For most, what applies is not “having children,” but reproducing.
For most, what applies is not “having children,” but reproducing.
―
Atrona Grizel
I used to wonder
how people could live amid this constant street noise without going insane. But
then I realized: they don’t even hear the street. Either they’re buried in
television, or they never take off their headphones and therefore forget the
street exists at all. Fine, but how do they endure this dullness of everyday
life? In video games, for instance, there are millions of worlds. How can a
person bear knowing they will never physically live in those worlds?
Imagination exists only to be consumed—it has no place in this world. How do
they live knowing that? By burying themselves in technological devices, of
course. In the past, this took the form of literature; today, screens have
taken its place. If those screens were taken away, people probably wouldn’t
return to literature either and would lose their minds instead. But perhaps I’m
still being too optimistic, assuming people possess broad-feeling, creative
intelligences—because they don’t even have a consciousness that goes beyond
ordinary reality enough to become bored with it.
―
Atrona Grizel
I like saying “if
only.” In fact, a person should say it often—contrary to what conventional
wisdom assumes. But not the kind of “if only” that demands action; rather, the
kind that simply remembers. That is: it would have been beautiful if only it
had been, but even its not having been is beautiful.
―
Atrona Grizel
Nietzsche
affirmed life, but I almost affirm affirming life itself, to the extent of
abandoning life altogether. What I mean is not living life by affirming it, but
affirming the affirmation of life, quarantining it as if it were a sacred
object so that it is never actually lived. I am Nietzsche without Dionysus.
―
Atrona Grizel
Thinkers who can
be co-opted by institutions like academies are not truly thinkers because they
have been commodified. To earn the title of professor, one must be a submissive
figure, because anyone who thinks too differently will be expelled from any
place they enter, if they’re even allowed in at all. Those who adapt and become
“public philosophers” do not carry strong ideas, and this is precisely why they
are idolized—because people are unwilling to consider the possibility that they
might be wrong. The most genuine opinions are the most dangerous, and that is
exactly why society can never understand them in its own unreality. The
reactions people will give are “boycotts,” while the response from authorities
will be censorship. This situation tends to make these cynical thinkers even
more cynical, often reducing them to the level of Diogenes.
―
Atrona Grizel
Nietzsche saved
me from my life; Cioran saved me from Nietzsche—and from being saved.
―
Atrona Grizel
I have neither
now nor have I ever had an existence comfortable enough to still be capable of
falling in love. I am neither naive nor unscarred enough to be passionately
attached to anyone. If someone wished to hug me—let us say they did—rather than
feeling anything pleasant, I would ask, with full seriousness, “Why? When you
were absent, I learned to live without you, and now you stand before me, asking
me to destroy that with a hug?” I can feel affection for things—and I
do—because to me, they are the ones that are metaphysically alive. To feel deep
love for beings who are physically alive—that is, for people—feels like
insulting myself by lowering myself to their level. I love not “who,” but
“what,” by which I mean an intellectual love. I do not find emotional love
frightening, only ironic—like a child’s game. Simply… “funny.” After all, a
god—perfect and complete—does not, and cannot, fall in love, for love requires
vulnerability and deficiency.
―
Atrona Grizel
Young people are
mired in the swamp of pleasure and amusement, while the elderly are stuck in
the bog of religion and tradition. Why must the rule always be like this?
―
Atrona Grizel
There is no such
thing as a “conscious consumer,” because one who is conscious does not consume.
―
Atrona Grizel
To be
“anti-ideology” is itself, inevitably, an ideology. For to be “anti” or “pro”
toward anything is to preserve its existence, as though inheriting it.
―
Atrona Grizel
I see CEOs and
politicians as dirtier than murderers and rapists.
―
Atrona Grizel
When I see
children in the grey, concrete cities of the Middle East—cities that have
turned into heaps of rubble due to war and conflict—their heads adorned with
fluffy headphones, their bodies draped in clothes patterned with popular
cartoon characters, their feet encased in glittering shoes, and their hands
clutching phones—phones handed to them under the pretense of “leaving their
families alone”—instead of feeling any warmth, instead of some innocent flicker
of human connection stirring within me, what awakens, what refuses to be quiet,
is the image of the force responsible for all of this: the West.
―
Atrona Grizel
Trying to
describe something that does not exist—this is how I feel about anything I
write concerning existence. Reality is not even “bad” or “flawed,” for it does
not exist at all. I am not living: I am “imagining” that I live. Since I treat
as real something that is not, I am merely one illusion among countless others
within a broad illusion.
―
Atrona Grizel
A shallow good is
worse than a deep evil; I would rather be tyrannical and monstrous than ugly
and mediocre.
―
Atrona Grizel
To carry a mind
whose imagination is as realistic as reality itself could solve everything. But
evolution stands against this: why would such an omnipotent mind, biologically,
seek reproduction? Genes, in this context, have deliberately designed humans to
be cognitively weak so that they remain dependent on external stimuli—hungry
for approval, love, comfort, and stimulation—so that the organism stays
motivated to connect, bond, and reproduce. They are intelligent enough to
invent fire, write symphonies, and build rockets, yet dumb enough to chase
approval, to hunger for love, and to fear being alone. And that is not even a
“flaw”; it is the very mechanism keeping the species going. Thus, even if the
body dies, the genes are passed on from generation to generation.
―
Atrona Grizel
Whenever I feel
overwhelmed, I feel as if I have been “interacting too much” with the Earth,
precisely because I have been “pulled into” it from somewhere else. In order to
return to myself, I need to leave the planet and forget it for a while again.
―
Atrona Grizel
If the elixir of
immortality were found, there would be neither culture nor morality nor
ideology nor religion left.
―
Atrona Grizel
Even though I
have never stepped outside the walls for years, I feel as if I have traveled
the whole world.
―
Atrona Grizel
I could never
reconcile with referring to my friends as “social support.”
―
Atrona Grizel
A person is a
third person who must themselves be witnessed.
―
Atrona Grizel
Preventing
children from accessing “horrifying” content is deception rather than
protection, just like the comfort given by an illusion.
―
Atrona Grizel
I feel like I
have been waiting for something so long that I have forgotten what it is.
―
Atrona Grizel
It is evident
from their state that people have never witnessed—and cannot even
imagine—someone different who is able to live without the things they chase
after, simply because of the sameness of the lives surrounding them. Within me
I carry an “illegal” life no one knows is possible, hidden from all outside.
―
Atrona Grizel
To live is to
make noise.
―
Atrona Grizel
I don’t see most
people as having heads; I see them as creatures with a mouth in place of a
head. Cutting off their elongated tongues would kill them, since their entire
lives depend on those tongues.
―
Atrona Grizel
I can definitely
connect with people, but to do that I must tolerate them. And if I must
tolerate them, then I will definitely not connect with them.
―
Atrona Grizel
“Do you also see
what I see?” I asked. My voice echoed in the room filled with emptiness.
―
Atrona Grizel
The refusal to
state is a statement.
―
Atrona Grizel
There are two
kinds of suicide: one aims to escape from oneself, while the other aims to
escape from things that are not oneself.
―
Atrona Grizel
If life were
different, the person would be different too. What makes a person who they are
is that one single thing they have lived through among billions of
possibilities.
―
Atrona Grizel
There is no such
thing as “silence.”
―
Atrona Grizel
Tear down the
rules, burn the institutions, renounce society, build theories, form
philosophies, create universes—then a single bullet strikes your head, and
everything ends… does it? Who can say this is not a kind of ending but the true
beginning?
―
Atrona Grizel
Does the surface
not give sunlight? Then grow inward, into the depths of the soil.
― Atrona Grizel