[...] she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There were the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through with it.
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Part I, Chapter 10Virginia Woolf
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What we really long for after death is to go on living this life, this same mortal life, but without its ills without its tedium, and without death. Seneca, the Spaniard, gave expression to this in his Consolatio ad Marciam... And what but that is the meaning of that comic conception of the eternal recurrence which issued from the tragic soul of poor Nietzsche, hungering for concrete and temporal immortality?
Miguel de Unamuno
Woe to the person who wants to be excused from suffering! That apostolic expression does not indicate only the forsakenness, the suffering of separation, which is even more terrible than the separation of death, since, death only separates a person from the temporal and therefore is a release, whereas this separation shuts him out from the eternal and therefore is an imprisonment that again leaves the spirit sighing in the fragile earthen vessel, in the cramped space, in the status of an alien, because the home of the spirit is in the eternal and the infinite. Four Upbuilding Discourses, 1844 p. 337 (Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses)
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
So, yes, death. When you're young, you think about it… Well, you don't really think about it, you know - you have the intelligence of raspberry jam, you're not thinking about anything. But it's there, as a motive force, making you do things. Go and get a job. Go and find a flat. Find somebody else. Put them in the flat. Make them stay. Get a toaster. Go to work. Get on the bus. Look at your boss. Say, "f**k". Sit down. Pick up the thing. Go blank. Scream internally. Go home. Listen to the radio. Look at the other person. Think, "WHY? Why did this happen?". Go to bed. Lie awake! At night! Get up. Feel groggy. Put the things on - your clothes - whatever they're called. Go out the door, into work - same thing! Same people, again, it's real, it is happening, to you. Go home again! Sit, Radio, Dinner - mmm, GARDENING, GARDENING, GARDENING, death. And so, the young woman thinks that if she has the right curtains, she can keep death and all other problems at bay. But the young man knows that the only way to keep death at bay, is by having sex pretty much constantly. Now, because nature's so clever, it makes the couple compromise by giving them children, so they never have to have sex again, and then the children pull the curtains down so there was NEVER anything to worry about in the first place!
Dylan Moran
A woman stopped by Orgonon to meet the man she said had saved her life. She had been diagnosed as having incurable cancer, she told Reich; accepting her fate, she had put her affairs in order and decided to enjoy what life was left to her. But then she heard about his accumulator and tried it. Now the cancer was gone.
Ross says that Reich listened to the woman's story, then told her bluntly: "I didn't save your life. You changed your life when you thought you were going to die. You started to have fun, to let out the things you had kept pressed down inside you. You saved your life."
Ross paused and looked said for the only time in the interview. "I can't see to this day," he said, "how the FDA called that man a fraud."Wilhelm Reich
One thing I have frequently observed in children, that when they have got possession of any poor creature, they are apt to use it ill: they often torment, and treat it very roughly, young birds, butterflies, and such other poor animals which fall into their hands, and that with a seeming kind of pleasure. This I think should be watched in them, and if they incline to any such cruelty, they should be taught the contrary usage. For the custom of tormenting and killing of beasts, will, by degrees, harden their minds even towards men; and they will delight in the suffering and destruction of inferior creatures, will not be apt to be very compassionate or benign to those of their own kind. Our practice takes notice of this in the exclusion of butchers from juries of life and death.
John Locke
Woolf, Virginia
Woollcott, Alexander
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