Ceronetti -aphorisms

... to be cured of life ...
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the truth is always, therapeutic, masterfully surgical ...
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What a fool calls  hypocrisy simply provides nurture for the balance of the human world, the only known respite in our race toward disintegration.
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Sodom is a mythic example of how asphyxiating extreme freedom can be: fire gained down to free it.
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Albert Camus said to Jean Guitton, "He never killed a fly". Guitton replied: "The fly he didn't kill carried the plague elsewhere. He should have said flea rather than fly, but the moral is the same.
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Optimism is like carbon monoxide: it leaves a rosy imprint on the cadavar when it kills.
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Pascal observed that  Plato and Aristotle wrote about politics only to lay down the law in madhouse.
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A woman has a very big dog that loves her and is extremely jealous. She brings little kittens into the house and covers them with caresses. After a brief and difficult cohibitation, the dog slaughters them. Thus she has proof of his love: she made a murderer out of him.
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In the world of love, repulsion is more frequent and important than affection. Like two sheets of paper held together by a strong glue, drifting on an ocean of boiling water.
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The river of shit that gives pleasure is Life; although it may assume the appearance of pure water, it is Maya in one of her disguises.
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It's not what you eat but what you don't eat is good for both body and the soul.
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To seek the truth is the goal of whoever looks behind the veil and goes against Nature, which does not wish to be seen in its nudity or intimacy...
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Fear is a contagion. Alain observed that most dangers are not very frightening, unless we see them reflected in another person's face, when almost none of us can resist a feeling of sudden terror.
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It is better to die emptying oneself than filling oneself, better to die from starvation than from indigestion.
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"... and of the spectator that he went there, the spectacle reminded" (Bartoli, death of Pliny the Elder).
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Isaak Babel, Red Calvary: "I can see the wounds of your god cozing seed, a fragrant poison to intoxicate virgins". As if Catherine of Siena were walking amid the Cossacks in a dream.
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We live beneath an electric net that subjects us to the influence of obscure discharges affecting our organic metabolism".
Cesare Soreno
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Life yearns, in secret, to cease to exist. Sometimes it even shouts it, but we do not hear.
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... those forsaken by reason versus those imprisoned by reason.
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Esquirol says that almost all those who escaped  revolutionary scythe were afflicted by mental derangement.
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Rene Guenon said that archaeological digs, usually undertaken by professors incapable of understanding the profound meaning of certain ruins, can resuscitate tenebrous psychic forces that are irritated by purely material knowledge.
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The English psychologist Kenneth Strongman says that when two people stare at each other, the one who looks away first is the dominator. This may be true, because the stronger person is afraid of causing harm by staring too long, obscurely aware of the force and powers of the eye and of the weak defences of the person sitting opposite; but only people with a superior moral sense look away (which is partly what makes them dominators); the wicked, feeling strong, will never be the first to do so.
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In the Canavese region, tormenting Masses were offered to bring harm to one of the living.
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The further into the tragic we enter, the more our sense of the tragic diminishes. The role of the fool becomes prominent. And the Laughing Madman is the tragic in disguise, its last avatar furnished  with a safe conduct. Sophocles is missing, but there are thousands of black humourists.
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Excrement is accepted as long as it is inside of the body: it is not separated from the microcosm's unity. In isolation, excrement shocks and repels because it gives off the smell of denuded anonymous soul.
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The difference between North and South: "A wretch in the snow still has a social value, while a wretch in the sunlight is already putrefying". (Pierre Mac Orlon)
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Marriage without religious rituals is a war that has been won. Now you can fight the war over again and lose.
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An acrobat with curly brown hair and very dark skin performs difficult exercises on the trapeze suspended in the mid-air. Very elegant and self-confident. After many revolutions, he serenely throws himself into the air, plummeting down into a green pool flickering with flames. (Maya. The hard part is throwing yourself. Once you have overcome the fear of diving, you are certain to find light and peace.)
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To keep us from seeing in the active forces of desolation the God whom we seek and love, a fiction like Satan is extremely convenient, for it screens the unbearable truth.
