About Suffering

Part of suffering is the useless urge to announce you’re suffering.

There is no other way to say it: I’m suffering. Just to say “I suffer” helps.

I read somewhere, “we become lyrical when we suffer.”

Happiness is suffering for the right reasons.

First-order suffering is second-order happiness.

You have to suffer for beauty? Because you have to suffer.

We pride ourselves on a high quality of suffering.

Turgenev was born in 1818 in the province of Orel, and suffered during his childhood from a tyrannical mother.

In the past their suffering was less absurd.

The problem is, everything’s worse. Paper or plastic? We’re all still going to die suffering.

I value being alone with my thoughts, but it’s weird to say, “This thing that makes us suffer less, we have to stop doing it.”

Isn’t it kind of the point of culture to assuage our feeling needless and alone?

How does one suffer “gladly,” exactly?

At least the rich get to suffer in comfort.

It makes the life feel longer. Live to suffer another day.

One’s past suffering can be a great source of comfort. A torturous luxury. Velvet upholstery.

Suffering is happiness, after forty minutes of desolate shuffling. The point is, life is suffering.

About suffering, no one is ever wrong.

The Idea of Beginning

My brother knows how to make a chair from the little wire cage on a bottle of champagne.

I find it hard to throw away the wire when I know there’s a chair inside.

A chair my brother would have made, which would make it worth saving.

I find it hard to throw out flowers, which were dead on arrival.

Some philosophers think that your phone has a conscious “mind.”

Same for anything sufficiently connected—like Pando, a tree that manifests as hundreds of trees and is “currently thought to be dying.”

I haven’t seen a crow in a long time—do crows have a season?

I got a book about symbols in the mail and it opened to the “crow” page—I’m not lying.

It said, Because of its black colour, the crow is associated with the idea of beginning.

Once, driving south through New Mexico at sunset, the sunset was endless.

I am not sure why, geographically or astronomically speaking, it just kept glowing.

I associate the idea of beginning with the idea of death: to exist at all is to enter eternity.

I associate the word thing with false humility—who am I to name a thing?

Who am I with this long blond hair?

Who am I when I sleep so deeply I wake up thinking of my childhood bed?

In New Mexico the moon rising over the mountain was absurd on its face.

All ha ha ha.

There’s a hole in your nightmare