to be them is something quite different."

"The world rolls round for ever like a mill; It grinds out death and life and good and ill; It has no purpose, heart or mind or will."

"Not to be born is the first choice, the prize beyond any other. But once he has seen the light, the next best is to go back to that dark place from which he came as soon as possible. In thoughtless youth all seems well at first— then suffering begins and every blow strikes home: envy, factions, war, and murder. Troubles abound. And afterwards comes hateful, feeble old age, crabbed and friendless— the evils compound."

"Our existence has no foundation to support it except the ever-fleeting and vanishing present; and so constant motion is essentially its form, without any possibility of that rest for which we are always longing. We resemble a man running down hill who would inevitably fall if he tried to stop, and who keeps on his legs only by continuing to run; or we are like a stick balanced on a finger tip; or the planet that would fall into its sun if it ceased to hurry forward irresistibly. Thus restlessness is the original form of existence."

"A bit of philosophizing leads to a wonderment of life. A lot of philosophizing leads to a contempt of it."

"Out—out are the lights—out all! And, over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm, While the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, "Man," And its hero, the Conqueror Worm."

"The question, then, as to whether life is valuable, valueless, or an affliction can, with regard to the individual, be answered only after a consideration of the different circumstances attendant on each particular case; but, broadly speaking, and disregarding its necessary exceptions, life may be said to be always valuable to the obtuse, often valueless to the sensitive; while to him who commiserates with all mankind, and sympathizes with everything that is, life never appears otherwise than as an immense and terrible affliction."

"TMT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory Terror Management Theory starts with the proposition that the juxtaposition of a biologically rooted desire for life with the awareness of the inevitability of death (which resulted from the evolution of sophisticated cognitive abilities unique to humankind) gives rise to the potential for paralyzing terror. Our species “solved” the problem posed by the prospect of existential terror by using the same sophisticated cognitive capacities that gave rise to the awareness of death to create cultural worldviews: humanly constructed shared symbolic conceptions of reality that give meaning, order, and permanence to existence; provide a set of standards for what is valuable; and promise some form of either literal or symbolic immortality to those who believe in the cultural worldview and live up to its standards of value. Literal immortality is bestowed by the explicitly religious aspects of cultural worldviews that directly address the problem of death and promise heaven, reincarnation, or other forms of afterlife to the faithful who live by the standards and teachings of the culture. Symbolic immortality is conferred by cultural institutions that enable people to feel part of something larger, more significant, and more eternal than their own individual lives through connections and contributions to their families, nations, professions, and ideologies."

"The idea of traveling makes me feel physically sick. I’ve already seen everything I’ve never seen. I’ve already seen everything I haven’t yet seen. The tedium of the constantly new, the tedium of discovering, beneath the transitory difference of things and ideas, the perennial sameness of everything, the absolute similarity between a mosque, a temple and a church, the absolute equivalence between a cabin and a castle, the same physical body in a king in all his finery and a naked savage, the eternal concordance of life with itself, the stagnation of everything that lives despite the constant changes to which it is eternally condemned. Landscapes are repetitions. On an ordinary train journey, I divide myself pointlessly and nervously between not looking at the landscape and not looking at the book that would be keeping me amused if I were someone else. Life already gives me a vague sense of nausea, and movement only aggravates that. The only nontedious landscapes and books are landscapes that don’t exist and books I will never read. For me, life is a somnolence that does not affect the brain. I keep that free as a place in which to be sad. Leave traveling to those who don’t exist! Presumably for someone who is nothing, life, like a river, is a simple matter of flowing ever onwards. For those who think and feel, those who are awake, the ghastly experience of sitting on a train, in a car or in a ship lets them neither sleep nor wake. I return from any journey, however short, as if from a sleep full of dreams — in a state of torpid confusion, with all my sensations glued together, drunk on what I have seen. I can’t rest because my soul is sick. I can’t move because there’s something lacking between body and soul; it’s not movement I lack, but the desire to move."

"Your fly will serve as well as anybody, And what's his hour? He flies, and flies, and flies, And in his fly's mind has a brave appearance; And then your spider gets him in her net, And eats him out, and hangs him up to dry. That's Nature, the kind mother of us all. And then your slattern housemaid swings her broom, And where's your spider? And that's Nature, also. It's Nature, and it's Nothing. It's all Nothing. It's all a world where bugs and emperors Go singularly back to the same dust, Each in his time; and the old, ordered stars That sang together, Ben, will sing the same Old stave to-morrow."

