Joseph Conrad
Yes, egoism is good, and altruism is good, and fidelity to nature would be the best of all ... if we could only get rid of consciousness. What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. To be part of the animal kingdom under the conditions of this earth is very well—but as soon as you know of your slavery, the pain, the anger, the strife—the tragedy begins. We can’t return to nature, since we can’t change our place in it. Our refuge is in stupidity ... There is no morality, no knowledge, and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that ... is always but a vain and floating appearance.
VOYAGING-VI
(…)
We never thought to search it out, but saw
From heights to depths, through all the mortal scale
The numbing spectacle of human flaw.
Sayfa 289Kitabı okudu
He’d been infected with vampire venom, and she’d been infected with stupidity.
Chapter 1Kitabı okudu
I wished I was old. I was tired of being so young, so stupidly knowing, so stupidly forgetful. I was tired of having to be anything at all. I felt like the Internet, full of every kind of information but none of it mattering more than any of it, and all of its little links like thin white roots on a broken plant dug out of the soil, lying drying on its side. And whenever I tried to access myself, whenever I’d try to click on me, try to go any deeper when it came to the meaning of ‘I’, I mean deeper than a single fast-loading page on Facebook or MySpace, it was as if I knew that one morning I’d wake up and try to log on to find that not even that version of ‘I’ existed any more, because the servers all over the world were all down. And that’s how rootless. And that’s how fragile. And what would poor Anthea do then, poor thing?
