The thing that constantly changes is the same.
The thing that constantly changes is the same.
― Atrona Grizel
The trend of
constantly comparing oneself with others today is rooted in the excessive
spread of technology and the social changes it caused. In older times, there
were no screens, and thus a person was not constantly exposed to the
experiences and emotions of others. That is exactly why they had a
“personality,” because there was no continuous liquidity to dissolve it. There
was no globalism, which gave them a firm sense of identity, not something to be
changed every day. This prevented self-hatred from reaching dangerous levels.
It seems to me that no one in the Stone Age would cry day and night because
their nose was ugly. But what happens today is exactly this. Because everything
is easily accessible through excessive expressiveness. Everyone knows
everyone’s life. Everyone shares everything on social media. I have even seen
people who go to restaurants simply to add another post to their profile, to
take a picture with the food, and then leave, “happy” when the likes arrive.
What does this show? An excessively externalized and therefore fragile identity
that collapses the moment the outside rejects it. This is not even compatible
with neurology, and this explains why a brain overwhelmed by such stimuli
becomes inattentive, desensitized, and thoughtless. Depriving oneself of
technology is not “disconnecting from the world” but repairing an
over-socialized brain that has become diseased.
―
Atrona Grizel
The collapse of
the USSR was the collapse of my dreams. The post-1991 era feels like a
neoliberal hell to me, and I spend every day struggling to survive within it. I
no longer have the luxury of dreaming. If that state were still standing, the
US would not be able to casually tear the Middle East apart, nor bind all world
economies to itself and monopolize their cultures. I feel the need for a strong
bloc that stands against the West. I want ideologies and regimes that imagine a
different world. I don’t even care what kind of world they imagine, as long as
it is something different.
―
Atrona Grizel
I’m not a big
thing. No matter how many big things I write, I’m not. Even if I seem that way,
it’s only for this reason: no one ever taught me how to live, so I never
learned. Someone who knows how to live wouldn’t write these things, and
certainly wouldn’t write them like this.
―
Atrona Grizel
Those who feel
discomfort at immorality are immoral themselves.
―
Atrona Grizel
To increase
pleasure, one must decrease pleasure. For those who live plain, simple,
minimalist lives, even the smallest journey is enchanting, but for a traveler
who has roamed the world, such journeys are not centers but “details,” and that
person can never reach that kind of fascination.
―
Atrona Grizel
A madman is more
sincere than a normal person. But I prefer to trust neither of them.
―
Atrona Grizel
Even pain has its
noble and ignoble forms, which is why it is not actually universal. Suffering
does not mean knowing how to suffer, and therefore accepting every sufferer as
“suffering” is wrong and an insult to pain. Only aristocratic souls feel deep
pain; plants do not feel pain at all.
―
Atrona Grizel
When I go on a
night walk and arrive at the roof of an abandoned building in a secluded,
wooded area where the distant city lights are visible, and when I watch the
view from there and experience all this with my cosmic inner world adorned with
aesthetics, symbols, and images, I feel like I’m about to lose my mind from
pleasure. A violent spiritual orgasm. Because my external life is very
monotonous. So monotonous that my brain receives a pleasure source that ends in
a minute for others as if it were a week’s worth of provisions.
―
Atrona Grizel
Adults have surrounded
me with every move, saying, “You don’t know; we know.” According to them, they
knew so much that if I told them about this judgmental attitude, I would still
be the guilty one. They would say, “You perceived it that way because you are
actually crazy, even though it isn’t so.” Then, are these feelings coming out
of thin air? I don’t think so, but they all treated me like this. What happened
then? Counterattack: just as they behaved toward me, I now behave toward
others: “I see what you cannot.”
―
Atrona Grizel
I suffered to
claim my thoughts, not to abandon them. I died for an idea, for my own idea,
and I will not abandon it.
―
Atrona Grizel
Like animals,
humans, too, never actually know they will die. Knowledge of death is always
abstract and theoretical for an individual, even when directly witnessing the
deaths of others. Even those who live with terror of death have not inwardly
accepted that they will die; at least they do not live in accordance with it.
Because the truth of death should erase fear of death, not ignite it.
―
Atrona Grizel
Sometimes I feel
shame simply because I exist. Not because I hate myself, but because I was
forced to live. I live not because I chose life, but because I did not choose
to die, and this means that if I live, it is only… by default. Not by my
choice. Sometimes I think I have violated the law of nothingness simply by
having existed once; I feel I have stained the beauty of the cosmic void by
falling into time. Perhaps I was part of that grace if I had no identity I had
forgotten before my birth as “me,” but once I was thrown into existence, I was
expelled from that art. I now watch it in an art gallery. I will only look from
the outside and say, “I wish I were there,” because I know I can never be
there, because by being born I was condemned to watch.
―
Atrona Grizel
A human is
himself or herself only in one state, because here all authority belongs to the
subconscious: sleep. Wakefulness is a hallucination the brain has believed in,
because one is awake only when asleep, in the deepest roots of the person’s
soul.
―
Atrona Grizel
A monarchy ruled
by a lineage with “strict intelligence, depth, and artistic measure” is better
than a republic governed by fools elected by the people. The only issue is that
such a marvellous dynasty does not exist. But this does not change the fact
that monarchy can be better than republic in theory.
―
Atrona Grizel
The greatest
revolution will occur in complete silence and will bring complete silence in
its wake. Masses of people marching loudly with banners and flags, annihilating
the individual just to appear as a single power, do not want the system itself
to change but the features of the system, meaning the system stays more or less
the same. For example, they protest because of unemployment, and with this they
expose their loyalty to the existing status quo, whereas is not the whole issue
the construction of an alternative world where work is not even necessary?
These protesters actually obtain nothing. Because nothing can be gained through
noise; the only things gained are ornaments. What they are angry about are
usually economic and political reasons, for no one will gather in masses to
protest something abstract like the erosion of the individual. Yet politics
cannot govern the inner world. A “ruler” is a ruler only if it has metaphysical
authority, because the human soul is abstract, and only the metaphysical can
reach it, not the concrete. If these protesters want to break this pattern
repeated for generations, what they must do is in fact very simple: silence.
But not sitting quietly, an active renunciation. If all people at once
abandoned their work, reinterpreted their “responsibilities” as mere
compulsions, left their workplaces and went into the streets not to act but
simply to sit and drift into thought, and afterward refused to do anything
anymore, the world would change in a single day because the actions that
supposedly oppose it but actually feed it would no longer exist.
―
Atrona Grizel
People around me
talk about the “Day of Judgment,” where everyone will be interrogated and their
lives displayed to all, and they find this dizzying. In my mind, however, a
comic image appears: God using a projector to show videos on the board while
teaching a class of students, and I mock the professor by saying, “I’m not
attending this lecture.”
― Atrona Grizel