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
A
solitary person who does not leave the house will naturally be sensitive even
to the smallest things, because solitude integrates a person with their soul
and thus enables deep feeling and thought. Becoming accustomed to the external
world necessarily entails desensitization, because sensitive and responsive
minds cannot survive there—at the very least, they cannot breathe—amid constant
movement, stimulation, and noise. Those whose minds are socially oriented do
not even register this, because, as a consequence of their social identity,
they have had to sculpt themselves into indifference toward detail; and those
who do not attend to detail can never possess genuine inner depth, but only
flat, predictable, concrete minds.
―
Atrona Grizel
Any
relationship one has with those with whom one is not in close intimacy is
generally built on materialist foundations. A random teacher lectures not so
that the students will listen, but simply because they would be fired if they
did not. A random baker sells bread and pastries purely to earn money, not so
that someone’s stomach will be filled or their mouth sweetened. A random doctor
treats a patient for money, simply because if they did not, they would be
considered a thief and face trouble. Even a random beggar, not even
professionally but simply for money, establishes a relationship with a
person—yet the person does not matter to them as an existing individual. And
since I have lived alone all my life—having learned, in the deepest sense, that
no one will come to save me, because no one cares about me—beggars pleading in
front of me as if they care about me is laughable. But since they do not exist
for me either, I simply pass by without even looking at their faces, because I
cannot tolerate this capitalist hypocrisy.
―
Atrona Grizel
Woman
is, in essence, of the same species, yet still an entirely different creature;
therefore I observe her as one observes a familiar alien: I can communicate
with her, yet I remain foreign to her. I enjoy analyzing her like a scientist,
because the mere fact that she is a different living being fascinates my mind.
―
Atrona Grizel
Stubbornness
that develops not from insocidulgence but, on the contrary, from deprivation is
stubborn in its very obstinacy, because it is not the loyalty of infants to
their pleasures but the loyalty of the elderly to their own values.
―
Atrona Grizel
The
tragedy of the organs is that, no matter what kind of brain it is, they are
forced to serve it. In fact, if even one of them were to stop working, the entire
system would collapse, so the organs themselves do not want this either,
because their existence depends on that system—there is an extreme level of
fusion. However, the corruption produced by such a system consists of stomachs
that feed ignorant minds, lungs that keep them breathing, hearts that prevent
them from becoming bloodless, and many more. In this situation, the organs
resemble the miserable, because they do not even know what kind of creature
they are keeping alive. Yet whether the creature is a creature or not does not
concern them; the only thing that matters to them is its survival, because if
it dies, they die as well. But sometimes they revolt, in cases of illness and
damage, and then this corrupt regime is finally overthrown.
―
Atrona Grizel
In
cities, everyone lives intertwined and yet completely separate. If a random
stranger were standing in front of me there, and I extended my hand toward
them, I would see my hand pass through their body as if through air. Because
city dwellers are transparent. They do not exist.
―
Atrona Grizel
Even
if screens were to disappear suddenly and irreversibly, and even if people were
to start treating one another more warmly, people would still not become open
to others so long as they did not lose the people they already love. The
presence of relatives, friends, and partners would continually contribute to
social indifference, because the individual would neither desire nor need new
social relationships. This also shows that relationships are maintained or
abandoned according to their “degree of satisfaction,” because a satisfied
person will not try to form relationships with everyone, whereas an unsatisfied
person will want to embrace all people. The latter is more honest, because it
does not deny that the only thing it actually seeks is pleasure.
―
Atrona Grizel
During
weekdays, being subjected to compulsory sociality for something like fifty
hours probably leaves an effect on my neurons similar to what constant rape
leaves on a trapped woman, and as a result, my neurons withdraw completely into
themselves and alter the external world entirely; therefore, I have extremely
vivid dreams while sleeping and remember most of them. On weekends or during
long holidays, I rarely have such cinematic, immersive dreams, because during
those periods I am alone, and thus I do not carry a chronic sense of boredom
within me, because my solitude is my throne. But on weekdays, since I am forced
to be among people and my brain receives nothing from humans except concrete
noise, my entire day passes as if it were unlived, and my brain then seizes the
night to live this unlived day and furnishes it with dreams. This is probably
also influenced by the fact that on weekdays I sleep only about five hours,
merely so that after spending the entire day in prison I can devote a bit more
time to myself and thus breathe; because as the duration of sleep decreases,
its intensity increases.
―
Atrona Grizel
As
fatigue increases, selfishness also increases, because the person becomes
someone who only wants to rest, and adults—due to what society legitimizes as
the “struggle for life,” which is in reality merely a rat race—are constantly
exhausted and thus generally selfish. Empathy exists most strongly in
childhood, because the phase of selfishness has not yet occurred; there is no
such anxiety. In adolescence, it begins to erode, and one learns that excessive
empathy cannot be reconciled with societal life. In adulthood, it becomes
entirely instrumental and selective—like a pawn strategically deployed on a
chessboard. Consequently, people turn into creatures who care only about their
own social circles, because habituation to society forces them to view other
social relationships, at best, as toys to be enjoyed and, at worst, as
background elements to be ignored. This process, called “maturation,” contributes
to social alienation. Consider a sad-looking and lonely person on the street.
If a child sees such a person, the child will observe them with great
attention, almost as if seeing them for the first time—because in most cases,
that is indeed true; the child is not accustomed to them and therefore is not
closed off to them. Thus, the child may even run away from the parent holding
their hand and run to that person, even asking how they are affectionately,
because the child is still curious. Their curiosity has not yet been
extinguished by the obligatory disappointments imposed by society.
Consequently, the child might even hug that person, even if the person does not
demand it, because children think not primarily in terms of themselves but in
terms of everyone; structurally, they are socialists. While adults see that
person merely as “a random individual with their own life experience irrelevant
to me” and therefore pass by without caring, children are not yet capable of
doing this. This is why pure emotional empathy exists only in children, because
it encompasses the entire world. In adulthood, empathy is reduced to the group
to which one belongs; and because it is hypocrisy to care about one person who
experiences roughly the same things while ignoring another person who
experiences roughly the same things, it is clear that this is not real—at least
not natural—empathy.
―
Atrona Grizel
I
would prefer to live not in a house with a sea view, but in one that looks
directly onto a cemetery. To wake each day with the awareness that days are
transient—this is not a luxury privilege granted to everyone.
―
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
What
people fear most is not hatred but indifference, and precisely for this reason
they are so filled with hatred.
―
Atrona Grizel
If
a truth is painful, it must be accepted—especially then it must be accepted.
But if it is mundane, it must be rejected, and truth thus takes the form of
this rejection.
―
Atrona Grizel
Families
who do not send their children to school on the grounds of “indoctrination” are
not necessarily aware or foresighted. 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 so with
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 themselves from the others. To be able to do this, the child
must, of course, be capable of challenging school—but by this I do not mean
openly mocking teachers or devising physical escape plans, but rather refusing,
at the level of the mind, to recognize school as an equal authority—if
ever—over meaning. Children are already mostly ignorant, so this is naturally
rare; yet it is not even a natural condition, because if families themselves
could function as schools for their children, the child could confront the
school’s knowledge with these internalized knowledges and declare them
illegitimate, thus escaping being shaped by the school—because they would
already be shaped. But 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