Where there is conformity, there is nothing but conformity, because harmony means the death of content in the name of cohesion.
Where there is conformity, there is nothing but conformity, because harmony means the death of content in the name of cohesion.
― Atrona Grizel
I do not see humans; I see Homo sapiens.
― Atrona Grizel
To be abandoned among people is to be exiled into a desert where the air cannot be breathed because of heat and the water does not exist because of dryness. To return to solitude, by contrast, is to dive into the ocean—and here there is a difference: the water is sweet, meaning it can be drunk as much as one wishes, and it is also breathable, meaning it refreshes the lungs even better than air.
― Atrona Grizel
In ordinary, chaotic, and noisy societies devoid of deep thought and artistic taste, rare great minds stuck in such a wicked swamp realize that, in sociality, their self is continuously being stolen from them, as if by theft. Thus, during socialization, they move away from themselves, because society alienates them from themselves, because society is alien to greatness; and so such a person wanders among people like a ghost, a ghost waiting to return to solitude. If this person refused to be a ghost among people, then they would become a ghost in solitude—but they are too attached to their values to sacrifice their authenticity for connection. Therefore, they do not become stupid like “academic geniuses” who have been moralized, ethicized, and institutionalized. Society is poor to the point of destitution, and thus it tries to swallow the gold of anyone who possesses even a slightly rich inner world. Yet such a person will always reproduce that gold, because they possess an infinite source within themselves and must know how to make that source fertile—being within society, but not of society.
― Atrona Grizel
I did not get used to things; I only got used to not getting used to things.
― Atrona Grizel
To arrive in a big city, knowing no place and no one… Such an effective plaster over one’s previous life is rare, and the soul must occasionally reset everything in this way, if possible, in order to free itself from the tyranny of a single life and the narrow-minded people enslaved to it.
― Atrona Grizel
I do not need the love of a girl; I need the love of a granny.
― Atrona Grizel
Families who do not send their children to school on the grounds of “indoctrination” are not necessarily aware and foresighted. Because the question they never ask is this: why must the children they send there almost automatically absorb what is imposed on them? Why this extreme permeability? Children are dough; and the only thing they should be taught is to turn themselves into stone if they are in such an indoctrinating environment—and most families are incapable of doing this. Yet a child can attend school classes, undergo rigid training, and do these within an external conformity while still remaining untouched in their inner world—if they are trained to live such a double life. Especially under totalitarian regimes, if one respects one’s individual essence, this is exactly what must be done to survive. If the child is thoroughly convinced that they have an inner world—that is, if they are made to believe that they exist as an individual being—they will defend that inner world and not easily abandon it, and thus will separate from the others; because those others generally grow up in ordinary families and are not even aware of the concept of an “inner world,” and therefore have nothing to protect, since they do not carry such an internal universe. The result of this is the fanaticism of examples like the Hitler Youth and Stalinist pioneers. Because without internal sovereignty, ideology replaces identity. All of this stems simply from the stupidity of epistemologically granting the school the authority to teach. If students stopped seeing school as a place of learning, schools could not become places of indoctrination; but educational propaganda does everything it can to present school as a “second home” in order to assimilate the individual into society and culture, which only benefits the state.
― Atrona Grizel