It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Tell me, ocean, will you be my brother? Roll wildly... more wildly
yet... if you would have me compare you to the vengeance of God.
Spread out your livid claws and tear yourself out a pathway in your own
bosom... that is good.
Roll your appalling breakers, hideous ocean, understood by me alone, and
before whose feet I fall prostrate.
Man's majesty is borrowed; it shall not overcome me. You, yes.
Oh, when you advance, your crest high and terrible, surrounded by your
tortuous coils as by a royal court, magnetic and wild, rolling your
waves one upon the other full of the consciousness of what you are; and
when you give utterance from the depths of your bosom as if you were
suffering the pangs of some intense remorse which I have been unable to
discover, to that perpetual heavy roar so greatly feared by men even
when, trembling on the shore, they contemplate you in safety: then I can
perceive that I do not possess that signal right to name myself your
equal.
Hence in the presence of your superiority I would bestow upon you all my
love (and none may know how much love is contained in my aspirations
towards beauty) if you would not make me reflect sadly upon my fellow
men, who form the most ironical contrast to you, the most clownish
antithesis that has ever been seen in creation.
I cannot love you, I detest you. Why do I return to you, for the
thousandth time, to your friendly arms which part to caress my burning
brow, their very contact extinguishing my fever! I know not your secret
destiny. All that concerns you interests me. Tell me whether you are the
dwelling-place of the Prince of Darkness. Tell me this, ocean... tell me
(me alone, for fear of distressing those who have yet known nothing but
illusion) whether the breath of Satan creates the tempests that fling
your salty waters up to the clouds. You must tell me this because I
should love to know that hell is so close to man.
"Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams..."
“If people saw the world for what it truly is, saw their lives for what they truly are, without dreams or illusions, I don’t believe they could offer the first reason why they should not elect to die as soon as possible.
Originally posted by CodyOutlaw
fiction, as written by the writer, becomes something else entirely to the reader.
“There was no meaning in life, and man by living served no end. It was immaterial whether he was born or not born, whether he lived or ceased to live. Life was insignificant and death without consequence. Philip exulted, as he had exulted in his boyhood when the weight of a belief in God was lifted from his shoulders: it seemed to him that the last burden of responsibility was taken from him; and for the first time he was utterly free. His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty. What he did or left undone did not matter. Failure was unimportant and success amounted to nothing. He was the most inconsiderate creature in that swarming mass of mankind which for a brief space occupied the surface of the earth; and he was almighty because he had wrenched from chaos the secret of its nothingness. Thoughts came tumbling over one another in Philip's eager fancy, and he took long breaths of joyous satisfaction. He felt inclined to leap and sing. He had not been so happy for months.
'Oh, life,' he cried in his heart, 'Oh life, where is thy sting?”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
From the beginning it was never anything
but chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped me,
which I breathed in through the gills. In the substrata,
where the moon shone steady and opaque,
it was smooth and fecundating; above it was a
jangle and a discord. In everything I quickly saw
the opposite, the contradiction, and between the
real and the unreal the irony, the paradox. I was
my own worst enemy. There was nothing I wished
to do which I could just as well not do. Even as a
child, when I lacked for nothing, I wanted to die: I
wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in
struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved,
substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing
an existence which I had not asked for. Everybody
around me was a failure, or if not a failure,
ridiculous. Especially the successful ones. The
successful ones bored me to tears. I was
sympathetic to a fault, but it was not sympathy
that made me so. It was a purely negative quality,
a weakness which blossomed at the mere sight of
human misery.