To do something well you have to like it If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school. Paul Graham, How to do what you love painprogress
Subjected to some great trial Often in the past he had wondered what it would be like to be subjected (soma-less and with nothing but his own inward resources to rely on) to some great trial, some pain, some persecution; he had even longed for affliction. As recently as a week ago, in the Director’s office, he had imagined himself courageously resisting, stoically accepting suffering without a word. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Prometheus painsuffering
Poetic drugs In the final chapters Bachelard lets slip (a confession really) how if he "were a psychiatrist," he would recommend a poem by Baudelaire to treat "anguish." His squabble then is not with the purpose but rather the approach of a still-young profession. And of course, why not treat the power of great poems as something akin to "virtual 'drugs'"? Mark Z. Danielewski, The Poetics of Space psychologypoetrypaindrugs
Distraction To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King boredommelancholyanxietyattentionpain
Prometheus A Poem by Lord Byron www.poetryfoundation.org The lightnings trembledThe sum of human wretchednessMaking Death a Victory Subjected to some great trialA hierarchical system of senseYou find reasons to keep living deathsufferingpain
Imperfectly locked doors quietly waiting A Fragment by Geoff Manaugh davidmaisel.com “Without vitamin C,” Anthony writes, “we cannot produce collagen, an essential component of bones, cartilage, tendons and other connective tissues. Collagen binds our wounds, but that binding is replaced continually throughout our lives. Thus in advanced scurvy”—reached when the body has gone too long without vitamin C—“old wounds long thought healed will magically, painfully reappear.” In a sense, there is no such thing as healing. From paper cuts to surgical scars, our bodies are catalogues of wounds: imperfectly locked doors quietly waiting, sooner or later, to spring back open. painmelancholyrepairhealtheuphony
To the Lighthouse A Novel by Virginia Woolf gutenberg.net.au All the lives to beThe alphabetGone crookedExtinguishedA thing you could ruffle with your breath+5 More solitudemelancholyloneliness
All the lives to be And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves. nature
The alphabet Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R. death
Gone crooked He was coming to see himself, and everything he had ever known gone crooked a little. It was awfully strange.
A thing you could ruffle with your breath It was a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses.
A coherence in things There is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune to change, and shines out…in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby. time
All dark and spreading Beneath it is all dark, it is spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.
There, with a dash on the beach How life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach. life
They would never know She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that. melancholy