"Every grade of the will’s objectification fights for the matter, the space, and the time of another. Persistent matter must constantly change the form, since, under the guidance of causality, mechanical, physical, chemical, and organic phenomena, eagerly striving to appear, snatch the matter from one another, for each wishes to reveal its own Idea. This contest can be followed through the whole of nature; indeed only through it does nature exist: εἰ γὰρ µὴ ἦν τὸ νεĩϰος ἐν τοῖς πράγμασιν, ἓν ἄν ἦν ἃπαντα, ὥς ϕησίν ’Eμπεδoxλῆς. (nam si non inesset in rebus contentio, unum omnia essent, ut ait Empedocles. [“For, as Empedocles says, if strife did not rule in things, then all would be a unity.”] Aristotle, Metaphysica, ii, 5 [4]). Yet this strife itself is only the revelation of that variance with itself that is essential to the will. This universal conflict is to be seen most clearly in the animal kingdom. Animals have the vegetable kingdom for their nourishment, and within the animal kingdom again every animal is the prey and food of some other. This means that the matter in which an animal’s Idea manifests itself must stand aside for the manifestation of another Idea, since every animal can maintain its own existence only by the incessant elimination of another’s. Thus the will-to-live generally feasts on itself, and is in different forms its own nourishment, till finally the human race, because it subdues all the others, regards nature as manufactured for its own use. Yet, as will be seen in the fourth book, this same human race reveals in itself with terrible clearness that conflict, that variance of the will with itself, and we get homo homini lupus."

"That thousands had lived in happiness and joy would never do away with the anguish and death-agony of one individual; and just as little does my present well-being undo my previous sufferings. Therefore, were the evil in the world even a hundred times less than it is, its mere existence would still be sufficient to establish a truth that may be expressed in various ways, although always only somewhat indirectly, namely that we have not to be pleased but rather sorry about the existence of the world; that its non-existence would be preferable to its existence; that it is something which at bottom ought not to be, and so on."

"I have a sense that, for creatures like me, there are no propitious material circumstances, no situations that will turn out well. This sense is already enough to make me distance myself from life; indeed, it only makes me distance myself still more. The list of achievements which, for ordinary men, makes success inevitable, has, when applied to me, a quite different, unexpected and adverse result. I sometimes have the painful impression that I am the victim of some divine enmity. It seems to me that the only explanation for the series of disasters that defines my life is that someone is consciously manipulating things in order to turn any such achievements into something malevolent. The result of all this is that I never try too hard. Fortune, if it so wishes, may come and find me. I know all too well that my greatest efforts will never meet with the success others enjoy. That is why I abandon myself to Fortune and expect nothing from her. Why would I? My stoicism is an organic necessity. I need to armor myself against life. Since all stoicism is really just a harsher form of epicureanism, I want as far as possible to enjoy my misfortune. I’m not sure to what extent I achieve this. I’m not sure to what extent I achieve anything. I don’t know to what extent one can achieve anything ... Whereas one person triumphs, not by virtue of his own efforts, but because his triumph is inevitable, I never triumph and never would, however inevitable or however much effort I made. I was perhaps born, spiritually speaking, on a very short winter’s day. Night descended early on my existence. The only way I can live my life is in frustration and solitude. Deep down, none of this is very stoical at all. My suffering is only noble when I put it into words. Otherwise, I whine and whimper like a sick child. I fret and worry like a housewife. My life is entirely futile and entirely sad."

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

"This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there” cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it."

"I’m forever on the defensive. I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful – only then do I find myself and feel comforted. Life makes me cold. My existence is all damp cellars and lightless catacombs. I’m the disastrous defeat of the last army that sustained the last empire. Yes, I feel as if I were at the end of an ancient ruling civilization. I, who was used to commanding others, am now alone and forsaken. I, who always had advisers to guide me, now have no friend or guide. Something in me is always begging for compassion, and it weeps over itself as over a dead god whose altars were all destroyed when the white wave of young barbarians stormed the borders and life came and demanded to know what the empire had done with happiness. I’m always afraid others might talk about me. I’ve failed in everything. I didn’t dare think of being something; I didn’t even dream of thinking about being something, because even in my dreams – in my visionary state as a mere dreamer – I realized I was unfit for life. No feeling in the world can lift my head from the pillow where I’ve let it sink in desperation, unable to deal with my body or with the idea that I’m alive, or even with the abstract idea of life."

"The weariness of all illusions and of everything that illusions involve — the loss of them, the pointlessness of having them, the anticipatory weariness of having to have them in order to lose them, the pain of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing how they would end."

"I bowed out of life before it began, for not even in dreams did I find it attractive. Dreams themselves wearied me, and this brought me a false, external sensation, as of having come to the end of an infinite road. I overflowed from myself to end up I don’t know where, and that’s where I’ve uselessly stagnated. I’m something that I used to be. I’m never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don’t know who’s seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul. I observe myself. I’m my own spectator. My sensations pass, like external things, before I don’t know what gaze of mine. I bore myself no matter what I do. All things, down to their roots in mystery, have the colour of my boredom."

"I aspire to nothing. Life hurts me. I’m not well where I am nor anywhere else I can think of being."

"The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence."

"So long as the object of our desire is wanting, it seems more important than anything else; but later, when it is ours, we covet some other thing; and so an insatiable thirst for life keeps us always openmouthed."

