## Metadata - Author: [[John Gray]] - Full Title: The Silence of Animals - Category: #books ## Highlights - In the GDR at present people often try to escape from their enforced happiness; but when they get to the Federal Republic they just as often complain about their loneliness, which is the other side of the coin of individual liberty. Things were probably similar in the Third Reich. We shall not try here to decide the question who is happier, socialized man or man living as an individual. ([Location 574](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=574)) - Tyranny offers relief from the burden of sanity and a licence to enact forbidden impulses of hatred and violence. By acting on these impulses and releasing them in their subjects tyrants give people a kind of happiness, which as individuals they may be incapable of achieving. ([Location 604](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=604)) - The overthrow of the ancien régime in France, the Tsars in Russia, the Shah of Iran, Saddam in Iraq and Mubarak in Egypt may have produced benefits for many people, but increased freedom was not among them. Mass killing, attacks on minorities, torture on a larger scale, another kind of tyranny, often more cruel than the one that was overthrown – these have been the results. To think of humans as freedom-loving, you must be ready to view nearly all of history as a mistake. ([Location 606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=606)) - In From the Other Shore, a collection of essays and dialogues written by Alexander Herzen between 1847 and 1851, the radical Russian journalist imagines a dialogue between a believer in human freedom and a sceptic who judges humans by their behaviour rather than by their professed ideals. To the surprise of the believer, the sceptic quotes Rousseau’s dictum, ‘Man is born to be free – and is everywhere in chains!’ But the sceptic does so only in order to mock Rousseau’s rousing declaration: ‘I see in it a violation of history and contempt for facts. I find that intolerable. Such caprice offends me. Besides, it is a dangerous procedure to state, a priori, as a fact, what is really the crux of the problem. What would you say to a man who, nodding his head sadly, remarked that “Fish are born to fly – but everywhere they swim!”?’ The sceptic goes on to present the argument of the ‘ichthyophil’, who believes that human beings long to be free: First of all he will point out to you that the skeleton of a fish clearly shows a tendency to develop the extremities into legs and wings. He will then show you perfectly useless little bones that are a hint of the bone of a leg or a wing. Then he will refer to flying fish, which prove, in fact, that fishkind not only aspires to fly, but… ([Location 611](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=611)) - History has developed by means of absurdities; people have constantly set their hearts on chimeras, and have achieved very real results. In waking dreams they have gone after the rainbow, sought now paradise in heaven, now heaven on earth, and on their way have sung everlasting songs, have decorated temples with their everlasting sculptures, have built Rome and Athens, Paris and London. One dream yields to another; the sleep sometimes becomes lighter, but is never quite gone. People will accept anything, believe in anything, submit to anything and are ready to sacrifice much; but they… ([Location 627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=627)) - Perhaps the most remarkable ichthyophils are the Romantics, who believe human individuality is everywhere repressed. Among them none is so well known as the author of On Liberty (1859), a seminal statement of ichthyophil philosophy. As Herzen summarized this view, John Stuart Mill was: horrified by the constant deterioration of personalities, taste and style, by the inanity of men’s interests and their absence of vigour; he looks clearly, and sees clearly that everything is becoming shallow, commonplace, shoddy, trite, more ‘respectable’, perhaps, but more banal … he says to his contemporaries: ‘Stop! Think again! Do you know where you are going? Look: your soul is ebbing away.’ But why does he try to wake the sleepers? What path, what way out, has he devised for them?… Modern Europeans, he says, live in vain unrest, in senseless changes: ‘In getting rid of singularities we do not get rid of changes, so long as they are performed each time by everyone. We have cast away our fathers’ individual, personal way of dressing, and are ready to change the cut of our clothes two or three times a year, but only so long as everybody changes it; and this is done not with an eye to beauty or convenience but for the sake of change itself!’… So we have come back and are facing the same question. On what principle are we to wake the sleeper? In the name of what shall the flabby personality, magnetised by trifles, be inspired to be discontented with its present life of railways, telegraphs, newspapers and cheap goods? ([Location 636](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=636)) - Ichthyophils imagine that human beings want a life in which they can make their own choices. But what if they can be fulfilled only by a life in which they follow each other? The majority who obey the fashion of the day may be acting on a secret awareness that they lack the potential for a truly individual existence. ([Location 649](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=649)) - Liberalism – the ichthyophil variety, at any rate – teaches that everyone yearns to be free. Herzen’s experience of the abortive European revolutions of 1848 led him to doubt that this was so. It was because of his disillusionment that he criticized Mill so sharply. But if it is true that Mill was deluded in thinking that everyone loves freedom, it may also be true that without this illusion there would be still less freedom in the world. The charm of a liberal way of life is that it enables most people to renounce their freedom unknowingly. Allowing the majority of humankind to imagine they are flying fish even as they pass their lives under the waves, liberal civilization rests on a dream. ([Location 652](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=652)) - Real wealth is physical and intrinsically finite; made from things