—garrulousness: man flees thought so as to take refuge in speech; and curiosity: since he has lost his perspective on eternity, he compensates by a perpetual search for substitutes. Such garrulousness and such curiosity about other people’s business are the sign of a lack of substance in one’s own personal life. While focused very often on the faults of others, these gossips become set in their own mediocrity.
The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times
Jean-Charles Nault
Category: DESPONDENCY
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The ancients knew too that one way of overcoming acedia [despondency] is to ridicule it by continually postponing flight until later; this is how one manages to remain faithful for one’s whole life!
It was said of Abba Theodore and Abba Lucius, both from Ennaton, that they spent fifty years ridiculing their own thoughts by saying: “After this winter we will depart from here.” And when summer returned, they would say, “After this summer, we will depart from here.” And that is what they did their whole life long, those memorable Fathers.
The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times
Jean-Charles Nault -
“Regardless of my transient joys, I am never free of a feeling of melancholy which somehow forms the base of my heart.”
—Frederic Chopin, from Franz Liszt’s Frederic Chopin, trans. Edward N. Waters (Collier-Macmillan, 1963) -
But now I often lament and grieve over my unhappiness, for many evils befall me in this vale of miseries, often disturbing me, making me sad and overshadowing me, often hindering and distracting me, alluring and entangling me so that I neither have free access to You nor enjoy the sweet embraces which are ever ready for blessed souls. Let my sighs and the manifold desolation here on earth move You.
—Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ -
We need to view the past as a book to be learned from, not a place we want to go. If we learn from it the right way, then we find the things that were most noble or choice-worthy about our past, individually or collectively. And then talk about how to recover that in a new fashion that takes us to places we couldn’t go otherwise.
Look, I’m nostalgic about times that I know I was miserable at the time, but I feel nostalgic about them now. It’s just the way our mind relates—in a way, it’s a good things—it helps us put into perspective things we didn’t appreciate at the time, but it’s also very risky.
—Mayor Pete Buttigieg -
(I long for someone to invent a punctuation mark for despondency…)
—Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation: On Pessimism -
“What I realized after talking to him, and many of my more cynical friends, is that most people who claim to possess nihilistic tendencies actually care a hell of a lot. Their empathy levels are off the charts.”
—Eugene Thacker, There’s Always Death To Look Forward To -
Confusion, frustration, depression, spite. Confusion about what I am supposed to do, frustration at my conditions, depression at feeling frustrated and confused, and a general spitefulness towards the world and all people. Every day. Only going for walks and writing in this pedantic notebook help, a little.
—Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation: On Pessimism
SO GOOD QUOTES 