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Magi129

Magi129

a boomtown rats fan
Oct 31, 2024
17
OK, I'm not sure if it is strictly philosophy or anything, but anyway, this offtopic seems to be the better to place to put these ideas in. I "started" to think about it, at least seriously, after have read the following paragraphs written in a letter from Bethencourd da Silva to the fellow writer Machado de Assis (it is originally in Portuguese, translation might be a little bad):


"My friend,

Abandoned on the path of life with a heart empty of the fair beliefs that populate our souls, when the sky is for us all cloudless blue and the horizon is of that colour of roses with which we clothe all the aspirations of the spirit, I sometimes take pleasure in bringing to mind the days of my past, of this past that I saw fall into the immensity of nothingness, like those sparks of light that die in the darkness of darkness. It is sad to live like this, when still in half life, the tired spirit turns to the past trying to soak itself up with it, because the future is dead, or at least stripped of all the illusions of youth!"


And it got stronger when read this other from Tolstoy:


"There also the further back he looked the more life there had been. There had been more of what was good in life and more of life itself. The two merged together. 'Just as the pain went on getting worse and worse, so my life grew worse and worse,' he thought. 'There is one bright spot there at the back, at the beginning of life, and afterwards all becomes blacker and blacker and proceeds more and more rapidly—in inverse ratio to the square of the distance from death,' thought Ivan Ilych."


And I finally realized that basically every fucking human being whose existence I know lived as such. Many artists, as we know, do and did all their work on childhood and younghood memories. The quote "your heart dies when you grow up" looks pretty real to me. But what you all think about?
 
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longtheriverrun

longtheriverrun

6.4311
Feb 23, 2025
47
I always saw it as an attempt to avoid confronting the future—where the inevitability of suffering and death remains—rather than mourning the past / one's youth. Art—that has its framework rooted in youthful ideas and memories—both tragically and beautifully eternalizes specific periods in time. Suffering is present from the very start, but it takes time for it to truly settle into your life
 
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