Another way of asking, “How much truth can you bear?” is "How much loneliness can you endure?”
Another way of asking, “How much truth can you bear?” is "How much loneliness can you endure?”
― Atrona Grizel
Reality is singular, while imagination is contagious.
― Atrona Grizel
Perhaps the greatest misfortune of teenagers—and the primary reason for their inertia—is that they have never truly encountered mature adults; as a result, they come to believe that their own way is the only valid form of reality.
― Atrona Grizel
The history of humanity is built upon countless absurdities invented out of the terror humans feel in the face of their own loneliness—and people have believed in them because they want to be deceived into thinking they are not irrelevant
― Atrona Grizel.
Happiness is the emotion most open to exploitation, because everyone instinctively chases after it—because it is valued above all else. The summary is simple: what brings happiness is loved; what brings unhappiness is rejected. This operates almost automatically for factory-made maggots that live only according to their biology. And so they end up pursuing anyone who offers them happiness—whether genuinely or merely as a promise. If you want to deceive the masses, tell them convincingly that you will make them happy. Just as animals are created to mate, they too are designed to desire this—not to live, but to want—and for that reason they will fall to their knees before you. Few of these stories of “kneeling” have ever ended happy.
― Atrona Grizel
Critical thinking amounts to defying the “social order”—and that is punished; only now, under the banner of “free” thought, the punishment comes not with chains but with exclusion. Otherwise, why does everyone who questions things even slightly, almost as if by some non-coincidental mechanism, automatically become a “misfit”?
― Atrona Grizel
The only kind of person I envy: the one who lives without having “lived.”
― Atrona Grizel
There is famine in the country, yet the president remains unaware of it because he has constructed such a paranoid apparatus that no one dares to deliver this news to him. At last, he begins to organize visits, touring villages and speaking with citizens. It appears as if there is no famine, because in truth everything is artificially staged before his arrival: the hungry are gathered out of sight, food is distributed to selected citizens, and they are told they will be killed if they fail to smile. Lower officials carry this out because the only way to preserve their positions is not to tell the truth but to tell lies. Is this kind of mechanism not strangely familiar everywhere? Every institution becomes a state unto itself, and in reality each one is built upon such lies, even if they are considered “smaller.” The true absurdity is that within all this bureaucracy, those who die in agony are still human beings. To truly trust institutions—to stand in grand ceremonies, deliver “proud” speeches, and believe in them—one must be a politician who has turned their back on people. Only such a person can convince themselves that what is, in truth, a kind of game—something everyone inwardly knows yet no one voices precisely because this silence is the rule of the game—is not a performance, but a genuinely sincere environment.
― Atrona Grizel
Sociality brings contamination with it: crude jokes, base jealousies, tainted behaviors… All of these are known by everyone, yet it is this very social world that presents them as a natural part of life—much like the propaganda of a totalitarian regime that constantly praises itself while shaping the perception of its people accordingly. In contrast, consider uncontacted peoples: what kind of spiritual corruption could belong to someone living entirely alone on a tropical island, having never encountered electricity, the internet, or even another gender? They may have their own fierce rituals, yet even these are, for them, religious in nature, which is a necessity of excessive solitude. They know nothing of civilization, and in this ignorance—even if they are wild—they remain honest, for they have never learned to conceal that wildness. A pure human being is one who has not been exposed to other humans.
― Atrona Grizel
The Nazis were executing Jehovah’s Witnesses by guillotine because they refused military service. In essence, this situation is not very different today. The only difference is that, whereas the Nazis carried this out with overt brutality, in the modern era, countries that impose compulsory military service and disregard individual rights execute such individuals not physically, but with a “civil guillotine.” Fascism did not end in 1945; it only transformed. For what could please a state more than turning itself into something akin to fascism—into a self-fashioned megalomaniac? All states harbor a weakness for such extreme ideologies, yet the modern age, wrapped in its layers of hypocrisy, has taught them well how to present this in the language of liberalism. No one is executed anymore for being a “conscientious objector”; instead, they are socially executed for being “defective.”
