When someone tells me what to read, I learn what not to read.
When someone tells me what to read, I learn what not to read.
― Atrona Grizel
Even if outdoor spaces are noisy, only indoor spaces transform this noise into an echo chamber, because being trapped in an enclosed cage with flat walls on all sides and filled with people causes noise to saturate the room’s air like the omnipresent atmosphere in its natural state—since, there, humans are the sole stimuli. Human words and shouts seem to hang in the air, and the longer the day, the more such “suspended noises” accumulate. Outdoors, by contrast, even if people remained the same, if instead of walls there were an open world and perhaps endless trees, the focus would not be solely on humans; other sources of stimulation would exist, and thus noise could not seize the air as it does in a closed space.
― Atrona Grizel
Even the most mischievous, foul-mouthed, and quarrelsome children cannot be morally evil, because a child is necessarily the opposite of whatever is “evil,” in every circumstance—even when doing so-called “bad” things.
―
Atrona Grizel
Death is the
taking of a person from life, almost like the conclusion of a test.
―
Atrona Grizel
What would happen
if North Korea did not possess nuclear weapons? Something like a random African
state in anarchy and famine, where Western powers enter as they wish and
overthrow any government they desire… meaning it wouldn’t even exist. The world
condemns it. Yet it is still there. And if one day it collapses, I would truly
be saddened by that. Not because I work on its behalf, but because a monumental
symbol would disappear. I imagine what would happen if the regime fell: all
those military and ideological monuments would be torn down, the magnificent
autocratic aesthetic would be trampled underfoot, the Juche Tower would be
demolished, American fast-food outlets would open in Pyongyang, and everywhere
would begin to fill with phone-addicted crowds rushing to parties and concerts.
And this, too, would be packaged and marketed as something good, under the name
“the globalist order.” It is like an insult to the sacred, and I cannot turn a
blind eye to it. Let North Korea simply… exist. Let it be there, just as it is,
in that corner of the world. But it must exist.
―
Atrona Grizel
When the only
source of entertainment is entertainment itself, it is not entertainment; it is
a sedative.
―
Atrona Grizel
Lies can be
hidden, even for an entire lifetime, and may never be spoken. But they cannot
be destroyed.
―
Atrona Grizel
A person, when
committing honorable suicide, should do so not for other ideas but solely for
their own idea; that is, not for a cause, but for themselves. This is because
causes are things one belongs to, not things one owns.
―
Atrona Grizel
Pain losing its
beauty is more serious than pain increasing. The goal should not be to minimize
pain itself but to minimize its ugliness.
―
Atrona Grizel
My downfall will
not be due to an emotional breakdown but due to a “system failure.”
―
Atrona Grizel
My identity is
built on continuously opposing society, and by doing this I practically strip
society and dress myself in an identity taken from it. This is useful because
it resembles plundering my enemy. The real concern, however, would not be that
I might want to return to society, but that I might stop seeing it as valuable
enough even to reject. If I stop secretly loving my enemy, I will become my own
enemy.
―
Atrona Grizel
Anger, contempt,
and even arrogance are still engagement signals. Be deeply concerned only if
you are dealing with a soulless soul.
―
Atrona Grizel
In the comments
under a video where young people dance with rap music playing in the background
and contort their faces, you will of course see nothing like “an examination of
the metaphysical decay of humankind,” because superficiality is the norm. At
most, there are emojis, and in the comments people shout and yell just like
those in the video, and this is called entertainment. And since they themselves
are prisoners of this social world’s cage, if you tell them critical things
like this, they will turn even that into a meme and amuse themselves by mocking
it within their own circle, without giving much thought to its deeper layer.
Why? Because they already feel safe in this world, and they will always feel
safe anyway. If you are superficial, meaning not “too much” in the language of
social media, you will be accepted everywhere, and they know this very well.
―
Atrona Grizel
I do not feel
lonely when I am alone, but I feel lonely when I am among people. This is
important, because I almost never experience loneliness when I am physically
isolated; I experience it only when I am surrounded by others. Because solitude
does not lie about connection.
―
Atrona Grizel
I can even
imagine Stalin as my father, and that is something I do not find with any other
dictator. He is the only one who feels familiar to me in this way. I can almost
guess what he thought and felt when he gave purge orders, handed over execution
lists, and then returned to his private room. Why? Because in him there is
introversion, paranoia, and a need to calculate and control everything. He
lived a double life: his inner world was always closed off, and in politics he
was forced to be someone else. He grew up in poverty, his wife committed
suicide, and he even wrote poetry, which was overshadowed by the cult of
personality. What I see here is someone who feels but had to harden himself,
who nevertheless did not destroy emotion, only “suspended” it. And this is not
something unfamiliar to me at all.
―
Atrona Grizel
I am rarely
answered; I am “responded” to. A response is a reflex; an answer requires
presence. Automatism is widespread, and so everyone responds. Signal is scarce,
and so no one says anything real. Because there is no one.
