High intelligence is never mirrored by others in average environments. In the end, it begins to mirror itself.
High intelligence is never mirrored by others in average environments. In the end, it begins to mirror itself.
― Atrona
Grizel
People do not
suffer from my absence. That suggests they have no need for thought.
―
Atrona Grizel
A person must
choose: one worships either the nation or the self. They call me a “traitor to
the homeland.” And I say to those who call themselves “lovers of the homeland,”
“You are traitors to yourselves.”
―
Atrona Grizel
Many people
survive by self-deception: pretending they belong, pretending they agree,
pretending they are satisfied, pretending the system works, and so on. I can
never do that convincingly. Every attempt at self-lie produces nausea for me.
So instead of reshaping perception to fit the external world, I reshaped an
entire ontology to preserve internal coherence. Yes, this burned bridges
permanently. But I was already consciously willing to trade the cost.
―
Atrona Grizel
Even if they put a million people with the same opinion in front of me, and I were the only person who did not agree with that opinion, I would still have enough conviction to say, “You are all idiots.” And when I see that they interpret this not as an insult directed at themselves, but as evidence of my own “inferiority,” and therefore mock me and amuse themselves at my expense, I become increasingly indifferent to intellectual plurality.
―
Atrona Grizel
A culturally adapted human’s way of describing despair differs from that of a post-human being outside culture who has made estrangement their identity. One sees despair as a condition and an unpleasant state; the other sees it as a structure and even a kind of gift. This appears in literature as well: do writers who remain fully human not always render such powerful emotions in an unpleasant manner? Those who live within society yet feel dissonance with it are the ones who complain of alienation, but for those who are truly alienated, there is nothing to complain about; it is simply the only reality. Even Kafka, though he constantly wrestled with this feeling, does not seem to me to have been completely alienated. If he had been, no one would know of him now anyway. There is a subtle humanism in his tone even when he describes alien things, and this is quite common among writers who grapple with despair almost as if it were a universal fashion. This means they have not always felt a lack of belonging; rather, they feel cast out from a place to which they once belonged, namely humanity. These people depict those outside society as rarely happy. Instead, they portray them as sad and angry because of their incompatibility. This portrayal is the most widespread stereotype attached to outsiders, and even if it can be true, it does not encompass the whole reality. It usually leads to a misunderstanding of estrangement, which in turn only deepens the alienation of those already alienated. That also means Kafka would have been crushed under the magnitude of my “alien alienation."
― Atrona Grizel
If “social maladjustment” were seen not as an art but as a pathology—if it were labeled “autism,” “anxiety,” or “neurodivergence”—half of the Russian writers of the nineteenth century would be sent to asylums, Nietzsche would be locked in a cell for “megalomania,” Cioran would be drowned in sleeping pills for “depression,” Kafka would be forcibly socialized in institutions for “anxiety,” and Pessoa would be confined within schizophrenia communities to “align his inner world with the outer one to achieve deeper happiness.” But literature exists. And through it, even the emotions psychiatry condemns as the most repulsive are revealed to be treasures. To try to rid oneself of them is to empty oneself, to wander soullessly. Modern societies largely exist in this state already, precisely because of extreme conformism: people move around like laugh machines, and everyone knows these smiles are not sincere—yet they have become so accustomed to performing that they accept it as natural. To feel alienated from such a civilization is a sign of a healthy mind. Yet psychiatry, functioning as a propaganda apparatus of society, frames this alienation not as breadth of vision but as an “inability to find one’s place in society,” and seeks to eradicate that spiritual independence under the cloaked banners of “progress,” “development,” “growth,” “healing,” and “integration.” This is nothing less than an assault on the identity of literary outsiders in existential exile. What was a deeply personal feeling that was the source of stories and novels becomes a mere “symptom” once medicalized. Psychiatry cannot comprehend literature.
― Atrona Grizel
A person who lacks intelligence does not perceive the existence of intelligence.
―
Atrona Grizel
Falling in love
is easy. What requires effort is loving.
―
Atrona Grizel
A humanity that
makes people who are like treasure feel like garbage should not be shown mercy.
―
Atrona Grizel
In this society,
people “learn” history not by reading or researching it, but by moving to the
couch and watching the shows they watch, and with the few bits of information
they gather, they boast everywhere; because no one knows history, even a person
who knows the name of the country’s founder inevitably stands out to a
significant portion of people.
―
Atrona Grizel
Modern life is
empty because it is not solid.