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Do faces belong to the body? Sometimes I have my doubts.They seem to lead independent lives, meeting each other unburdened by the rest of the body. Faces are directly from the demonic and from the depths and from the heights: the rest is merely terrestrial.
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A man acclaimed is a man enchained.
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With a great humanity, Chamfort explains something I have asked myself many times: Why do people have children under intolerable political regimes? "Because nature has laws that are gentler, but more imperious, than of tyrants: because children smile at their mother under Domitian the same way they did under Titus". Vittorio Alfieri addresses this issue in On Tyrany: "I conclude that a man who has a wife and children under tyrany is repeatedly enslaved and humiliated as many times as there are individuals for whom he is forced to tremble."
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Charles Du Boss observed that Dostoevsky's psychological descriptions presuppose direct cooperation with Satan.
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How can we consider those who are most terrified by the human faces  abnormal and mentally ill? The true madness is not to fear it, not to be ashamed of it,  given the things of which it is capable. The terrifying sensation of being surrended, besieged by man, knowing  from one moment to the next the law, all moral restraints, can snap, blow, explode; at times, the law seems to be sustained only by a miracle or momentary calm. Earthquakes, which have never ceased to race through the earth in all directions, provide a kind of relief for man's diseased cities. (Finally a different fear! a fear without a human face!)
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An old doctor says: "Health is a precarious state for man that bodes no good".
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"Even hatred of evil can make men evil, if it is to strong, too dominant, to isolated (so to speak) from our other feelings. Hence our books have inspired evil, calling attention only to tragedies associated with certain abuses. (Joubert)
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More frequently than Pascal, Carlo Emilio Gadda calls "I" the most lurid pronoun of all. Some example he sets.
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"The crimes of extreme civilization" says Barbey d'Aurevilly, "are certainly more atrocious then those of extreme barbarity". We are civilized to the extreme ...
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A psychiatrist on the Badder-Meinhof gang: "They seek salvation in paranoia that blinds them to reality, because they believe everything that surrounds them is an evil machination." On this point they are not blind. Man cannot, however, look upon the underlying evil and thus cannot escape the punishment of total blindness and corruption metod out to all except inspired seers, and specially those athletes who have overcome evil and been immunised before approaching the vision. For Arguna the sight of God in his terrifying aspect is cathartic, he remains a warrior and righteous man. For a Badder, a glimpse behind the veil produced mental upheaval.
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With extraordinary subtlety, Leriche notes an individual privilege: "Not everyone may be capable of producing a painful syndrome". This is one way to restore karma and predestination.
[karma means action. Ceronetti has in mind "karma vipaka"a resalt of action.]
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True doctors are few and little known, for almost all physicians are true invalids. (G.Bruno)

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Our poor lives as witnesses of the end. What can we do? Fast into silence, suicide, or submission.
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Aulus Gellius says that Socrates was saved from the Athenian plague by temperance, abstinence, and a regimental life - so that he was in no way responsible for the common destruction of all. Beautiful myth, possible event. Temperance is the opposite of, the true antidote to plague, which is disorder, concussion, coming undone, and losing control. But it is a classic allopathic cure. Homeopathy requires a temperance that is not to rigid: a dose of the plague, well diluted.
[Then Dhamma is totally allopathic.]
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Karl Klaus says that "diagnosis is a very widespread disease", because the Viena school was more interested in diagnosing than in curing. You can only understand his aphorism by remembering the therapeutic nihilism of which the Viena medical school stood accused.
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Perfect adaptation to contemporary urban life is a sign of serious imbalance. Only those who suffer from city life are healthy. The signs of imbalance that result from conscious suffering and incompatibility are proof of sound mental health.
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The body is perfid and treacherous: it is a Thug who travels with us. It smiles at life and it is a killer sent by death.
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"Every diversion is an anticipation of hell". Well said, Jose Bergamin, but terrible! These words were not spoken by a fanatical fifteenth-century preacher but by brilliant contemporary writer. The infernal substance of diversion consist, I believe, in its literal meaning: to take another way.
