Member-only story
- When I give up the illusion of control, the more in control I am; I am most human when I stop trying to play God.
- Then something happens: thought asserts itself as music and forgets all its problems.
- I didn’t realize how intellectually nihilistic I was becoming over the winter: I started to allow myself to believe that it didn’t matter what I read or wrote, what I did or felt; I started to accept, falsely, that everything is equally. I was becoming de-aestheticized: I was ceasing to order my perceptions according to the principles of beauty and wisdom.
- Our culture replaces aesthetics with associationism — with the notion that something is good because it’s ‘ours’.
- I pity us modern people who only know how to treat each other as financial means to an end.
- One thing is clear: even if our current mode of living does not destroy the human race, it will destroy the human spirit.
- Pathos is released in the transition from one emotional state to another.
