"No one doubts that philosophy is often pointless, an unpleasant way of exploiting minor talents."

"...precisely this lack of real results is its greatness. Its entire value is in the absence of rest that it fosters."

- Georges Bataille, Guilty

Almost gave up on this one because the opening stories were quite weak. Skipped to Grimscribe and I'm vibing a lot more - significant leap in writing quality

Some bangin bookmail today

There needs to be greater cross-pollination between Philosophy Twitter and Lit Twitter because The Baphomet is peak Brodernism

"But for us, who have inherited the rest, who can only decide between preserving or losing it, how difficult it is to mediate the beginning and intervene for the conclusion of our personal history... how difficult is the freedom and discretion of something..."

- Attila

"He never lost Ariadne's thread, which was to have no goal and serve no cause: causes, he knew, clipped wings. But the absence of a cause, on the other hand, threw him into solitude: this is the sickness of the desert, a cry lost in great silence"

- Bataille, On Nietzsche

"Why am I here, says the silence, what have I done, echoes the emptiness, why have I ruined myself in this willful manner, chuckles the money in the till, why have I been brought so low, wheedles the thoroughfare, to which the only answer was-"

"I am in the shadow of what is in store for me, shaken to the bones by what I will be when the future has caught up with me"

- Helene Cixous, Tomb(e)

"O love, there is a chance for peace.
Take it. We all die soon enough"

- Andromache to Hector, from Christopher Logue's War Music

"did not the human event, however and wherever it happened, unhesitatingly disclose itself as a consequence of creaturely fear, from the twilight prison of which one could neither break out nor escape, as it was the anguish of a creature lost in a maze? "

- The Death of Virgil

"...reality was always to be symbolized only by reality-, image upon image, reality upon reality, not one of them actually real as long as it stood alone, yet each a single symbol of an inviolate, ultimate truth which was the sum of their totality."

Someone needs to put these three writers in conversation with one another

On Baudelaire: "At a time when literature attributed the pain of living almost exclusively to the misfortunes of unrequited love or the jealousies inherent in adultery, he had paid no attention to those infantile maladies but had probed wounds that are less easily healed,

Gerard Manley Hopkins

"I cannot describe the pain that invades a man once he has begun to speak." - Blanchot, Death Sentence

Perhaps my favorite paragraph in all of Blanchot

"but you are not Arthur Rimbaud."

After days of discarded drafts and unoriginal sentences, some tough love from Pierre.

Daniil Kharms

"The limit is crossed with a weary horror: hope seems a respect which fatigue grants to the necessity of the world."