Sunday, August 23, 2009

Readings: Danger!

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From The Impostor by Georges Bernanos (this book has been kicking my lame ass all over the lot. I recommend it highly to any person who wants to believe that he knows himself pretty damned well):

Just as the wretched human race pitches its pathetic tents between hills thrown up in some terrible ancient cataclysm and scratches around in the cooling outer crust of a world that still has a raging abyss at its center, so he too had found a resting place at the very center of all his inner contradictions. He was living there in solitude, cut off from civilized life, all human contact, and his own terrible past.
[…]
At such a juncture, few men escape the double snare of either an ambiguous and nostalgic tenderness for what they have renounced for a sterile hatred, which is merely another form of remorse and completes their moral and psychological breakdown. No one is deceived by their violent behavior, and everyone sees them with spittle on their lips, begging the bread they have just thrown away and eternally hunger for. The fact that in their pride they now claim to be emancipated, unique, and alone hardly matters, for in reality they have an immense need of other people. They are merely dispossessed.

Ay-yi-yi!
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