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"The influence of our political misfortunes has been so pervasive that I could recount the history of our revolution, from the storming of the Bastille to Bonaparte's last appearance, through the story of a few lunatics whose madness is tied to the events that have make this long period history". (Esquirol)
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Tattoos were all the rage among whores during the Napoleonic era. On their arms they bore the name of the man who exploited them, on their bellies the name of their favourite woman. To the moralists who were striving to abolish slavery: behold an intrepid response from indomitable slaves.
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Borges considers the thirteenth-month bonus one of the moral outrages of Peronism. He is right. It is terrible to be paid for work that is not done, for time that has not been put in, for a month that does not exist. You could pay more for work actually done, but the invention of the thirteenth month is shameful.
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In old people, after almost all sensations of pleasure have been lost, taste is "the last thread from which the happiness of living is suspended" (Bichat) There is also a passage in Montaigne on the sauces that so preoccupy old age in the desert of life.
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Esquirol speaks a great truth: "Some individuals recover their sanity leaving home and lose it again when they return". The home fosters madness and nervous illness: prison and dung heap, in the ward of the Buddhist. I love my home, but I am happy when I am far away. I do not see the bars, my reason is calm, my thoughts have freer rein, and my habits change. Those who have no home, who are born nomads, may never know mental illness.
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The political mental hospital is nothing new. "From Da Porto's testimony we know the Venetians used to lock up many madmen and the most outspoken critics of their give inside the Padua Castle".
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Do you want to become a medical specialist? Then specialize, as did the most subtle Egyptians, in Unknown Illnesses.
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Thank you, Schopenhauer, for a thought that provides me with a broad justification. "It is really a very risky, nay, a fatal thing, to be sociable; because it means contact with natures, the great majority of which are bad morally, and dull or perverse, intellectually." Not and more I too feel that contacting and seeing wasteful robes the heart of its beats and the spirit of vital lymph. I know it is foolish to hope I will find someone in the crowd capable of giving me or receiving from me anything good. "To be unsociable is not to care about such people; and to have enough in oneself to dispense with the necessity of their company is a great piece of good fortune; because almost all our sufferings spring from having to do with other people; and that destroys the peace of mind, which, as I have said, comes next after health in the elements of happiness. Peace of mind is impossible without a considerable amount of solitude."
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Some forms of construction are far more damaging than any destraction.
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"And how does that villainy increase and thrive? Through the religious sentiments of the democratic religion, which demands you speak of the rabble with respect; and if you call the rabble by its name, you are treated like excommunicated heretic, as those who doubted Catholic dogma were in other times". (Vilfredo Pareto to M. Pantaleoni)
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"They will dry their tears but burn the cities" (Dostoevsky, Notebook for The Possessed). Anyone who dries tears with fire ends with charred, empty sockers.
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In the boundless ocean of human enslavement - to Fate, to Predestination, to the Cycle of Birth and Death, to the body, to the passions, to the Zeitgeist, to social order - political freedom is a mysterious gift, a flower blooming out of season.
To lose it is to return to the normal human condition.
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Anyone who tolerates noise is already a corpse.
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A nice maxim from Napoleon: "However little you may eat, you still eat to much".
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In Leopardi the enormous central theme is the destructive truth, whose deadly rays kill our ability to tolerate life. Thoughts, cantos, parables, letters, all his work addresses this theme: his work is an uninterrupted spasm of pain, an infinite weeping. Leopardi is the absolute anti-Marx, anti-Hegel, anti-positivism, anti-progress. He writes for the sake of the rare tokens, the few glimmers of the immutable atoms of available happiness (either that or nothing, either the blessed phantasm or desperation).
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Done for. "Prosperity brings with it an elation that inferior men can never resist", Balzac remarked. Populations consist mainly of interior men incapable of resisting this bliss. The destructive capacities and cravings of these former paupers of the West are amazing. And if one day Africa and Asia shed their impoverished masses, they become mere fragments of uprooted nature. Prosperity is the flood, the plague of the Tombs of Last.
