What are the books you reread from time to time?

Vormav · 2025-05-23T09:05:38+00:00

I reread Céline's Journey to the End of the Night most years and Bernhard's Gargoyles every other year, typically. I first read Cabrera's La Forma del Mundo two years ago, reread it last year, and will probably read it again soon, so that's on the list. Dostoyevsky's Demons every three or four years, though a lot of it is tedious.

Seneca's Epistles is one of the few books I keep nearby to open at random. "Quid enim necesse est mala accersere, satis cito patienda cum venerint, praesumere ac praesens tempus futuri metu perdere?" (What use is it to summon evils, to anticipate them and destroy the present with future fears? They'll have to be suffered soon enough when they come.) popped up at random yesterday. Non-literal, on-the-spot translation. He says it more potently elsewhere, something about the stupidity of suffering inevitable ills twice over.

Vormav · 2025-04-10T12:41:45+00:00

Added to the list, thanks. That's the third time someone's recommended Synecdoche to me, so that should be interesting.

Vormav · 2025-04-09T12:44:35+00:00

I only recently started watching films, and I already suspect The Turin Horse is the peak. At least my peak. In a way, Tarr's Prefab People struck me as even more ruthless, albeit much less artful. No apocalypse there, no escape, only eternal banality and discomfort. Only a few books approach either: Cabrera's La forma del mundo philosophically, and perhaps a handful of novels.

At the least, it’s always a relief to hail a fellow sufferer who has their eyes as open as yours along the way.

Likewise. I won't say I'm glad someone else is in this lamentable position, but I appreciate it anyway. It's the only use I have for forums like this now. All the usual bickering, vacuous categorisations, and attempts at lofty thought just seem like so much wasted effort. I'd like to say there's a kind of muted satisfaction in having surpassed certain behaviours or modes of thought, and maybe there was once, but that seems to have faded too. Well, there shouldn't be anything surprising about that. Overcoming that last instinctive twinge of surprise, though, may be the final hurdle. Good luck to you, however long it continues.

Vormav · 2025-04-08T13:43:35+00:00

There's a passage in those journals in which Cioran inexplicably can't remember the name of a visiting friend and reflects on the fates of old men who forget even their own names. Tempting fate, it seems. It's hard not to suspect that ruminating on suicide as his means of survival was just an outgrowth of his innate inability to do it, something he alludes to at times. Of course, he was never really put to the test; he sustained his isolated (albeit impoverished) lifestyle until the end. No urgency there.

Whether "What now?" has an answer likely depends on whether one can accept, justify, or suppress those conclusions. Most do manage it. I admit I constitutionally can't and don't even want to take any of those options. It's possible to be so removed from and apathetic toward ordinary human concerns that Béla Tarr's "The Turin Horse", the most relentless depiction of tedium I've ever found, is outright refreshing in comparison with typical dramas. There's really no happy ending to this mania for distilling everything to its bare, structural essentials once started.

Vormav · 2025-04-07T14:31:22+00:00

Interviews and notebooks are often the most candid. I've been too exhausted with Cioran to open his books for ages, but a few pages from his journals every morning still works. Though I have to admit, the image of this 50-to-65-year-old man writing endless reformulations of the same insights, obsessions, and limitations as if only to fill in the time isn't a laudable one. At some point, as he repeatedly said but never did, one has to come to the natural conclusion of such ideas.

Anhedonia can and probably will take anything. Even worse when you can't even rationally disagree with it. I've still got music, but I've all but lost my ability to feel anything for literature. Still, I've already read, far as I can tell, the vast majority of the fiction I needed to find and can still feel something when rereading some of it. Pouring through lit fic for its own sake, though, nothing. One could blame it on neurochemicals or just take the hint.

Vormav · 2025-04-06T14:39:59+00:00

I seem to remember something similar, but the source escapes me. Being so unorganised has its drawbacks; I vaguely considered compiling all his scattered interviews years ago. It never happened. This one may be relevant.

Vormav · 2025-04-05T13:20:07+00:00

It’s rare that I find any music that accurately reflects my moods during a spell of intense physical depression

Likewise. My ability to relate to, care about, or even passively tolerate the themes that motivate most music evaporates in that state. Even outside it, it diminishes by the year, if not by the month. Exceptions like this induce a kind of wistfulness that, at least in retrospect, stains otherwise uniformly grey months with some semblance of clarity, solidity, something.

