I wonder why I don’t go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip one hour more of sleep and live.
Or perhaps is is that time doesn’t heal wounds at all, perhaps that is the biggest lie of them all, and instead what happens is that each wound penetrates the body deeper and deeper until one day you find that the sheer geography of your bones - the angle of your hips, the sharpness of your shoulders, as well as the luster of your eyes, the texture of your skin, the openness of your smile - has collapsed under the weight of your griefs.
It all seems pointless in light of the fact that we’re all going to die eventually. Why do anything - why wash my hair, why read Moby Dick, why fall in love, why sit through six hours of Nicholas Nickleby, why spend time getting into the right schools, why dance to the music when all of us are just slouching toward the same inevitable conclusion? The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death.
+ life + death + short + meaningless + existential + pointless + die + time + conclusion + prozac nation + depression + elizabeth wurtzel + point of life
One of my big problems is time sickness. When I feel lonely, I assume that the mood will never pass—that I’ll feel lonely and bad for the rest of my life, which means that I’ve wrecked both the present and the future. And if I look back on my past, I wreck that too, by concentrating on all the things I did wrong. The brutal thing about time sickness is that naming it is no cure.
There is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.
People so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.
People just are not good to each other
one on one.
The rich are not good to the rich,
the poor are not good to the poor.
We are afraid.
Our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.
It hasn’t told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.
Or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone
untouched
unspoken to
watering a plant.
+ charles bukowski + genuis + depression + reality + gutters + suicide + school + terror + aching + alone + untouched + neglected + time + love is a dog from hell + loneliness + isolated
You’re not like the others. I’ve seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon, last night. The others would never do that. The others would walk off and leave me talking. Or threaten me. No one has time any more for anyone else. You’re one of the few who put up with me.
+ different + unlike + rest + talk + listen + attention + others + time + connection + present + conversation + people + distracted + vacant + ray bradbury
The relationship between loneliness and solitude can be hard to delineate: the former is often seen as cancelling out the legitimacy of the latter, as though a lonely adult or child is simply not entitled to want or need time alone. But the feelings of isolation that accompany loneliness are entirely different from the more sated and creative feelings that accompany solitude, and it’s entirely reasonable to feel lonely and yet still feel as though you need some time to yourself.
+ isolation + loneliness + legitimate + alone + isolate + lonely + feeling + self + alonetime + time + depression + introvert
It’s precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive - or at least a partial sense of it. Your quality of experience is based not on standards such as time or ranking, but on finally awakening to an awareness of the fluidity within action itself.
+ haruki murakami + pain + suffering + depression + despair + overcome + fight + recovery + living + feeling + alive + experience + time + awakening + awareness + sense + action
Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going
+ life + memory + past + moment + mindful + existentialism + philosophy + living + time + pass + awareness + alive + mind
I’d like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.
+ enjoy + moments + retrospect + reflective + living + past + looking back + thinking + memories + david foster wallace + dfw + mindful + time + happening + depression + head + mind + replay
The thing I’m most afraid of is me. Of not knowing what I’m going to do. Of not knowing what I’m doing right now.
+ afraid + self + control + self-control + doing + knowing + haruki murakami + IQ84 + murakami + going to do + right now + time
Because that’s the thing about depression. When I feel it deeply, I don’t want to let it go. It becomes a comfort. I want to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lunges. I want to nurture it, grow it, cultivate it. It’s mine. I want to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in its arms and not wake up for a long, long time.
Closing your eyes isn’t going to change anything. Nothing’s going to disappear just because you can’t see what’s going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes. That’s the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won’t make time stand still.
When you’re young, you always feel that life hasn’t begun- that “life” is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays- whenever. But suddenly you’re old and the scheduled life didn’t arrive. You find yourself asking, “Well then, exactly what was it I was having- that interlude- that scrambly madness- all that time I had before.
