"Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness."
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
"I see dead people. Walking around like regular people. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead."
Cole Sear, The Sixth Sense
"The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love...
What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
"Every century is like every other, and to those who live in it seems worse than all times before it... thus much of comfort do we gain from what has been hitherto, not to despond, not to be dismayed, not to be anxious, at the troubles which encompass us. They have ever been; they ever shall be; they are our portion."
John H. Newman
Economic news came in weakly this morning with a shocking miss in the Chicago PMI.
The major US stock indices were waffling about today at the end of November, with an undercurrent of weakness, but with prices somewhat sustained by a lack of conviction and therefore without the substance of genuine volume to take them much higher or lower.
The US electoral and political process is becoming almost compelling to watch, not out of any enjoyment or intellectual enrichment, but with a macabre fascination of a natural disaster or a train wreck.
What follows the emptying of oneself, the impulse to give over to the void so as to escape the burden of thought and compassion, the pain of being human? History suggests that it is an occasion of grace, or a slow descent into madness.
More bread, circuses, and cowbell.
Have a pleasant evening.