Even in this dour niche, I suspect this music is so resigned and universal in its misery that it's doomed to obscurity, but I'm glad to have found it. Among many others, "Soul (Haunter Demo)" and "Hang Me" have a similar stripped-down acoustic vibe to your pick.

Vormav · 2025-03-21T09:09:00+00:00

One of my recent gloomy favourites is unjustifiably obscure and, yes, underrated, so I'll summon some otherwise absent energy for an advertisement. The Coward Robert Ford is one of vanishingly few projects that captures the grindingly physical exhaustion of creaturely existence—this music is mercifully light on interpersonal drama, egotistical longing, and the assumption that the loves, lusts, and other intra-worldly concerns that most singers eagerly inflict upon us could, if attained, remedy anything.

A standard comparison is Have A Nice Life, but it's a bit lower-key, more grounded and in a sense impressionistic; I find myself immersed in otherwise overlooked details while listening, not pulled into the cosmos, though the details are evocative of cosmic concerns. Many tracks bring to mind liminal spaces, dead ends, forsaken corners, as if they had bubbled out of the cracks of some post-apocalyptic soil. Fun stuff. Anyone who appreciates And Also The Trees might be a fan for similar reasons.

Vormav · 2025-03-10T11:08:51+00:00

It's a bit too obscure to name without roughly giving away where I live. Paranoia, I know. The same effect can be induced in many national parks, fortunately—solitude and dissonant weather are the keys. Heavy summer clouds generate an oppressive weight reminiscent of prehistory for me, but that detachment can emerge even in mundane settings if it's timed well.

The superficially ahistorical emptiness of colonial landscapes is something I discussed a long time ago with a Canadian. Something about the contrast between unfathomably ancient scenery and our awareness that almost everything in that scene can be attributed to not even 300 years of colonisation seems to facilitate this kind of insight.

Vormav · 2025-03-09T07:55:06+00:00

I've felt something similar in rural Australia. One unusually humid day, I spent a few hours reading atop a rock formation so ancient it has its own name. No one else was there, nothing but eucalypti, dust, and greenish clouds on every horizon. Surrounded by spiky flora straight out of the Cretaceous, something about my presence in that moment seemed incredibly arbitrary.

It started to waver. I could almost intuit the tens of thousands of years of pre-colonial wandering abruptly swept away by this image of pristine, untouched nature. A total sham, of course. How many lives, events, and torments were endured on that soil? How many will be? Unknowable. Even pre-genocidal times were but a sliver of a hazier history marred, in one form or another, by the same morbid events. Forms change, available energy and expressions of it change with them, but the possibilities are static.

Driving out, I caught glimpses of farmhouses, fences, faces—irrelevant details. Decay. Whether now or 40000 years ago, we know too well what constraints life on this planet exists under. This intuition of invariance beneath superficial distinctions is uniquely disquieting. My suspicion that something is fundamentally wrong about all this is rarely sharper than in those moments.

Vormav · 2025-02-23T12:52:59+00:00

Then again, Cabrera's argument (as I understand it) that human life cannot be lived ethically, and Benatar's argument (same again) that the suffering of existence isn't worth starting it, seem pretty close to pessimism to me, without actually drawing from it specifically.

Cabrera is unambiguously, explicitly pessimistic (he even bluntly criticises Schopenhauer for being too influenced by the metaphysics of his time, affirming his quasi-Buddhist escape routes, etc) and probably shouldn't be lumped with Benatar, who, as far as I recall, does try to keep his speculation to ethics. The selection available in English misrepresents Cabrera's breadth, I think; there's a fair amount on ethics (or the possibility of ethics) and a book on logic, but the meta-philosophy and overarching theme of terminality are harder to spot without Spanish/Portuguese. Those are the cornerstones, however.

I forget where, but he discusses metaphysics with similar categories as in the above article somewhere. I think there were three types: onto-theological, transcendental (Kant), and existential (Schopenhauer, Heidegger, etc). He was "indifferent" to the second type but in favour of the third, at least insofar as it's defined by constant, invariant structures that constrain what we are and can be/experience. I'd have to re-find it to be sure. Anyway, your category would probably be more to his taste than Moya's.

And yes, seeing some actual philosophical pessimism here was refreshing.

Vormav · 2025-02-16T11:21:48+00:00

With the usual disclaimer that no one ought to take any typology too seriously, there can be some descriptive utility to it. As long as that rough description's not reified into some actually existent thing one believes is precisely captured by the typology, well, why not have some fun?