that are used up or rust away, it is eaten by time. Debt is potentially limitless, feeding on itself and increasing until it can never be paid off. ([Location 695](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=695)) - According to some historians, inequality in America at the start of the twenty-first century is greater than in the slave-based economy of imperial Rome in the second century. Of course there are differences. Contemporary America is probably less stable than imperial Rome. It is hard to see how the volatile paper wealth of a few can be sustained on the basis of a decimated workforce in a hollowed-out economy. The insuperable problem of American capitalism may well turn out to be the declining profits of debt slavery. ([Location 711](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=711)) - Austerity in Greece has resulted in a flight from the city to the countryside and reversion to a barter economy – a reverse form of economic development. In an irony that is somehow predictable, the determination to impose modernization is forcing a return to more primitive forms of life. ([Location 721](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=721)) - The crisis today resembles that in the 1930s in a more basic respect: it cannot be overcome by collective action. It is part of the faith in progress that no human problem is in the long run insoluble. Marx declared in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) that ‘humanity sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve.’ Right in thinking that capitalism contains a potential for self-destruction, Marx was wrong in believing that capitalism would be followed by a more lasting mode of production. Wealth can be created in many kinds of economic system, but never for long. The human animal consumes what it has produced, and then moves on. The rise and fall of economic systems is the normal course of history. Today, while one kind of capitalism is declining, others – in China and India, Russia, Brazil and Africa – are advancing. Capitalism is not ending. It is changing its shape, as it has done many times before. How old and new capitalisms settle their conflicting claims over the Earth’s resources in a time of rising human numbers remains to be seen. The most serious problems are not resolved. More than anything enacted by Roosevelt, it was mass mobilization in the Second World War that lifted America, and eventually the world, out of the Great Depression. In the same way, the problems facing the world today will not be overcome by any kind of decision. Instead there will be a shift of scene, an alteration in the global landscape that no one can foresee or control, as a result of which difficulties that are presently intractable will be left behind. ([Location 734](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=734)) - If there is anything unique about the human animal it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience. Science and technology are cumulative, whereas ethics and politics deal with recurring dilemmas. Whatever they are called, torture and slavery are universal evils; but these evils cannot be consigned to the past like redundant theories in science. They return under different names: torture as enhanced interrogation techniques, slavery as human trafficking. Any reduction in universal evils is an advance in civilization. But, unlike scientific knowledge, the restraints of civilized life cannot be stored on a computer disc. They are habits of behaviour, which once broken are hard to mend. Civilization is natural for humans, but so is barbarism. ([Location 776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=776)) - The evidence of science and history is that humans are only ever partly and intermittently rational, but for modern humanists the solution is simple: human beings must in future be more reasonable. These enthusiasts for reason have not noticed that the idea that humans may one day be more rational requires a greater leap of faith than anything in religion. Since it requires a miraculous breach in the order of things, the idea that Jesus returned from the dead is not as contrary to reason as the notion that human beings will in future be different from how they have always been. ([Location 782](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=782)) - selection is that it is a process of drift. Evolution has no end-point or direction, so if the development of society is an evolutionary process it is one that is going nowhere. ([Location 811](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=811)) - If there is a choice it is between myths. In comparison with the Genesis myth, the modern myth in which humanity is marching to a better future is mere superstition. As the Genesis story teaches, knowledge cannot save us from ourselves. If we know more than before, it means only that we have greater scope to enact our fantasies. But – as the Genesis myth also teaches – there is no way we can rid ourselves of what we know. If we try to regain a state of innocence, the result can only be a worse madness. The message of Genesis is that in the most vital areas of human life there can be no progress, only an unending struggle with our own nature. ([Location 823](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=823)) - Science and the idea of progress may seem joined together, but the end-result of progress in science is to show the impossibility of progress in civilization. Science is a solvent of illusion, and among the illusions it dissolves are those of humanism. Human knowledge increases, while human irrationality stays the same. Scientific inquiry may be an embodiment of reason, but what such inquiry demonstrates is that humans are not rational animals. ([Location 836](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=836)) - Modern myths are myths of salvation stated in secular terms. What both kinds of myths have in common is that they answer to a need for meaning that cannot be denied. In order to survive, humans have invented science. Pursued consistently, scientific inquiry acts to undermine myth. But life without myth is impossible, so science has become a channel for myths – chief among them, a myth of salvation through science. When truth is at odds with meaning, it is meaning that wins. Why