"That there is redemption to be found in an ecumenical nonexistence is an old idea on which Mainländer put a new face. For some it is a cherished idea, like that of a peaceful afterlife or progress toward perfection in this life. The need for such ideas comes out of the fact that existence is a condition with no redeeming qualities. If this were not so, none would need cherished ideas like an ecumenical nonexistence, a peaceful afterlife, or progress toward perfection in this life."

"Everything wearies me, even those things that don’t. My joy is as painful as my grief. I wish I could be a child sailing paper boats on a pond in the garden, with the sky above crisscrossed by the vine trellis, casting checkerboards of light and green shade on the somber reflections in the shallow water. A tenuous pane of glass stands between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I cannot touch it. Should we reason our way out of sadness? But why, when reasoning requires effort? And the sad man lacks the necessary energy to make any effort at all. I do not even abdicate from the banal gestures of life from which I so wish I could abdicate. Abdication takes effort, and I do not have enough soul to make that effort. How often it pains me not to be the captain of that ship, the driver of that train! To be some other banal individual whose life, because not mine, fills me with delicious longing and a poetic sense of otherness! I would not then be horrified of life as a Thing. The notion of life as a Whole would not weigh down the shoulders of my thoughts. My dreams are a foolish refuge, about as reliable as an umbrella in a thunderstorm. I am so inert, such a poor wretch, so entirely lacking in gestures and actions. However deep I plunge into myself, all the paths of my dreams lead into clearings of anxiety. Even though I am a prolific dreamer, there are times when dreams escape me. Then things appear clearer. The mist I surround myself with dissipates. And all the now visibly rough edges wound the flesh of my soul. All the hard surfaces bruise the part of me that knows them to be hard. All the visibly heavy objects weigh on my soul. It’s as if someone were using my life to beat me with."

"Living seems to me a metaphysical mistake on the part of matter, an oversight on the part of inaction."

"Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night."

"Ah, now I understand! Senhor Vasques is Life; Life, monotonous and necessary, commanding and unknowable. This banal man represents the banality of life. On the surface he is everything to me, just as, on the surface, Life is everything to me. And if the office in the Rua dos Douradores represents Life for me, the fourth-floor room I live in on that same street represents Art. Yes, Art, living on the same street as Life but in a different room; Art, which offers relief from life without actually relieving one of living, and which is as monotonous as life itself, but in a different way. Yes, for me Rua dos Douradores embraces the meaning of all things, the resolution of all mysteries, except the existence of mysteries themselves, which is something beyond resolution."

"Everything is absurd. One man spends his life earning money which he then saves even though he has no children to leave it to nor any hope that a heaven somewhere will offer him a divine reward. Another puts all his efforts into becoming famous so that he will be remembered once dead, yet he does not believe in a survival of the soul that would give him knowledge of that fame. Yet another wears himself out looking for things he doesn’t even like. Then there is the man who ... One man reads in order to know, all in vain. Another enjoys himself in order to live, again all in vain. I’m riding a tram and, as is my habit, slowly absorbing every detail of the people around me. By “detail” I mean things, voices, words. In the dress of the girl directly in front of me, for example, I see the material it’s made of, the work involved in making it — since it’s a dress and not just material — and I see in the delicate embroidery around the neck the silk thread with which it was embroidered and all the work that went into that. And immediately, as if in a primer on political economy, I see before me the factories and all the different jobs: the factory where the material was made; the factory that made the darker-colored thread that ornaments with curlicues the neck of the dress; and I see the different workshops in the factories, the machines, the workmen, the seamstresses. My eyes’ inward gaze even penetrates into the offices, where I see the managers trying to keep calm and the figures set out in the account books, but that’s not all: beyond that I see into the domestic lives of those who spend their working hours in these factories and offices ... A whole world unfolds before my eyes all because of the regularly irregular dark green edging to a pale green dress worn by the girl in front of me of whom I see only her brown neck. A whole way of life lies before me. I sense the loves, the secrets, the souls of all those who worked just so that this woman in front of me on the tram could wear around her mortal neck the sinuous banality of a thread of dark green silk on a background of light green cloth. I grow dizzy. The seats on the tram, of fine, strong cane, carry me to distant regions, divide into industries, workmen, houses, lives, realities, everything. I leave the tram exhausted, like a sleepwalker, having lived a whole life."

"So they were, and so they are; and as they came are coming others, And among them are the fearless and the meek and the unborn; And a question that has held us heretofore without an answer May abide without an answer until all have ceased to mourn. For the children of the dark are more to name than are the wretched, Or the broken, or the weary, or the baffled, or the shamed: There are builders of new mansions in the Valley of the Shadow, And among them are the dying and the blinded and the maimed."

"How could it have harmed us never to have been created? Are we to believe that our life lay groveling in murk and misery until the first day of creation dawned for us? All people, once born, must certainly wish to remain in life, so long as seductive pleasure detains them; but if one has never tasted the love of life or been numbered among the living, how does it harm one not to have been created?"