1
" We in our age are faced with a strange paradox. Never before have we had so much information in bits and pieces flooded upon us by radio and television and satellite, yet never before have we had so little inner certainty about our own being. The more objective truth increases, the more our inner certitude decreases. Our fantastically increased technical power, and each forward step in technology is experienced by many as a new push toward our possible annihilation. Nietzsche was strangely prophetic when he said,
“We live in a period of atomic chaos…the terrible apparition…the Nation State…and the hunt for happiness will never be greater than when it must be caught between today and tomorrow; because the day after tomorrow all hunting time may have come to an end altogether.”
Sensing this, and despairing of ever finding meaning in life, people these days seize on the many ways of dulling their awareness by apathy, by psychic numbing, or by hedonism. Others, especially young people, elect in alarming and increasing numbers to escape their own being by suicide. "
― Rollo May , The Discovery of Being
2
" As melancholia replaced the jarring of my invention, I sat.
Unable to breathe in the smog I had created, unable to stand on my betraying legs, unable to howl at the heavens over my sordid soul.
In this inferno, I became paroxysmic, my self-hatred, superparamount, numbness dulling the agony of such a devilish act,
An iron curtain fell upon the surrounding world, or at least what I had left of it to be owned by the laconic eclipse.
All the angels fled, disowning my prayers, the lurid world backed away, leaving me forsaken and detached,
I could no longer hear the bombings, hear them fall, my own fabrication, only the dead air that came after, the intense silence.
Cynical and paralyzed, I realized I had purloined a portion of Hell and given it to the unwilling Earth,
Punishing those I had no right to punish, judging those I had no reason to condemn, destroying cities I had never set foot in.
This is how I became Death, the destroyer of Worlds. "
― Moonshine Noire
12
" I want to defend Ben Bella just as I am going to defend Boumedienne. Ben Bella was not the 'demon' that the nervous, demagogic communique of 19 June accused him of being, no more than Boumedienne is the 'reactionary' that L'Unita wrote about. Both are victims of the same drama that every Third World politician lives through if he is honest, if he is a patriot. This was the drama of Lumumba and Nehru; it is the drama of Nyerere and Sekou Toure. The essence of the drama lies in the terrible material resistance that each one encounters on taking his first, second, and third steps up the summit of power. Each one wants to do something good and begins to do it and then sees, after a month, after a year, after three years, that it just isn't happening, that it is slipping away, that it is bogged down in the sand. Everything is in the way: the centuries of backwardness, the primitive economy, the illiteracy, the religious fanaticism, the tribal blindness, the chronic hunger, the colonial past with its practice of debasing and dulling the conquered, the blackmail by the imperialists, the greed of the corrupt, the unemployment, the red ink. progress comes with great difficulty along such a road. The politician begins to push too hard. He looks for a way out through dictatorship. The dictatorship then fathers an opposition. The opposition organises a coup.
And the cycle begins anew. "
― Ryszard Kapuściński