―
Atrona Grizel
My kind of
loneliness would survive a full contact list, a partner in the next room, or a
family at the table. It is worse to feel alone despite being in a relationship,
and so I prefer being entirely solitary instead.
―
Atrona Grizel
To be able to
hate someone, you must first acknowledge that person’s existence. You cannot
hate what does not even exist for you.
―
Atrona Grizel
Humans do not
know how disgracefully they reduce themselves inside my mind, because they
belong to the world of society that calls this “entertainment,” not to my
universe, the one that created all of this.
―
Atrona Grizel
I want to
withdraw completely; I want not prophets but hermits. And in this total
withdrawal, by excavating the treasure of my inner world and placing it on my
head as a crown, I want to bring the world entirely under my dominion in the
most abstract sense.
―
Atrona Grizel
Mirrors make me
uncomfortable, not because I think I am “ugly,” but because appearance
influences how others behave, and that dependence feels degrading. If I do not
see how I am perceived from the outside, then I am forced to act according to
my inner world rather than the external one. That means I will not live for
others’ looks but for how I see myself. I have not even looked at my own face
in the mirror for years, and I do not feel the absence of it at all, because a
face is something that exists for the outside, not for what is within. Mirrors
should never have been invented.
―
Atrona Grizel
I can live in the
deepest sense only if this happens: they put me into a kind of capsule and send
me into sleep until I die, but they also attach tubes to my body so that I do
not starve or soil myself. But I never wake up. They only sustain my body, and
my mind remains in permanent sleep. Over time this causes such neurological
changes that the person becomes the sole architect of reality; in their dreams
they can fly, turn everyone into whatever they wish, crash planets into one
another, or step outside the universe. That is to say… they live. The world as
it is is unbearable because there is a constant human presence, which only
monotonizes reality. I grow bored of strangers without even knowing them,
because they all feel so familiar. And they are everywhere. They will always be
everywhere. An aristocratic soul cannot live in such a world. Life must be
relocated from civilization to imagination.
―
Atrona Grizel
Whenever I shared
things with depth on mainstream social media platforms, the responses I
received were always the kind of slang labels typically assigned to “deep”
content to mock them due to their “oddness.” I did it because I could not
tolerate that superficiality, but it seems to me that they are aware of this as
well, yet they do not even perceive it as superficiality. On the contrary, they
actively defend it. That is precisely why these platforms are superficial in
the first place. They deliberately exclude depth, and what remains is always
the same kind of shallow content. People openly want to remain shallow, and
they encourage this by stripping it of the name “shallowness” and replacing it
with “speed and efficiency.” I realized that I had profoundly misunderstood the
world when I reached the point where I could no longer ignore this pattern.
What was wrong was my assumption that superficiality was something undesirable.
But no. People go on the defensive almost reflexively the moment you send any
long or complex piece of writing, either to avoid disrupting a “casual and
friendly” atmosphere or because their own shallowness is exposed. It is such a
situation that if I share an essay about my private life, I expect to be
mocked; if I share a philosophical aphorism, I expect to be harassed; and if I
still have not “learned my lesson” and openly criticize other people, I expect
to be accused of being a “know-it-all” and thrown off platforms. This has
already been confirmed by my experiences, such as my writings being removed on
grounds like “supporting terrorism.”
―
Atrona Grizel
Most adults are
not wise but simply older.
―
Atrona Grizel
People do not
fail to see; they refuse to see.
―
Atrona Grizel
A person never
fully owns themselves. Existence itself means dependence, because the reason
for the evolution of consciousness is nature itself. And therefore, when the
very thing that brings a person into being is nature, it is impossible to be
completely independent from it. This means that a person can never truly be a
“person.” However, this can be altered by bending one’s mode of thinking. Since
the only thing a person owns is themselves, even if this self is an invention
of nature, one can separate it from nature within the mind and thus attain a
sense of individualism. And this is justified, because nature allows it.
―
Atrona Grizel
The purpose of
life is to estrange a person from death by accustoming them to life as they
live it. And yet, even those who have grown accustomed to life die within
seconds. The death of children is less saddening than the death of the elderly,
because children die without ever having truly existed and therefore lose
nothing. The elderly, on the other hand, are condemned to life, and they gain
nothing from it either, because there is nothing to be gained from life.
―
Atrona Grizel
I am not a nurse;
I am a bomber.
―
Atrona Grizel
My writings are,
of course, not things to be read while sunbathing on the beach. For those who
have shaped their lives around pleasure and entertainment, I will either appear
as “too much” and they will stop reading me, or they will continue to see me as
“too much” and still be unable to resist reading, and thus they will witness
how the darkness inside them seizes all that brightness inwardly in the summer
heat where people play ball, surf, and the sun melts ice creams. Sartre’s
Nausea.
―
Atrona Grizel
There was a
reason I built an empire on top of my wound rather than applying ointment to
it…
― Atrona Grizel