What had changed since his adolescence? He still had the same desires, with the knowledge that he could probably never satisfy them.
Atomised
Michel Houellebecq
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‘I’m useless,’ said Bruno resignedly. ‘I couldn’t breed pigs, I don’t have the faintest idea how to make sausages or forks or mobile phones. I’m surrounded by all this stuff that I eat or use and I couldn’t actually make a single thing; I couldn’t even begin to understand how they’re made. If industrial production ceased tomorrow, if all the engineers and the specialist technicians disappeared off the face of the earth, I couldn’t do anything to start things off again. In fact, outside the industrialised world, I couldn’t even survive; I wouldn’t know how to feed or clothe myself, or protect myself from the weather — my technical competence falls far short of Neanderthal man. I’m completely dependent on my society, but I play no useful role in it. The only thing I know how to do is write dubious articles on outdated cultural issues. I get paid for it, too – well paid for it – much more than the average wage.’
Atomised
Michel Houellebecq -
In contemporary Western society, death is like white noise to a man in good health; it fills his mind when his dreams and plans fade. With age, the noise becomes increasingly insistent, like a dull roar with the occasional screech. In another age the sound meant waiting for the kingdom of God; it is now an anticipation of death. Such is life.
Atomised
Michel Houellebecq -
Bruno was definitely in the throes of a midlife crisis. Was Michel? A man in a midlife crisis is asking only to live, to live a little more, a little longer. Michel, on the other hand, had had enough; he could see no reason to go on.
That evening he stumbled on a photo taken at his primary school in Charny and he cried. The child in the photograph sat at his desk holding a textbook open in front of him. The boy smiled straight at the camera, happily, confidently; it seemed unthinkable to Michel that he was that boy…
For several days Michel kept the photograph beside him on his bedside table. The mysteries of time were banal, he told himself, this was the way of the world: youthful optimism fades, and happiness and confidence evaporate. He lay on his Bultex mattress, struggling to come to terms with the transience of life.
The Elementary Particles
Michel Houellebecq -
Plain fare gives as much pleasure as a costly diet, when once the pain of want has been removed, while bread and water confer the highest possible pleasure when they are brought to hungry lips.
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I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) has not been lost: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in ‘the High Countries’. In that sense it will be true for those who have completed the journey (and for no others) to say that good is everything and Heaven everywhere. But we, at this end of the road, must not try to anticipate that retrospective vision. If we do, we are likely to embrace the false and disastrous converse and fancy that everything is good and everywhere is Heaven.
But what, you ask, of earth? Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.The Great Divorce, Preface
C.S. Lewis