―
Atrona Grizel
If I were the
dictator of a community, the first thing I would do is “filter out” the
“unnecessary” population.
―
Atrona Grizel
Society’s
prejudice against teenagers pushes them even further into chaos and anger,
because aren’t they always treated as “know-it-all brats”? When teenagers say,
“Nobody understands me,” no matter how annoying it may sound, it is usually
true. If I had said I didn’t love my family because they treated me like an
object, people’s reaction would have been that I shouldn’t complain because
they feed me, that I should be happy they don’t make a fuss even though I’m a
burden, and that if I don’t want to see them, they’d get angry with me and take
my family’s side without knowing the actual reality. How do I know this?
Because I lived it.
―
Atrona Grizel
The general
mentality that softens hypocrisy by presenting it as “compartmentalizing life”
and normalizes it by turning hypocrisy into “adulthood” makes everyone play a
certain role in public, laughing on stage while crying in their rooms.
―
Atrona Grizel
People avoid
being in the same places as those they dislike. But if the “people I dislike”
are not certain individuals but all of humanity, where am I supposed to go? Not
to therapy, but to mountain monasteries.
―
Atrona Grizel
If I let myself
be deceived by the concept of “civilization,” I imagine a scene where toilets
disappear and people empty their rectums in the open, naked, in public. Humans
really are animals, yet the system they’ve built treats them as something so
separate that they have become alienated from their own primitiveness, which is
their essence.
―
Atrona Grizel
If you have
fallen into an environment that is wrong for you, you must be right toward
yourself.
―
Atrona Grizel
Falling among
certain people in a place and from that moment being condemned to always remain
with them—for example, entering a new class at school and having to stay there
all year, always seeing the same faces and hearing the same voices—is
psychological torture for those who, because of their depth of understanding,
never fit into any place they enter.
―
Atrona Grizel
How does one deal
with an “overly social” environment designed to crush solitude? Through
strategic dissociation. If a hermit is in such inhumane conditions,
disconnecting from the reality of those conditions is always permissible.
―
Atrona Grizel
The thoughts of
the young are inexperienced, but precisely for this reason they are sharp; the
thoughts of the old are mature, and precisely for this reason they are dull.
Radicalism fits one; tolerance fits the other. Youth and patience are usually
irreconcilable, and it is no surprise that extreme ideologies have their
largest fanbase among the young.
―
Atrona Grizel
I was introduced
to others by my family with an insult disguised as a nickname that society
typically slaps onto people considered “smarty-pants,” namely “bookworm.” They
would smile while saying it, as if they had any idea what I was reading. They
didn’t even know whether I was reading, since we never talked; they were simply
making things up based on appearances, knowing nothing of my inner world.
Although I was completely foreign to them, they arrogantly tried to claim and
present me as theirs. Because of this, I even wanted to stop reading books; my
stubbornness and pride found their attitude unacceptable. I didn’t care what
they said about me, but if they said I was reading, then I automatically had to
do the opposite, because if I fit their description, it meant I was being
compliant, and that meant losing myself. Yet I had no choice but to read books,
because in the limited space I was in, there wasn’t much else to do. I started
reading not out of curiosity but out of necessity, because the outside world
offered me nothing that satisfied me, so I needed another world. That’s how I
met books, and over time, I became addicted to them. At school I would read all
day long, for hours without getting up, and take notes. Others were told to
read books; I was told not to. Yet none of them developed any deep curiosity
about my difference, because none of them read anyway. In this society, finding
a young person who reads books other than manga and romance—someone who, for
example, finishes The World as Will and Representation, A Short History of
Decay, or Thus Spoke Zarathustra with genuine understanding—is quite rare,
because it indicates a development outside the norm. But such books were
exactly the kind I constantly read. I was left entirely alone with vast ideas,
and so I had to construct myself out of silence. Every book I read became
another brick that distanced me from people rather than bringing me closer,
because I could tolerate their accustomed mediocrity less and less. I was
especially outraged when they tried to label me with things like “book lover”
and encouraged me to join book clubs to “discuss books,” as if I had any
interest in arguing my thoughts or interacting with such a stupid youth. I read
precisely to belittle and diminish these people in my mind, to make the burden
of them more bearable. For every book meant another world, and other worlds
meant that this world was not the only one and therefore not a place to be
taken too seriously.
―
Atrona Grizel
The tyranny of a
minority is always preferable to the tyranny of a majority, because one can be
ended with a revolution, while the other is a mass anesthesia that makes change
impossible.
― Atrona Grizel