José

“Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Platform

“I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort. Sometimes I call it the “backwards law.” When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float. When you hold your breath, you lose it—which immediately calls to mind an ancient and much neglected saying, “Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“... you can also be sure that, no matter how many heroic remedies the playwright invents, ninety-nine drama critics out of a hundred will declare the suicide is absurd and the play unbelievable.
For life, happily filled with shameless absurdities, has the rare privilege of being able to ignore credibility, whereas art feels called upon to pay attention to it.
Life's absurdities don't have to seem believable, because they are real. As opposed to art's absurdities which, to seem real, have to be believable. Then, when they are believable, they are no longer absurd.
An event in life may be absurd; a work of art, if it is a work of art, cannot be.
It therefore follows that to criticize, in the name of life, a work of art for being absurd and unbelievable is sheer stupidity.
In the name of art, yes. But not in the name of life.”
― Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal

“The acceleration of contemporary life also plays a role in this lack of being. The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the master himself has become a laboring slave. In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination.”
― Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society