― Atrona Grizel
What does a young person—living a simple life devoted to caring for an elderly individual, spending their time reading in quiet sincerity while the elderly person knits silently before them, belonging to a world of simplicity, authenticity, and art—feel among their peers? What do they think when they see their peers’ obsession with appearances, their status games, their sex parties, their hunger for power and money? Do they not, quite naturally, feel a sense of disgust—and is even this disgust not tempered, mature, and free of empty adolescent fury? While their peers are thinking about which slut or prostitute they will sleep with, he becomes both a poet and a philosopher by constantly reflecting on what comes after death, what death truly means, and whether the death of a loved one really signifies “death” at all—and to be a genuine poet and a philosopher, as Kierkegaard himself observed, stands in fundamental conflict with public recognition. Imagine a dialogue like this: this person asks, “Why don’t you stay silent even for a moment to think, to write, to read something?” Their peers giggle among themselves when they hear this. To them, it is something very funny—after all, this person does not play their games of “popularity.” They reply in those spoiled tones, “If you keep being such a naive loser, you’ll never truly live.” This simply shows that youth is fundamentally lacking in the capacity to understand them, and the sense of incompatibility that any young person experiences once they begin to deepen even slightly on an inner level is precisely what lies behind it. These people are those who, in environments where everyone gossips loudly, quietly carry a feeling that “this is not right,” and experience it not as shame or doubt but as a simple mismatch. When forced to interact with youth, they accept them despite their ways, yet when they are mocked and even openly provoked, they cannot quite make sense of it—and still they regard it not with anger but with indifference, seeing it as trivial. The only people they truly value are those close to them, and as a caregiver, they have learned to cultivate within themselves a strength that is not artificial but deeply rooted. Having grown up early, they carry a quiet resilience that does not need to announce itself. Such a person has learned to build a shelter in stormy weather and to take refuge in it. When the storm begins, they return to the shelter they have already prepared. They do not grow angry at the lightning, because they know it is natural. Yet they never belong to that world of lightning that burns and destroys everything in its path. They exist in parallel, living in a private world unknown to the poisonous youth culture into which they have fallen—among those who understand human nature—forming a self-assured character shaped by experiences their peers often encounter only later in life: separation, illness, poverty, and death.
― Atrona Grizel
Whenever I find the opportunity—in environments that appear “natural”—if I am wearing a hooded garment, I pull the hood over my head, and if possible, I lie down on the table, burying my head, and in doing so I pass into the world of darkness. The world of silence. At last, a tangible wall comes between me and the world, and this allows my mind to rest. When this happens, I close my eyes as well, and thus only my inner world remains on the stage, exactly as I want it. In this way, I drift into daydreams. I begin to think freely, because people have ceased to be the primary focus; those gnawing rodents of thought and imagination disappear. Sometimes, however, I part my eyes slightly and watch the outside world through the gaps between the fibers of the hood. I look at people, because I have now become invisible—not in a poetic sense, but in the most physical one. They do not see that I see them. I look at their faces. Only their silhouettes are visible; their faces cannot be seen clearly because the image is not sharp, yet it is obvious that they are there. And is it not always like this: they are always there, yet in truth they do not even have faces. Faceless silhouettes. Looking from beneath the hood merely allows me to witness this reality directly. I think about how easily they ignore me. We are random people dropped into random settings within random lives, and naturally those who see this and refuse to join the game are inevitably pushed to the margins, as I am. And this astonishes me. I cannot help it. How is it that they never ask anything of someone standing right before them, never speak to them, as if that person does not exist? Then again, are they not the same: none of them truly exist either. I must have gone mad for taking all these imaginings too seriously. Then I withdraw my focus back to my inner world until I forget time and context.
― Atrona Grizel
The concept of the “right to life” is uncertain because it is open to interpretation. What does it mean to “live”? Is it merely to remain biologically alive? If so, then billions of people are living. Yet very few are actually “alive.”
― Atrona Grizel
The things that consume my time right now—washing dishes, cleaning the house, driving a car—will likely be viewed with sarcasm by people of a future age. They will say: “Did these fools really squander their lives like this?” And they will be right, because in their era there may not even be people left who perform such tasks. Yet does the present age not parade these very activities as virtues? A person who does not obtain a driver’s license is not even accepted by society. Because there is something called the “values of the age.” No age can see what lies ahead of it. Each one folds inward, convinced of its own superiority. Every era carries within itself a kind of blindness—a madness that cannot see beyond its own horizon.
― Atrona Grizel
Trying to defend human rights in this society comes off not just as hard or dangerous, but almost as absurd and funny. This country—and individual rights. Can such a thing even be imagined? Even the public would simply laugh it off. A person must come to their senses as if splashing water on their own face to wake from a stupor and realize: this is not Norway. Those who demand “human rights” must simply distance themselves from this echo chamber culture that has shut itself off from humanity and its own rights, and whatever they do for their cause must be done from abroad—because the moment one sets foot in this land, even the word “rights” begins to be perceived as a luxury to be ashamed of. Such a thing is possible because even the very structure of society’s thinking is like this: “If the state does it, it is right.” “Lean your back on the father that is the state.” “If the homeland is at stake, everything else is detail.” There are still tens of millions living with this mentality from decades ago. Why aren’t these biological wastes simply eliminated? Because it would be called “genocide”? Actually, it would be more about carving space where life can breathe—and perhaps, only then, would human rights arise on their own…
― Atrona Grizel