"What I seek in the poem is not refuge, but a place where truth can breathe, even if only briefly.” — Paul Celan to René Char

Saturday light seeps through the curtains like a failed apology. After a night without sleep, the body refuses its old obedience. I lie between two failures: the one behind me, the other taking shape ahead. Morning enters, but finds nothing alive to greet it.

Spilliaert’s snow is a silence crossed by iron. The pylons rise like black thoughts, carrying an invisible fire above the sleeping fields. Nothing speaks; yet something passes overhead—cold electricity, a last pulse of the world refusing to die.

Sleep comes in short intervals, interrupted by long deserts of wakefulness. And the day, the damned day, returns without mercy, collecting its daily tax from whatever remains of me.

Odilon Redon — His eye hangs above us like God’s insomnia. It does not look upon the world; it condemns it for existing. In its pupil there is no salvation, only the suspicion that we were born beneath a foreign gaze. To look is to consent to our own guilt.

Kafka: writing at the edge of things. Deleuze and Guattari turn it into a small machine of escape. But escape to where? Perhaps literature is strongest precisely where there is no exit, and yet, sentence after sentence, it continues to invent one.

Allen Michie’s essay dismantles the saintly Van Gogh myth and asks us to look beyond the “hagiography machine.” It restores the artist’s contradictions, failures, and humanity, making his work more unsettling—and more alive Beyond the Great Van Gogh Hagiography Machine artsfuse.org/295066/book-...

Book Review: Going Beyond the Great Van Gogh Hagiography Machine - The Arts Fuse

Émile Bernard, to his credit, spends much of his life redeeming rather than demeaning his friend.

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The obsession to expose oneself in social media is perhaps the last form of solitude: we display every wound, every joy, every insignificant hour, begging strangers to confirm our existence. We no longer live—we document our disappearance, awaiting applause from those who will forget us.

The sea keeps its secret at the horizon, where the visible world becomes a question. I watch that thin, trembling line: neither departure nor arrival, but the wound through which the unknown breathes. Perhaps mystery begins precisely where sight ends.

Edward Hopper’s The Dory (1929) captures solitude without drama . Light falls across the empty space like a silent question. Nothing happens, yet everything feels suspended—between arrival and departure, presence and absence.

I wake without coffee or a cigar, deprived of the petty vices that lend existence its miserable charm. Morning finds me defenseless before consciousness. To awaken is merely to resume our sentence, without appeal—and, most humiliating of all, without even the courtesy of surprise.

Imitation of Edvard Munch’s iconic The Scream, reimagined by Hungarian photographer Vilmos Skuta.

"The absolute rule is to give back what you have received. Never less, always more. The absolute rule of thinking is to give the world back just as we received it—incomprehensible—and, if possible, even more incomprehensible. Even more enigmatic." — Jean Baudrillard: >Le crime parfait<

« Ton tableau a l’odeur d’un bouquet d’étoiles de chaleur. » — René Char, letter to Nicolas de Staël, 8 April 1952

Mass media have not merely colonized our attention; they have colonized our solitude. They spare us the burden of thinking by flooding us with opinions. In their endless noise, silence becomes suspicious—and thought, an almost forgotten form of resistance.

Parallels Midas could turn everything into gold. The digital human can turn everything into attention. Both lead to a world in which true value disappears.

William Faulkner’s dictum, “If I have the choice between nothingness and pain, I choose pain,” leads to the conclusion that horror vacui represents a far more profound experience of pain. One might speak of a “world-weariness.”

After a night without sleep, morning feels like a punishment for having existed. The light enters reluctantly, as if ashamed of itself. I have no desire to begin the day; yet another day begins me. Fatigue is perhaps the purest form of lucidity.

If Hegel were alive, he might call our age the triumph of the Spirit—after a nervous breakdown. History has become a machine for producing noise, progress a ritual of panic. Yet he would smile: even our absurdity serves the Dialectic. Misery, at least, has a logic, too.

Van Gogh—his SUMMER EVENING holds the last light of day like a fragile secret. The fields glow in violet silence, while the distant village flickers with life. It is not simply dusk, but a brief passage between solitude and hope, earth and infinity.

In Čiurlionis, the landscape seems less a place than the memory of a place. The earth has withdrawn, leaving behind a silence that resembles eternity. His horizons do not promise escape; they remind us that even infinity can become another form of solitude.

Behind the stone, barely visible, a small piece of ocean remains on the grey horizon. As if the world, having exhausted its vastness, had left this fragment hidden there—an afterthought of infinity, quietly refusing to disappear.

Reading "The Antichrist" is like entering a church with a torch and discovering that the altar is made of bones. Nietzsche does not merely attack faith; he tears its mask from the face of weakness. I read him and felt my own pieties shiver in the dark.

I adore those book lovers who boast of reading several volumes a week. One wonders: how long is their week, and what sort of books do they consume? Perhaps their weeks last longer, their books are shorter, and thought, that tiresome parasite, is wisely excluded—a blessed economy

Last night, René Cravel reading: La mort difficile In La Mort difficile Crevel makes despair almost elegant. His characters suffer as if suffering were their last luxury. Death is never far away; it waits beside desire, patient and indifferent, while life continues its absurd little performance.

There are pictures before which I am both bewildered and conquered. I cannot name what they awaken in me. I only know that before them I am caught—yet I feel no desire to escape. Some traps are more merciful than freedom.

Sea Without Consolation Sugimoto’s sea is what remains when the world has exhausted its excuses. Horizon and water become one, as if existence itself had forgotten the difference. Before that silence, we discover the cruelest peace: nothing awaits us, yet nothing is lost.

Wisdom comes only at dusk. Minerva’s owl, as Hegel said, does not enlighten us; it merely confirms, with the cruelty of hindsight, that we were blind all along. “I have often regretted my speech, never my silence” — Xenocrates of Chalcedon (c. 396–314 BCE)

Mallarmé writes as if language were a room after everyone has left. Meaning lingers in the objects, in the silences between words. Nothing is explained; everything withdraws. His sentences do not illuminate the world—they make its absence visible.

Fuji appears not as a mountain, but as a memory refusing to disappear. In Yamamoto’s photograph, distance becomes intimacy: the summit withdraws into silence, while the eye approaches. Nothing happens, and yet something vanishes—perhaps the world itself, quietly, behind the image.