Spurious

Jim Jarmusch: The subject is not coffee and cigarettes — that’s just a pretext for showing the undramatic part of your day, when you take a break and use these drugs, or whatever. It’s a pretext for getting characters together to talk in the sort of throwaway period of their day.

iW: Why would viewers find that interesting?

Jarmusch: Well, I think our lives are made of little moments that are not necessarily dramatic, and for some odd reason I’m attracted to those moments. I made “Night on Earth,” which only takes place in taxi cabs, because I kept watching movies and where people, like, say, “Oh, I’ll be right over,” and you see them get out of the taxi, and I’m always thinking, “I wonder what that moment would be like.” The moment that’s not important to the plot. I made a whole movie about what could be taken out of movies.

iW: The interstices.

Jarmusch: Yes. One of my favorite directors is Yasujiro Ozu. On his gravestone, which I visited in Japan, was a single Chinese character that means, roughly, “the space between all things.” That’s what I’m attracted to.

Interview with Jim Jarmusch, Indie Wire

The last day will be so imperceptible, that we shall not notice its dawn or its twilight, or the last night. Perhaps the last day he’s passed, unnoticed? Maybe we live in the twenty-fifth hour.

Is the world around us a sad epilogue to reality? Is this world the entrance gate to nothingness?

The world must end because it is intolerable. The prophets proclaim the end of the world so as to cause it.

Empty shells of a once burning hope.

Mine was a life without religion, and is this not, after all, a definition of philosophy? … I am a failure, because I live philosophy. Which is to say that philosophy is my life.

Vilem Flusser

This universe is an abandoned kingdom; its price is the withdrawal of God, and its very existence is the cause of separation from God.

… the space that God left in the world is located not so much outside God, but instead ‘between’ God and God.

Evil is the distance between the creature and God.

God creates a finite being who says I, who cannot love God. By the effect of grace, little by little the I disappears, and God loves himself through the creature who becomes empty, who becomes nothing.

De-creation as transcendent completion of creation: annihilation in God that gives the annihilated creature the plenitude of being of which it is deprived so long as it exists.

To live while ceasing to exist so that in a self that is no longer the self God and his creation may find themselves face to face’.

… the person in us is the part of us belonging to error and sin.

… the ego is only the shadow projected by sin and error which blocks God’s light and which I take for a being.

Simone Weil

Human life is made in such a way that many problems that pose themselves to all human beings without exception are insoluble outside sainthood.

God alone, and absolutely nothing else, is worthy of our interest.

How can a being whose essence is to love God and who is located in space and time have any vocation other than the Cross?

Crucifixion is the end, the accomplishment of a human destiny.

Simone Weil

Is that also the secret of Velasquez’s fools? Is the sadness in their eyes the bitterness of possessing the truth, of having, at the cost of an unnameable degradation, the possibility of saying the truth, and of not being heard by anyone? (except Velasquez). It is worth the trouble of considering them [fools] again with this question in mind.

Simone Weil

I have no desire to demonstrate, to amuse, or to persuade … I aspire to absolute rest and continuous night ... to know nothing, to teach nothing ,to will nothing, to feel nothing, to sleep and still to sleep, this today is my only wish. A base and loathsome wish, but still sincere.

Baudelaire

 A failure of communication – that’s what my film is about. If there was communication, we wouldn’t need to speak, or make music, or make films. Cinema comes at a moment when there is a failure of communication.

Godard, JLG/JLG:

Sometimes I believe that nothing has meaning. On a miniscule planet that has been heading towards oblivion for millennia, we are born in pain, grow up, struggle, fall ill, suffer, cause suffering, cry out and die: and at that very moment, others are born in order to start the whole useless comedy over.

Sabato

 The Russian people in accordance with their metaphysical nature and vocation are a people of the End. Apocalypse has always played a great part both among the masses of our people and at the highest cultural level … In our thought the eschatological problem takes an immeasurably greater place than in the thinking of the West.

Berdyaev, The Russian Idea

In a rare lyrical outburst, in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, Kant describes what would befall such a philosopher like Spinoza:

Deceit, violence and envy will always surround him, even though he is himself honest, peaceable and benevolent; and the righteous ones besides himself that he will still encounter will, in spite of all their worthiness to be happy, nevertheless will be subject by nature, which pays no attention to that, to all the evils of poverty, illness, and untimely death, just like all the other animals on the earth, and will always remain thus until one wide grave engulfs them all together (whether honest or dishonest, it makes no difference here), and flings them, who were capable of having believed themselves to be the final end of creation, back into the abyss of the aimless chaos of matter from which they were drawn.