this should be so is a delicate question. Why is meaning so important? Why do humans need a reason to live? Is it because they could not endure life if they did not believe it contained hidden significance? Or does the demand for meaning come from attaching too much sense to language – from thinking that our lives are books we have not yet learnt to read? ([Location 846](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=846)) - Along with every serious philosophy and religion, Freud accepted that humans are sickly animals. Where he was original was in also accepting that the human sickness has no cure. It would not be wrong to see Freud as fashioning a new type of Stoic ethics. A mark of his iconoclasm is that he viewed resignation as a virtue. ([Location 871](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=871)) - Echoing the Christian faith in free will, humanists hold that human beings are – or may someday become – free to choose their lives. They forget that the self that does the choosing has not itself been chosen. ([Location 886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=886)) - For Stoics such as Marcus Aurelius, the good life was a life of virtue. To transgress morality in order to live a better life was unthinkable, since the commands and prohibitions of morality were the laws of the universe turned into principles of conduct. Not believing in a law-governed cosmos, Freud took a different view. Morality was a set of human conventions, which could be disregarded or altered when it stood in the way of a more satisfying life. It was not just the unconscious that had to be mastered. So did the super-ego, the part of the human mind called the conscience, which would like to be entirely ‘good’. The super-ego – in German, das Über-Ich, or ‘Over-I’ – internalizes the constraints of civilization. But in Freud’s view it is only when they have achieved a certain detachment from ‘morality’ that anyone can claim to be an individual. Like Nietzsche but more soberly, Freud envisioned a form of life that was ‘beyond good and evil’. Describing the qualities of a good psychoanalyst in a letter to a colleague, he wrote that a good psychoanalyst should not be too moral: ‘Your analysis suffers from the hereditary weakness of virtue. It is the work of an over-decent man … One has to be a bad fellow, transcend the rules, sacrifice oneself, betray, and behave like the artist who buys paints with his wife’s household money, or burns the furniture to warm the room for his model. Without such criminality there is no real achievement.’ ([Location 892](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=892)) - ‘Where id was,’ Freud wrote, ‘there shall ego be.’ The sense of oneness had no magic for him. Human life may be a meandering road to death. But, until we reach our destination, we are at war. ([Location 925](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=925)) - The founder of psychoanalysis has been seen as providing a therapy for modern ills, when what he actually did is subvert modern myths of health. But Freud was not suggesting that the mind could be emptied of myth. Psychoanalysis was itself a kind of mythology – ‘our mythological theory of instincts’, as Freud put it in an exchange on the causes of war he had with Einstein. Freud writes that the death instinct – an instinct that is ‘at work in every living creature and is striving to bring it to ruin and to reduce life to its original condition of inanimate matter’ – may be a myth. ‘It may perhaps seem to you as though our theories are a kind of mythology,’ he writes to Einstein, ‘and, in the present case, not even an agreeable one.’ Then he goes on to ask Einstein: ‘But does not every science come in the end to a mythology like this? Cannot the same be said today of your own Physics?’ ([Location 946](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=946)) - Of course Freud’s ideas are a system of metaphors. So is all human discourse, even if metaphors are not all of one kind. Science is not distinguished from myth by science being literally true and myth only a type of poetic analogy. While their aims are different, both are composed of symbols we use to deal with a slippery world. ([Location 982](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=982)) - For all we know, science could be a succession of lucky errors. ([Location 987](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=987)) - For most of his life Freud aimed to extend the reach of conscious awareness. For this Freud, religion was the primary example of the human need for illusion. But as a later Freud came to realize, the illusions of religion contain truths that cannot be conveyed in other ways. ([Location 1007](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1007)) - Freud is adamant that science is not fiction, and it is true that the methods of science include falsification – the systematic attempt to demonstrate that a theory is in error – whereas myths and fictions cannot be true or false. But if we know anything from the history of science, it is that the most severely tested theories still contain errors. No doubt the theories we use are the ones we think closest to the truth; but we do not know which parts of them are true and which are not. Still we go on using them. It has been said that myths are fictions whose human authorship is not acknowledged. But scientific theories can also become myths when their fictive qualities are forgotten. ([Location 1034](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1034)) - The myth of progress is the chief consolation of modern humankind. But Freud did not aim to provide another version of consolation. If he had an aim, it may have been to explore what it would mean to live without consolations. Freud is the thinker who poses the question: how can modern humans beings live without modern myths? ([Location 1067](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1067)) - An anxious attachment to belief is the chief weakness of the western mind. It is a fixation with a long lineage, going all the way back to Socrates, the founder of philosophy – at least as we understand it (and him) today. But outside of some currents in western religion and the humanist successors of monotheism, belief is not the foundation of practice. Religions have