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Why I am an Orthodox Christian Pessimist Jonathan McCormack

Poison Oasis, Jean-Michel Basquiat

The Obligation to Be Happy

By Linda Pastan

It is more onerousthan the rites of beauty or housework, harder than love.But you expect it of me casually,

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$#en are  wretched by necessity, and determined to believethemselves wretched by accident%

& Leopardi

Why does insanity always twist the great answers?

Because only

tormented persons want truth.

Man is an animal like other animals, wants food and success and

women, not truth. Only if the mind

Tortured by some interior tension has despaired of happiness:

then it hates its life-cage and seeks further,

And finds, if it is powerful enough. But instantly the private

agony that made the search

Muddles the finding.

- Robinson Jeffers, fragment from Theory Of Truth

Kobayashi Issa

Never forget:

we walk on hell,

gazing at flowers.

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"That’s how we know we are alive. We are wrong."

— Philip Roth

“death cannot harm me

more than you have harmed me,

my beloved life.”

— Louise Glück, fragment fromOctober 

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The

hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty

such that one holds them to one's heart have a common

provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he

whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.

~ Cormac McCarthy

If we could understand and love the infinity of agonies which

languish around us, all the lives which are hidden deaths, we

should require as many hearts as there are suffering beings.

〜Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

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Desolation

By Ibn Abbad

For the servant of God

Consolation is the place of danger

Where he may be deluded

(Accepting only what he sees,

Experiences, or knows)

But desolation is his home:

For in desolation he is seized by God

And entirely taken over into God,

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In darkness, in emptiness,

In loss, in death of self.

Then the self is only ashes. Not even ashes!

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  Oswaldo Guayasamin, Las Manos