Cioran, Antero, Kafka… all endowed with a nocturnal mind, that is, a mind that, in opposition to daytime bodily habits, chooses the night to put itself in intense activity. Most nights, therefore, a real torture, an incessant conflict that only ends when the light already invades the bedroom window. The tired body asking for rest, and the mind having in the stillness of dawn the perfect time to work. Ideas bursting like firecrackers, reasoning that builds upon each other, scenes, judgments, afflictions, plans, expectations, all bursting forth, sucking attention when the desire is to annul them all. Then, already accustomed to it, the spirit begins to call good nights those in which sleep is like a semi-sleep—the maximum it can reach—a state in which mental chatter blends into a middle ground between dream and reasoning, already automated by an unconscious enchainment and only interrupted by spaced awakenings, in which a conscious glimmer questions the degree of its own lucidity. And from this apparently terrible routine, many, many fruits, solutions that would never be given in a fully awake state, ideas that, if not originating from the deepest recess of the mind, seem to be placed by the hands of a superior spirit. Very well, very well: it is possible to learn to enjoy nights like this—it is just not possible, for a mind like this, to be in a good mood in the mornings.
Tag: psychology
The Man Whose Life Expresses His Inner Motivation…
Zimmermann already noticed, two centuries in advance, what would be proved theoretically and practically by Frankl:
Une forte résolution et ce désir d’atteindre un grand but peuvent nous rendre supportables les douleurs les plus aiguës.
If, on the one hand, a man seized by emptiness highlights his fragility on a daily basis, a man whose life expresses his inner motivation, whose steps seem to him justified, full of meaning, this man seems of an entirely different kind. It is as if he has, all his life, trained himself for war, for deprivation, and for pain. Nothing seems able to shake him. He has erected, with long and patient effort, an impenetrable psychological fortress. Life has become clear to him, and the same sense of priorities that guides him prevents him from succumbing to the less important. What to the first is the end of the line, to him is a new opportunity for affirmation.
The Human Brain Always Ends Up Humiliated
The human brain always ends up humiliated when it yields to the irresistible temptation to order the irrational. It would be much easier if it accepted it in its unlimited manifestations, and assumed for itself its own limits. One cannot concatenate the spontaneous, the unheard-of, the exceptional, without running an immense risk of falling into ridicule. Error is the fruit of presumption. If reason demands answers, lacks logic, it must be content most of the time with the very process of analysis, with simply reducing possible mistakes through careful observation, and avoiding, as much as possible, hasty judgment. The irrational exists, imposes itself, and does not give a damn about its considerations.
Modern Psychiatry, Invading the Terrain of Philosophy…
Modern psychiatry, invading the terrain of philosophy, is already a kind of doctrine in which eminent Simões Bacamartes are taking great strides toward the end that the original one had. There is a model of normality, and this model is that of the jester. Anyone who does not fit into it is unquestionably sick and should seek professional help. There are judgments about life, about the environment, about others, there are deliberate behaviors that only spring up in an unhealthy mind. All of them, of course, must be treated. A Seneca, a Schopenhauer, fatally suffers from a disorder. So do all saints, all monks, hermits of any kind, poets, dreamers, adventurers, and many others. A Fernando Pessoa, then, is a raving madman, a lunatic to be tied at the foot of a table. And for all these, the most enlightened modern psychiatry has already attributed a mental illness. All this would be funny, if we were not in an age where freedoms are gradually stifled and individuals are increasingly forced to follow a behavioral primer. It would not be long before the State, based on Science, proposes to correct the disturbed, justifying itself by Marketing. And then the mentally ill, those harmful to the common good, are interned. It is possible to perfectly imagine the Ministry of Health that Orwell did not create, operated by today’s very powerful sociopaths, whose taste for control exceeds all limits ever recorded by history. What a catastrophe!