Carlo Michelstaedter Quotes

One place is as good as another, in the valley without exit...

Life is all one long hard thing. He must have the courage to feel alone, to look his own pain in the face, bearing the entire weight of it.

Man 'knows', which is why he is always two : his life and his knowing.

Life is will-to-live, will is a lack, lack is pain, all life is pain.

You do not carry the cross. Instead you are all crucified on the timber of your sufficiency, which is given to you, the more you insist, the more you bleed: it suits you to say you carry the cross like a sacred duty, whereas you are heavy with the weight of your necessities. Have the courage not to admit those necessities and lift yourselves up for your own sakes.

If I am hungry,reality is nothing more to me than an ensemble of more or less edible things. If I am thirsty, reality is more or less liquid, and more or less potable. If I am sleepy, it is a great bed more or less hard.If I am not hungry, not thirsty, not sleepy, and do not need any other determinate thing, the world is a large ensemble of grays that are I don’t know what but that certainly are not made to cheer me up.

Together they repeat, ''we are, we are, because we know, because we can tell each other the words of knowledge, of free and absolute consciousness.'' Thus do they stupefy one another. Having nothing and able to give nothing, they let themselves sink into words that feign communication, because none of them can make his world be the world of the others; they feign words containing the absolute world, and with words they nourish their boredom, making themselves a poultice for the pain; with words they show what they do not know and what they need in order to soothe the pain or make themselves numb to it. Each word contains mystery, and they entrust themselves to words, weaving with them thereby a new, tacitly agreed-upon veil over the obscurity: 'ornaments of the darkness'.

Ahora bien, ¿qué es, oh Sócrates, la vida?, preguntaría yo.

I know I want and do not have what I want. A weight hangs suspended from a hook; being suspended, it suffers because it cannot fall: it cannot get off the hook, for insofar as it is weight it suspends, and as long as it suspends it depends. [...] Its life is this want of life. If it no longer wanted but were finished, perfect, if it possessed its own self, it would have ended its existence. At that point, as its own impediment to possessing life, the weight would not depend on what is external as much as on its own self, in that it is not given the means to be satisfied. The weight can never be persuaded. Nor is any life ever satisfied to live in any present, for insofar as it is life it continues, and it continues into the future to the degree that it lacks life. If it were to possess itself completely here and now and be in want of nothing—if it awaited nothing in the future—it would not continue: it would cease to be life. So many things attract us in the future, but in vain do we want to possess them in the present.

«Se spera che i sassi deventa paneti perché i povareti li possa magnar. Se spera che l’acqua deventa sciampagna perché no i se lagna de sto giubilar Se spera sperando che vegnarà l’ora de andar in malora per più no sperar».

Likewise, however little man, in living, demands as just to himself, his duty toward justice remains infinite. The right to live cannot be paid by finite labour, only by infinite activity. Because you participate in the violence of all things, all of this violence is part of your debt to justice. All of your activity must go toward eradicating this: to give everything and demand nothing; this is the duty—where duties and rights may be, I do not know.

The flower sees the propagation of its pollen in the bee, while the bee sees sweet food for its larvae in the flower. In the embrace of the two organisms each sees “itself as if in a mirror” (Phaedro 255d) in the disposition of the other. Neither knows whether its affirmation coincides with the other’s or whether conversely its affirmation deprives the other of the future— killing it; each knows only that this is good for it and uses the other as a means to its own end,material for its own life,while it is itself the material for the other’s life.