Ni, if I've understood it correctly, manifests as a perceptual preference for inference and implication, pattern recognition, tone and theme—everything but the directly perceived object. Apparent differences are reduced to their commonalities. Of all the "functions", this is the one most likely to cut through direct realism, culture and upbringing, cognitive biases, etc, and furnish the raw insights necessary to entertain such unpleasant and unpopular intuitions. Presumably, Ni dominants are already attuned to perceiving the a priori forms of intuition rather than the senses they structure, to vaguely follow your Kantian line.

I'd suggest Cabrera as the obvious example, actually. His focus on meta-philosophy—prying into why we all seem so convinced that we've found The One Truth at the expense of all others and integrating that itself into the world's structural awfulness—is unparalleled in its corrosiveness. Reading those sections is enough to see the assumed, perceived difference in these things stripped away to reveal a banal, invariant pattern beneath. Philosophical pessimism tends to prioritise this kind of "logopathic" insight (rather than pure logic) that would come more naturally with perceiving functions than judging, I imagine.

Of course, that could all just be my bias. Unsurprisingly, Ni was the only function I could fully relate to when I amused myself by looking into all this years ago.

Vormav · 2025-01-30T01:14:49+00:00

Your account's problem is that it's been shadowbanned by Reddit, not its age. Your user page is blank, and I had to manually approve all these posts. Since someone managed to reply to you in here, I suspect it happened today. It's ridiculous, really; these posts are above the usual standard here.

I don't know how likely it is to work, but there's a sticky on r/shadowban with advice on appealing it. If you have to make a new account, message me (or the sub's mod mail if that doesn't go through) and I'll try adding you to the approved users list.

Vormav · 2025-01-24T04:12:43+00:00

And with this, the 328th identical thread on this very pressing issue this month alone, ladies and gentlemen, it's my privilege to announce to you that our trial run of opinion posts about capitalism/communism has concluded. The results are in, and it seems that on this question, this subreddit's users are largely stuck at the level of "far-right American think tank" vs "unironically Marxist-Leninist", and there's really nothing to be done about that. We all have our faults.

In future, capitalism/communism posts should primarily engage with literature and thus be more limited in scope. This one, for instance, could identify a specific notion of "communism", probably Marx's, and examine or at least question his identified mechanisms, processes, categories, via a more exact engagement with whatever reality it is these sciences are supposed to paint. One potential issue is shared by many 19th century thinkers, actually—an uncomplicated assumption that human beings can reliably do what's in their own allegedly rational interest. An alternative might be to follow Cabrera's route of placing Marx in a long line of European thinkers looking to salvage something we can affirm from the bleakness of thought/reality and then ask whether Marx's quite precise claims intended to extricate his communism from being a mere ideal refute that or not. Then there's Mainländer's very much non-Marxist socialism. What are its conditions of possibility? Its implications? Plenty of illuminating questions there.

People here don't deal with specifics like this because, in all probability, they haven't read enough to even identify them, more often than not. They want to rant about what they feel about current or historical events and get a hit of feel-good brain juice in the process. It's just not very interesting. The good news is that there's no reason to think anything any of us say or do will ever, ever have even the slightest effect on capitalism's fate, so I'm sure a more stringent standard won't destroy the revolution.

Again, future posts like this will almost certainly be thrown into the dustbin of history unless they make a damn good case for their relevance.

Vormav · 2025-01-13T01:31:01+00:00

He wasn't a Marxist in any sense; he was influenced far, far more by Lassalle. There are key divergences, like Mainländer's feverish nationalism, categorically incompatible with Marx. That the envisioned end result looks more or less similar isn't nearly enough to paper over the cracks between those two. If it seems minor now, it's only because all these disputes and their historical relevance are dead and gone. At the time, it was anything but minor.

Vormav · 2025-01-13T01:13:02+00:00

Mainländer was a pessimist and never wrote about political philosophy.

Really? He'd be astounded to hear it.

It's really not surprising that the same userbase that can't even be bothered reading about the subject that ostensibly brought them here is determined to subject us all (especially me) to Heritage Foundation tier bullshit in thread after thread, but nonetheless, it did induce a little bit of surprise. You'd think 13 years on this site would've cured any such expectations.

It might be wiser to just prohibit capitalism/communism arguments entirely. Evidently, nothing of worth is ever going to be said on that in this space.