produced highly refined systems of ideas, such as Vedanta, Buddhist dialectics and the Kabbalah, but these are not apologies for belief. If they have a practical task, it is to point to realities that cannot be captured in beliefs. ([Location 1088](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1088)) - A supreme fiction, Stevens tells us, must have a number of attributes: it must be abstract; it must change; and it must give pleasure. These are interesting requirements. Though they develop over time, myths are thought to be timeless. Why not admit the obvious, Stevens seems to be asking, and accept that the fictions that shape our lives are as changeable as our lives are themselves? It may seem odd to ask of a fiction that it give pleasure. But why else should anyone make it a part of their life? A fiction is not something you need to justify. When it comes to you, you accept it freely. As for other people, they can do as they please. The supreme fiction is not any final belief but the activity of making fictions, which Stevens calls poetry. ([Location 1093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1093)) - No fiction could be supreme for everyone, or even for a single person, for ever. The supreme fiction is not the one idea worth having, for there can be no such idea. ([Location 1104](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1104)) - Admitting that our lives are shaped by fictions may give a kind of freedom – possibly the only kind that human beings can attain. Accepting that the world is without meaning, we are liberated from confinement in the meaning we have made. Knowing there is nothing of substance in our world may seem to rob that world of value. But this nothingness may be our most precious possession, since it opens to us the world that exists beyond ourselves. ([Location 1106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1106)) - For Freud the pursuit of happiness is a distraction from living. It would be better to aim for something different – a type of life in which you do not need a fantasy of satisfaction in order to find being human an interesting and worthwhile experience. ([Location 1112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1112)) - The ideal of self-realization owes much to the Romantic movement. For the Romantics the supreme achievement was originality. In creating new forms the artist was godlike. The poems and paintings of Romantic artists were not variations on traditional themes. They were meant to be something new in the world, and soon it came to be believed that every human life could be original in this way. Only by finding and becoming their true self could anyone be happy. For Freud there was no true self to be found. The mind was a chaos, and imposing order on it was the task of reason. ([Location 1120](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1120)) - For Freud human life was a process of ego-building, not the quest for a fictitious inner self. Looking for your true self invites unending disappointment. If you have no special potential, the cost of trying to bring your inner nature to fruition will be a painfully misspent existence. Even if you have unusual talent, it will only bring fulfilment if others also value it. Few human beings are as unhappy as those who have a gift that no one wants. ([Location 1127](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1127)) - The idea of self-realization is one of the most destructive of modern fictions. It suggests you can flourish in only one sort of life, or a small number of similar lives, when in fact everybody can thrive in a large variety of ways. We think of a happy life as one that culminates in eventual fulfilment. Ever since Aristotle philosophers have encouraged us to think in this backward-looking way. But it means thinking of your life as if it had already ended, and none of us knows how we will end. Spending your days writing an obituary of a person you might have been seems an odd way to live. ([Location 1138](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1138)) - In an exchange of letters with Jung in 1910 in which Jung suggested that psychoanalysis must ‘transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine’, Freud wrote: ‘But you mustn’t regard me as the founder of a religion. My intentions are not so far-reaching … I am not thinking of a substitute for a religion: this need must be sublimated.’ ([Location 1192](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1192)) - Nowadays myths can be practically momentary: transmitted throughout the world by 24-hour news and the internet, they spread virally, entering the minds of tens and hundreds of millions of people in minutes or hours. Are these true myths, or mass-manufactured fantasies? At times they can be both. In recent years images of resistance to tyranny have been relayed around the world by mass media, many of them captured on mobile phones by the resisters themselves. The myths of revolution that moved the resisters were reinforced, for a time, by the media that make the news. But myths survive for only as long as they are enacted by those who accept them. As popular uprisings go through their normal sequence of rebellion, anarchy and renewed tyranny, the myth of revolution dissipates to be replaced by new myths of conspiracy and betrayal. Myths are not eternal archetypes frozen somewhere out of time. They are more like snatches of music that play in the mind. Seeming to come from nowhere, they stay with us for a while and then are gone. ([Location 1267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1267)) - Many people think the world is like a book. The pages may be torn and the print smudged; we may find some pages missing, or forget the book in a taxi. But if only we could read the text in full, we would understand the world in which we find ourselves. Hulme thought differently. In a series of notes he began in 1906–7, which he called ‘Cinders’, he wrote: ‘Never think in a book: here are Truth and all the other capital letters; but think in a theatre and watch the audience. Here is the reality, here are human animals. Listen to the words of heroism and then look at the crowded husbands who applaud. All philosophies are subordinate to this. It is not a question of the unity of the world and men afterwards put into it, but of human animals, and of philosophies as an elaboration of their appetites.’ ([Location 1348](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1348)) - ‘The truth is that there are no ultimate principles, upon which the whole of knowledge can be built once and for ever as on a rock. But there are an infinity of analogues, which help us along, and give us a feeling of power over the chaos when we perceive them. The field is infinite and herein lies the chance for originality. Here there are some new things under the sun.’ ([Location 1358](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1358)) - ‘Man is the chaos highly organised, but liable to revert to chaos at any moment.’ ([Location 1362](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1362)) - ordinary language is a succession of compromises perpetuated by habit. ([Location 1390](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1390)) - The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. The first thing is to recognise how extraordinarily difficult this is. It is no mere matter of carefulness: you have to use language, and language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise – that which is common to you, me and everybody. But each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see, he must have a terrific struggle with language, whether it be with words or the technique of other arts. Language has its own special nature, its own conventions and communal ideas. It is only by a concentrated effort of mind that you can hold it fixed to your own purpose. ([Location 1391](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1391)) - The need for peace seduces the human mind into seeing the mirage of a resting-place in the desert of its striving for knowledge; the scholars believe in their linguistic roots. At all times and in all places, the science of a particular time is the expression of the poor human spirit’s wistful desire for rest. Only critique – wherever it is still alive in even poorer heads – may not rest, for it cannot rest. It must rudely awaken science, remove its illusion of an oasis, and drive it further along on the hot, deadly, and possibly aimless desert paths. ([Location 1463](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1463)) - An uncompromising atheist and author of a four-volume history of atheist thinking, Mauthner noted that ‘atheism’ – like ‘God’ – is only a word. His atheism has nothing in common with the evangelical unbelief of his day or ours. In a pure form, atheism is no more to do with unbelief than religion is about belief. Strictly understood, atheism is an entirely negative position. You are not an atheist if you deny what theists affirm. You are an atheist if you have no use for the concepts and doctrines of theism. ([Location 1475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1475)) - Negative theologians use language as Mauthner thought it should be used: to point to something (not a thing in any ordinary sense) that cannot be expressed in words. If only that is real which can be captured in language, God is unreal. But it is not only ‘God’ that is unreal in this way. So are all general terms including ‘matter’ and ‘humanity’ – abstractions that have featured in the catechisms of unbelief. Atheism does not mean rejecting ‘belief in God’. It means giving up belief in language as anything other than a practical convenience. The world is not a creation of language, but something that – like the God of the negative theologians – escapes language. Atheism is only a stage on the way to a more far-reaching scepticism. Mauthner called this view – ‘just in order to have a word-symbol’ – godless mysticism. ([Location 1482](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1482)) - There is no mysterious essence we can call a “place”. Place is change. Its motion is killed by the mind, and preserved in the amber of memory.’ ([Location 1505](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1505)) - ‘So much cruelty is mercifully concealed from us by the sheltering leaves. We seldom see the bones of pain that hang beyond the green summer day. The woods and fields and gardens are places of endless stabbing, impaling, squashing and mangling. We see only what floats to the surface: the colour, the song, the nesting, and the feeding. I do not think we could bear a clear vision of the animal world.’ Walking in the woods and seeing a bullfinch biting off a bud from a twig, he cannot help thinking of the violence of bird life: ‘the pull and twist of his bill to break off a bud reminded me of a peregrine breaking the neck of its prey. Whatever is destroyed, the act of destruction does not vary very much. Beauty is vapour from the pit of death.’ ([Location 1583](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1583)) - The laws of memory are subject to the more general laws of habit. Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantor of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence. Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals … The creation of the world did not take place once and for all, but takes place every day. Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects. The periods of transition that separate consecutive adaptations (because by no expedient of macabre transubstantiation can the grave sheets serve as swaddling clothes) represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being. ([Location 1969](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=1969)) - Contemplation can be understood as an activity that aims not to change the world or to understand it, but simply to let it be. ([Location 2126](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=2126)) - If there has been no spiritual change of kind Within our species since Cro-Magnon Man And none is looked for while the millennia cool, Yet each of us has known mutations in the mind When the world jumped and what had been a plan Dissolved and rivers gushed from what seemed a pool For every static world that you or I impose Upon the real one must crack at times and new Patterns from new disorders open like a rose And old assumptions yield to new sensations. The Stranger in the wings is waiting for his cue … ([Location 2139](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AAYF9Q6&location=2139))