Gensis of existentialism

One of my favorite excerpts from what I consider to be the primer and template of modern day existentialism.

"Not just wicked, no, I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect.

And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something."

- The unnamed narrator in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground.

One of my favorite English actors also left one of the best suicide notes . . . as far as suicide notes go. Brief, apropos and to the point.

"Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck."

- George Sanders

In Memoriam A.H.H.

If Sleep and Death by truly one,
And every spirit's folded bloom
Thro' all its intervital gloom
In some long trance should slumber on;

Unconscious of the sliding hour,
Bare of the body, might it last,
And silent traces of the past
Be all the color of the flower:

So then were nothing lost to man;
So that still garden of the souls
In many a figured leaf enrolls
The total world since life began;

And love will last as pure and whole
As when he loved me here in Time,
And at the spiritual prime
Reawaken with the dawing soul.

A Devil's Tale

"As I was walking among the fires of hell, delight with the
enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and
insanity, I collected some of thier Proverbs: thinking that as
the sayings used in a nation mark its character, so the Proverbs
of Hell shew the nature of Infernal wisdom better than any
description of buildings of garments."

- From William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Tennyson

'In Love, if Love be Love, if love be ours,
Faith, and unfaith can ne'er be equal powers:
Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all.

'It is the little rift within the lute,
That by and by will make the music mute,
And ever widening slowly silence all.

"The little rift within the lover's lute
Or little pitted speck in garner'd fruit,
That rotting inward slowly moulders all.

"It is not worth the keeping: let it go:
But shall it? answer, darling, answer, no.
And trust me not at all or all in all.'

List of books

Here are a list of great legal books:

The Common Law - Oliver Wendell Holmes
A Matter of Interpretation - Justice Scalia
Active Liberty - Justice Breyer
The Judicial Process - Cardozza
The Death of Contracts - Grant Gilmore

- Enjoy

List of books

Vincent Marconi

Vincent Marconi