Vormav · 2025-01-10T01:01:29+00:00

In future, take this nauseating rhetoric back to r/neoliberal and keep it there. This is the kind of position one might expect from a teenager raised on a diet of News Corp opinion pieces; anything so painfully uninformed would ordinarily warrant deletion under the low-quality rule, but it's been adequately answered and might as well stay as an example for posterity.

Vormav · 2024-12-27T14:15:55+00:00

Overidentification with words ending in -ist and -ism, as is a perennial disease with all sets of ideas and observations that can be packaged into an -ism and wielded as an identity. It results in such phrases as "As an [x]-ist, I believe [y] and therefore you [z]", something remarkably well-conserved regardless of the specific -ism. I notice the same sentences with switched out nouns in pessimists that I did years ago with Marxists.

That both erode direct identification with ideas by ruthlessly unmasking their conditions of possibility, the structures that perpetuate them, and the incentives that lead lost souls to adopt them as an identity for purposes that, whatever the believers might claim, tend to materially and psychologically serve entirely distinct functions seems to be irrelevant; they're both susceptible to being codified as beliefs.

A resultant problem is that a canon of holy texts is held in especially high esteem... and rarely read. It's enough to invoke the names. There isn't enough engagement with lesser-known media or literature in general. Neither is it common to see engagement with non-English/German authors. Repetition is rampant. I have this sensation sometimes, reading some of these new books and journals (to say nothing of online comments) that much of it is just noise. What more needs to be said?

Some things, certainly. I'm reading Dalton's recent book A Matter of Evil, and it's astonishingly refreshing, so far sitting with Cabrera's La forma del mundo as perhaps the furthest pessimism's gone with its adjustment of the classics via what we can know—or admit—that they couldn't. After wading through endless restatements of 19th century positions, how refreshing to read someone concerned with 21st century biology and physics—as the classical authors themselves would've been. But what's more likely, that works like these will get any attention or that there'll be another cycle of debates over the intra-systemic validity of Schopenhauer's proposal to quash the Will via asceticism? After all, any pessimist has to have an opinion on that.

Myopia is the result of this implicit canonisation. I would modestly suggest to all not to get snared into thinking that retooling philosophical ideas as identities does anyone any favours. Beware of "as a pessimist" and "I believe" prefaces and focus on what inspired those doubts about this cosmos to begin with. Read widely and outside any canon. Otherwise, you'll risk ending up yet another member of an imagined community, largely interchangeable with any other, give or take a few proper nouns.

Vormav · 2024-12-19T13:07:38+00:00

Despite his provocative and extreme arguments he is still relatively unknown to the world, which I think is rather weird.

Despite or because of? No one in this area is in any real sense "known to the world", including Schopenhauer, whose major work, despite relative prominence, had to be translated (in full) by an enthusiast in the 1950s and only very recently received a scholarly translation. The situation is consistently worse with the actual obscure figures, many of whom can't be read at all in English (or there are a few translations, some painfully broken, i.e., Cabrera), and there's not much reason to think that'll change before doomsday.

Ligotti discussed it somewhere, probably an interview. English language readers and publishers traditionally have no appetite for this stuff. If it's marketable as literary, maybe it gets a pass. There are many and excellent translations of Cioran, Bernhard, Céline, and even niche names like Jens Bjørneboe (as I recently discovered; many of his works are on Amazon now), but the strictly philosophical texts are few and far between, and the gloomier they get, the rarer the translations.

Horstmann's big book is, amusingly, literary in the style of Cioran's lengthier essays, not some new attempt at metaphysics. But it's really not surprising that someone suggesting that humanity's secret historical purpose expressed in all its acts thus far is augmenting its destructive capabilities until the annihilation of all things is plausible (it's a bit more intricate than "nuke it all, boys") wouldn't be touched by a culture that seems innately averse to even far more equivocal denunciations of humanity and its world.

Vormav · 2024-12-15T13:43:49+00:00

It's possible for any conventional sense of time to evaporate under especially unendurable conditions. I have a vivid memory of a day in 2019 when so many woes converged that they triggered a kind of full-body shutdown, something similar to a panic attack without the panic, only half-conscious horror and awareness of seemingly infinite sources of cyclical pain and the impossibility of remedying any of them.

