My Inspiration for November 2023

Nov 30, 2023

2 min read

This November I enjoyed Arthur Schopenhauer’s “Studies in Pessimism” in particular his essay “The Vanity of Existence”, poetry by a Hungarian Jewish poet Miklos Radnoti, Egon Schiele’s portraits of his wife Edith, Mikhail Nesterov’s paintings of countryside scenes with sad looking women dressed in traditional clothing, views of rooftops and houses, sad autumnal lakes with lonesome little boats, the last birds flying over forests, a sense of something ending… The National’s song “Light Years” really touched me deeply these days as well.

“Of every event in our life we can say only for one moment that it is; for ever after, that it was. Every evening we are poorer by a day. (…) a man never is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with masts and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over.”

(Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism; The Vanity of Existence)

“I, too, will twist and turn in my sprawlingbed, and leisurely soar beyondmy troubles; and take upon myself all your gravecares, as we fallasleep to the rhythmic thrashing of your heart.And then drift off todream, listening to the moist fluttering ofautumn in the night.