Category Archives: fourteen forms of melancholy

“An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.”

Wašíču is the Lakota and Dakota word for people of Western European descent. It expresses the indigenous population’s perception of the non-natives’ relationship with the land and the indigenous population. Typically it refers to white people but does not specifically mention skin color or race.

A common folk etymology claims that wašíču originates from wašíŋ ičú “he takes fat”

“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”

Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

Regarding God, Cioran has noted that “without Bach, God would be a complete second-rate figure” and that “Bach’s music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded as a complete failure”.

His mother once said that if she knew how miserable he would have turned out, she would have aborted him, a statement which Cioran described as “liberating”.

the misanthrope, as an essentially solitary man, is not a man at all: he must be a monster or a god, a view reflected in the Renaissance view of misanthropy as a “beast-like state”.

Humanity is a moral disaster. There would have been much less destruction had we never evolved. The fewer humans there are in the future, the less destruction there will still be.
—David Benatar, “The Misanthropic Argument for Anti-natalism”

“I know the sap that courses through the trees as I know the blood that flows through my veins. The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water, but the blood of our grandfathers grandfathers.

The wind that gave me my first breath will receive my last sigh.”

“If I could believe that I should grow old in pursuit and change, I should be rid of my fear: nothing persists. One moment does not lead to another. The door opens and the tiger leaps.”

-Rhoda, from The Waves by Virginia Woolf

“…do you know what a wasp’s nest is like? It’s made of something much much thinner than airmail paper: grey and as thin as possible. This gets wrapped around and around like pastry, like a millefeuille, and can get as big as two feet across. It weighs nothing. For me the wasp’s nest is a kind of ideal vision: an object that is extremely complicated and intricate, made out of something that hardly exists.”

“Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound… disembodied.”

Barbara Maria Neu – Missing: “Like a hole in the body and mind, missing someone. Is it even possible to miss someone. Is it longing, eternal quest. For the absent, which I don’t know, for illusion, imagination. Love. Unfortunately, Kris cannot be there today. I miss Kris.”

Many households in India own and grow a cannabis plant to be able to offer cannabis to a passing sadhu (ascetic holy men), and during some evening devotional services it is not uncommon for cannabis to be smoked by everyone present.