Science, Religion, Politics and in the pursuit of truth – HappyPsychotic

Some quotes from books by Michel Houellebecq:

Here’s an excerpt from his 1st book “Whatever”…

The rules are complex, multiform.  There’s the shopping that needs doing out of working hours, the automatic dispensers where money has to be got.  Above all there are the different payments you must make to the organizations that run different aspects of your life.  You can fall ill into the bargain, which involves costs, and more formalities.

Nevertheless, some free time remains.  What’s to be done?  How do you use your time?  in dedicating yourself to helping people?  But basically other people don’t interest you.  Listening to records?  That used to be a solution, but as the years go by you have to say that music moves you less and less.

Taken in its widest sense, a spot of do-it-yourself can be a way out.  But the fact is that nothing can halt the ever-increasing recurrence of those moments when your total isolation, the sensation of an all-consuming emptiness, the foreboding that your existence is nearing a painful and definitive end all combine to plunge you into a state of real suffering.

And yet you haven’t always wanted to die.

and from “Platform”

The reason he played so much sport, he told me once, was to stupefy himself, to stop himself thinking.  He had succeeded:  I was convinced that he had managed to go through his whole life without ever really questioning the human condition.

Life without anything to read is dangerous:  you have to content yourself with life and that can lead you to take risks.

One morning in February – I remember it very well, it was my birthday – she said to me straight out:  ‘You’ve changed, Michel…I don’t know, you seem happy.’
She was right; I was happy, I remember that.  Of course there are lots of things, a whole series of inevitable troubles, decline and death, of course.  But remembering those months, I can bear witness:  I know that happiness exists.

and the latest book “The Possibility of an Island”

During the first part of your life, you only become aware of happiness once you have lost it.  Then an age comes, a second one, in which you already know, at the moment when you begin to experience true happiness, that you are, at the end of the day, going to lose it.  When I met Belle, I understood that I had just entered this second age.  I also understood that I hadn’t reached the third age, in which anticipation of the loss of happiness prevents you from living.

I bathed for a long time under the sun and the starlight, and I felt nothing other than a slightly obscure and nutritive sensation.  Happiness was not a possible horizon.  The world had betrayed.  My body belonged to me for only a brief lapse of time;  I would never reach the goal I had been set.  The future was empty; it was the mountain.  My dreams were populated with emotional presences.  I was, I was no longer.  Life was real.