Are you persuaded of what you do or not? Do you need something to happen or not in order to do what you do? Do you need the correlations to coincide always, because the end is never in what you do, even if what you do is vast and distant but is always in your continuation? Do you say you are persuaded of what you do, no matter what? Yes? Then I tell you: tomorrow you will certainly be dead. It doesn't matter? Are you thinking about fame? About your family? But your memory dies with you,with you your family is dead. Are you thinking about your ideals? You want to make a will? You want a headstone? But tomorrow those too are dead, dead. All men die with you. Your death is an unwavering comet. Do you turn to god? There is no god, god dies with you. The kingdom of heaven crumbles with you, tomorrow you are dead, dead. Tomorrow everything is finished—your body, family, friends, country, what you’re doing now, what you might do in the future, the good, the bad, the true, the false, your ideas, your little part, god and his kingdom, paradise, hell, everything, everything, everything. Tomorrow everything is over—in twenty four hours is death. Well, then the god of today is no longer yesterday’s, no longer the country, the good, the bad, friends, or family. You want to eat? No, you cannot. The taste of food is no longer the same; honey is bitter, milk is sour, meat nauseating, and the odor, the odor sickens you: it reeks of the dead. You want a woman to comfort you in your last moments? No, worse: it is dead flesh. You want to enjoy the sun, air, light, sky? Enjoy?! The sun is a rotten orange, the light extinguished, the air suffocating. The sky is a low, oppressive arc. . . .No, everything is closed and dark now. But the sun shines, the air is pure, everything is like before, and yet you speak like a man buried alive, describing his tomb. And persuasion? You are not even persuaded of the sunlight; you cannot move a finger, cannot remain standing. The god who kept you standing,made your day clear and your food sweet, gave you family, country, paradise—he betrays you now and abandons you because the thread of your philopsychia is broken. The meaning of things, the taste of the world, is only for continuation’s sake. Being born is nothing but wanting to go on on: men live in order to live, in order not to die. Their persuasion is the fear of death. Being born is nothing but fearing death, so that, if death becomes certain in a certain future, they are already dead in the present. All that they do and say with fixed persuasion, a clear purpose, and evident reason is nothing but fear of death– ‘indeed, believing one is wise without being wise is nothing but fearing death.

Just as a child cries out in the dark to make a sign of its own persona, which, in its infinite fear, it senses is insufficient, so men, who in the solitude of their empty spirit feel insufficient, inadequately affirm themselves, feigning the sign of the persona they do not have, “knowledge,” as if it were already in their hands. They no longer hear the voice of things telling them, “You are,” and amidst the obscurity they do not have the courage to endure, but each seeks his companion’s hand and says, “I am, you are, we are,” so that the other might act the mirror and tell him,“you are, I am, we are”; and together they repeat, “we are, we are, because we know, because we can tell each other the words of knowledge, of free and absolute consciousness.” Thus do they stupefy one another.

This, which men often call docility, goodness, or even superiority or knowledge of the world,is none other than the superficiality of those without reason in what they do, who merely find themselves doing it, not knowing why they wanted the things they wanted,having neither the potency of those things in themselves nor the sufficiency to withstand their loss. Instead they find themselves extracting their little lives from those things.Only fear for their own continuation makes them exchange those things now, in the same way that they grasped them before,when they obeyed that fear through insufficiency.

Together they repeat, ''we are, we are, because we know, because we can tell each other the words of knowledge, of free and absolute consciousness.'' Thus do they stupefy one another. Having nothing and able to give nothing, they let themselves sink into words that feign communication, because none of them can make his world be the world of the others; they feign words containing the absolute world, and with words they nourish their boredom, making themselves a poultice for the pain; with words they show what they do not know and what they need in order to soothe the pain or make themselves numb to it. Each word contains mystery, and they entrust themselves to words, weaving with them thereby a new, tacitly agreed-upon veil over the obscurity: 'ornaments of the darkness'.

Persuasion lives not in him who does not live from his own self, who is son and father, slave and master of what lies around him, of what came before, of what must come after—a thing among things. Persuaded is he who has his life within himself, a soul naked amongst the islands of the blessed (Gorgias). But men look for ‘life,’ and lose ‘life’ (St. Matthew).

Io lo so che parlo perché parlo,” (I know I am talking because I’m talking.)

Because their personal comfort is their reality, the calamity that interrupts it is a transcendent force: the devil.

In conclusion, the good can be made better; the bad remains bad.

«¡vivid y disfrutad, que el tiempo apremia y se acerca la hora en que todo os será arrebatado!».