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"What's better? To have Fun with Fungi or to have Idiocy with Ideology?" asked Aldous Huxley, who chose mushrooms. The rational choice is to flee mushrooms as Ideology, and Ideology as mushrooms. We'd better with no drugs.
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Purification occurs very rapidly in a sweet, says Etienne Farrier's Manual de medicine, and culminates in the saponification of the organic tissues. An observation applicable to t effects of the urban environment on morals (the ethical fiber) and on the social framework.
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The only man who tied his name to the revolt against the machines of modern industry, the true, unfortunate benefactor of humanity, is a man who never existed: Ned Ludd. Those good Luddites had to invent a leader to console themselves in their solitude.
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Theodor Adorno as an example of the intellect divorced from the heart. While his intelligence was lofty, it's role was determined by this separation, and his stature reduced by the heart's absence. To little connection between intelligence and heart in today's thinking world. Isolated intelligence, when it is not generating hell's, can at best analyze them; it cannot raise a sooting barrier against pain. If the fire does not destroy us soon, we can predict centuries of endless analyses of Hell, ever more refined and interesting. But we would by wasting our time to beg for a salve against  the burns.

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I never experienced any sort of pain, said Montesquieu, that could not be eased by an hour of reading. Now, there is a true man of letters.
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During cholera's visit to Paris, when rumors of poisoning led to massacres, Guizot said: "Civilization sleeps atop on immense mine of barbarity".
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For Spinoza, Eden still exists, man never left it. Eden is the world, which we lack the courage to call Gan Eden. Such a thing redeems the world but deeply offends human suffering.
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"Sir, forgive me, I did not do it deliberately" (Marie Antoinette on scaffold, to the executioner, for having stepped on his foot by accident). Courtesy and Guillotine: these are memorable encounters! Apologies for stepping on foot are queen's last exquisite sign of superiority.
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You can become wise by accumulating distant ignorances. Ethnology.
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Goethe says that medicine must absorb a physician's total being, because his object is the total human organism.
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Marinetti on Kant's two infinities: "But if the moral law is in us is a true and absolute reality, if the moral order is the essential foundation of all reality, then what do the myriad stars in the sky matter?" This provides a key for understanding the prophets, those ultra-Kantanians obsessed with the absolute reality of moral law, who for its sake would demolish the sky and stars.
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Woman had her safe, dull happiness: in completely abandoning her improbable existence to man's attempts to construct his own and in becoming his material. Now that she struggles to construct her own life, by herself, and fishes in the great seas of man's unhappiness, she has turned into a man full of holes, who immediately sinks.
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If you have a bell near your bed and know that no one will come to your assistance, you are in the ideal condition to need God.
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A knowledge with no clear idea of Evil as universe and principle, a knowledge that pays no mind to the evil that man is and was and for which he is force to atone, is a knowledge with a view to Evil, in favour of Evil, and probably suggested by Evil.
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In reality man is made for more and cannot bear the marriage for long without becoming despondent. To much mixing with women is harmful. Love with excessive mixing - its greatest degree of perfection - noxious. We are made for the plow, the hunt, war, poetry, music, God. Filled with rooms, landings, photographs, elevators, conflicts, worries over responsibilities, we are exhausted into imbecility.
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Kafka's Diaries include a very simple phrase, almost a pun on death that could indicate the extreme limit of the profundity man has reached in defining death: "an apparent end that produces real suffering.
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Monstrous, untarnished egotism always finds some admiring woman. Limited, controlled, cautious egotism, which strives to restrain itself, arouses intolerance, because it does not cover, it does not submerge, it does not engulf everything.
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Since man is a cancer, his metastasis on other planets should no longer seam so improbable.
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Optimism is like carbon monoxide; it leaves a rosy imprint on the cadavar when it kills.
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Julien Sorel is magnificent: I wanted to kill, I must be killed. This is noble murderer, the man who even in his guilt never ceases to be fair. (...)
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War heals the sounds of peace by making its patients die en masse.
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When there is no atonement for crime, the tragic becomes a fermented poultice, a suffocating cloud. Zola takes the place of Sophocles. The tragic can regain oxygen and light only by fully accepting moral responsibility again.

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