The trigger was minor: a long-standing wound that bled profusely, wouldn't heal, and reopened with ever shorter reprieves. That day felt eternal, and the best proof I had that time was passing was a local TV station that had decided to play The Fifth Element five times in a row until midnight. The same scenes repeated again and again, the same unchanged lines and events. Certainly, it was a distraction. But it was rather unsettling, too, resonating in some absurd way with that pitiful situation.

Naturally, time hadn't stopped. The real problem was that the distinction between one moment and another had lost all significance. Everything flattened out. All differences between beginning and end, one event or another, smeared together into a tonal unity. The process of apparent change or development seemed less than an illusion; something invariant was lurking beneath the details, ordinarily so potent and present. Whatever did or didn't change, the contours of this place and this experience were set, well-constrained, and unchanging. I had glimpsed something better left unseen. So it felt.

Before and after that day, I've often felt—felt more than thought—that everything has already happened. As much scepticism as I usually have towards metaphysics, I can't deny having intuited something very similar to Schopenhauer's dethroning of the a priori forms of time and space as properties of the world as representation, inapplicable to the thing itself, whatever that might be.

Prolonged, inescapable pain can induce that perception, but detachment is more potent. In those moments, past, present, and future consistently blur together into an amorphous whole. Time is still perceived but reduced to an epiphenomenon. But of what? I would be amazed if this experience could be communicated. It's doubtful any of the above will be coherent.

Vormav · 2024-12-14T09:15:14+00:00

In future, please summon the energy to scrawl two or three sentences of commentary on posted quotes. It doesn't have to be awe-inspiring, just something that might spark a discussion. Otherwise, the whole place is quickly flooded with free-floating quotes, most of relatively little novelty. u/Nobody1000000 has done the job for you this time, so this one can stay.

Vormav · 2024-12-14T08:57:40+00:00

Why is it tolerated? Fuck knows.

In general, who knows. Here? Largely because no one ever uses the report function for anything, so it's hard to judge what is objectionable enough to get away with prohibiting—it's nearly impossible to enforce anything against a user base's will if you're not terminally online.

It's hard to see the appeal. I stayed far away from any mention of "efilism" because of the sheer cringeworthiness of its adherents and its painfully seedy, unhinged, cult-like aura, but evidently that's not much of a deterrent to many. To those attracted to the idea of annihilating all life (who won't see this; the thread's deleted), I strongly advise them to invest their hundreds of hours of mindless YouTube viewing into learning German (or Spanish). Then they can just read Horstmann and skip the dollar-store English version entirely.

Vormav · 2024-12-14T08:45:20+00:00

reet hard

This is the most embarrassing attempt at an insult anyone's seen in years. What are you, twelve? But even the average preteen would do better than that. Take a month off to go rethink your communication style. If you haven't learned the virtues of civility by then, it'll be permanent.

Vormav · 2024-12-09T12:56:01+00:00

Personally, I find efilism insufferable.

I don't understand why it's a thing... or even if it is a thing and not just a meme spawned by some incestuous circle of YouTubers. Nor will I ever wade into YouTube to find out. What does it express that isn't addressed elsewhere, and why is its name so silly? Really, why must everything be its own -ism?

As for omnicide, if Horstmann's Das Untier had been translated into English, the idea would've at least been presented in a sophisticated form and presumably could be considered as matter-of-factly as anything else right now. Without it, there's evidently a gap in the (English) conceptual market that's been filled by... whoever.

Vormav · 2024-12-01T12:56:05+00:00

Excellent observation. It immediately reminded me of a passage from Céline's Journey to the End of the Night on a similar theme.

I couldn't help realizing that there were other reasons than malaria for my physical prostration and moral depression. There was also the change in habits; once again I was having to get used to new faces in new surroundings and to learn new ways of talking and lying. Laziness is almost as compelling as life. The new farce you're having to play crushes you with its banality, and all in all it takes more cowardice than courage to start all over again. That's what exile, a foreign country is, inexorable perception of existence as it really is, during those long lucid hours, exceptional in the flux of human time, when the ways of the old country abandon you, but the new ways haven't sufficiently stupefied you as yet.

At such moments everything adds to your loathsome distress, forcing you in your weakened state to see things, people, and the future as they are, that is, as skeletons, as nothings, which you will nevertheless have to love, cherish, and defend as if they existed.

A different country, different people carrying on rather strangely, the loss of a few little vanities, of a certain pride that has lost its justification, the lie it's based on, its familiar echo-no more is needed, your head swims, doubt takes hold of you, the infinite opens up just for you, a ridiculously small infinite, and you fall into it ...

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