steenarie

from Henry Miller's Autobiography discovered by Roth: "I will begin by saying that the way I spend most of my time is not at all the way I would like to spend it. It's because I am still a man with a conscience--which I am sorry about. I am a man who has a regard for his obligations and duties, and these are the things I've been fighting against most of my life. I want to say fuck it all, fuck you all, get out of my life. That's how I feel. I would like, I've repeated it again and again, as far as possible to do nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing. Vegetate almost. Of course it isn't vegetating in the usual sense, but to me it means inactivity, it means a disregard for what people think is important. My emphasis in the last twenty years is in moving from doing to being. I am more interested in being than doing. There is nothing that I really want to accomplish, nothing has any real value to me. Nothing is so important that it has to be done and yet every day I find myself doing these fucking chores imposed upon me by other people. There are so many projects. Everybody thinks he's got to know what I'm doing, what is my life like, what has it been and so on. And I'm utterly disgusted in a way, rehashing everything about my own life or future projects. I don't want any plans, I have no real plans for the future. Every day when I wake up I want to say "le bel aujourd'hui," as they say in France, and there shouldn't be anything more to it. I want to live the day in whatever fashion I like, and I have no fashion. I'm at that wonderful, beautiful point where I don't see the need for any prescribed way of living. But I can't do it. I'm too well known fro one thing; people pester me, and my friends are often my worst enemies. I can't ignore them and I don't even try. Actually you don't have a choice. We think we have choices, but your temperament, your character and your previous mode of living--everything that you have done in y our life--dictates what you will do, whether you like it or not."

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