Wenn ich auf dieser Welt nur realistisch sein darf, um mich an dem zu orientieren, was schon ist – dann wird sich meine Realität niemals verändern.
„,Er trinkt nur, wenn er deprimiert ist.‘
,Warum sollte er deprimiert sein?‘
,Manchmal wird er deprimiert, weil er nichts zu trinken hat.’“
(T. Pratchett über Sam Mumm, „Helle Barden“)
Wenn ich auf dieser Welt nur realistisch sein darf, dann kann ich mich auch gleich ins Grab legen.
„Tja, anfangs ist es ein wenig beängstigend, wie alles Neue, aber nach einer Weile nimmt man die Dinge etwas selbstverständlicher. Rauchen hilft dabei. Außerdem bin ich süchtig.“
(S. MacLaine, „Zwischenleben“)
Das ganze Leben ist wie eine Droge. Was, wenn selbst die Einsamkeit abhängig macht?
„The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, (…) to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment. (…) Dreams and drunkenness, the use of opium and alcohol are the semblance and counterfeit of this oracular genius, and hence their dangerous attraction for men. For the like reason, they ask the aid of wild passions, as in gaming and war, to ape in some manner these flames and generosities of the heart.“
(R.W. Emerson, „Essays and other Writings“)
„(…) sooner or later, every hard junkie becomes a devil in exile.“
(G.D. Roberts, „Shantaram“)
„Oh, wieviel wollte ich! Ich will jetzt nichts mehr, will nichts mehr wollen, ich habe mir das Wort gegeben, nichts mehr zu wollen; mögen sie ohne mich die Wahrheit suchen!“
(F.M. Dostojewskij, „Der Idiot“)
„Erlösung aber ist die Erkenntnis der Sinnlosigkeit allen Lebens.“
(R. Schneider, „Schlafes Bruder“)
The day I decided to kill my self.
„Erwarte nichts. (…) Jetzt bin ich ausgelaugt. Der Weg, dem ich atemlos gefolgt bin, verliert sich im Gestein. (…) Es hat sich auch nichts geändert, ich bin immer noch dasselbe ich, besessen von den alten Gelüsten und Leidenschaften, der ewige Nörgler über unbedeutende Widerwärtigkeiten, immer noch klafft die Lücke zwischen dem, was ich weiß, und dem, was ich bin. (…), aber alle Hoffnungen, Taten und Reisen haben zu nichts geführt. Ich habe nichts mehr zu erwarten.“
(Peter Matthiesen, „Auf der Spur des Schneeleoparden“)
„‚To deny is not to achieve.‘
‚Paradise is for those who make paradise.‘
‚The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer, and his sons are born in exile.‘“
(U.K. LeGuin, „The Dispossessed“)
„The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship’s stokers. With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the shaky flames darted, curling out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in worth of mirth; as their uncivilised laughter forked upwards out of them like the flame from the furnace, as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.
So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begot kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.“
(H. Melville, „Moby Dick“)
Umarme die Sinnlosigkeit. Denn am Ende – sind wir alle – allein.
„I watch the cars go by for a while on the highway. Something lonely about them. Not lonely – worse. Nothing. Like the attendant’s expression when he filled the tank. Nothing. A nothing curb, by some nothing gravel, at a nothing intersection, going nowhere.
(…) They all look like they’re in a funeral procession.“
(R.M. Pirsig, „Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“)
„Da ich sie nirgends einzuordnen vermochte, konnte ich sie nicht als Teil der Realität akzeptieren.“
(W. Megre über Gefühle, „Anastasia – Tochter der Taiga“)
„Sie konnten sich an sich selbst nicht festhalten.“
(T. Glavinic über Selbstmörder, „Die Arbeit der Nacht“)
„Unbegründete Gedanken taugen zu nichts anderem, als euren Körper zu verbrauchen. Betrübnis bringt nichts zurück. Sie nimmt lediglich euch mit.“
(„Buch der Kenntnisse“)
Inner walls seem to me like a callous structure inside the body, but they are strangely disembodied, themselves without substance, and they guard nothing. Behind these walls lurks but a poor emptiness, a yawning chasm instead where my heart should be. ’Tis a bottomless well I’m trying to fill, with all kinds of things, day after day after day.
(N)Euer Senf – mittelscharf, wenn’s geht