[b]Elias Canetti
…no mind ever grew fat on a diet of novels. The pleasure which they occasionally offer is far too heavily paid for: they undermine the finest characters. They teach us to think ourselves into other men’s places. Thus we acquire a taste for change. The personality becomes dissolved in pleasing figments of imagination. The reader learns to understand every point of view. Willingly he yields himself to the pursuit of other people’s goals and loses sight of his own. Novels are so many wedges which the novelist, an actor with his pen, inserts into the closed personality of the reader. The better he calculates the size of the wedge and the strength of the resistance, so much the more completely does he crack open the personality of the victim. Novels should be prohibited by the State.[/b]
Starting with, say, the Bible?
It is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it.
Let’s run this here by, among others, Fixed Cross and Mr Reasonable.
Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster. Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open arms into their misfortune?
Well, sure, this might be true. You know, of others.
Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages.
Though no less so than birth.
The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind.
After all, naming something makes it true.
One lives in the naïve notion that later there will be more room than in the entire past.
Trust me: You’ll stop believing that soon enough.