One of my favorite quotes is this one by Walker Percy (though it is too cynical): “How can the great suck of self ever hope to be a fat cat dozing in the sun?”, from The Second Coming (more text).
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Although I hate its silly, hand-wringing cynicism, and also dislike silly “existential dread” stuff… and stuff like the following:
- Nietzsche handwringing about the “horror and absurdity of existence” … “One man will be enthralled by the Socratic delight in knowledge and the delusion that it might heal the eternal wound of existence”. The Birth of Tragedy
- Sartre and “Nausea“
- Adorno’s concept of “damaged life” or “damaged existence.” Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life.
- Nozick’s ridiculous and self-absorbed narcissism in his non-rigorous, hyperbolic statement that “I believe that the Holocaust is an event like the Fall in the way traditional Christianity conceived it, something that radically and drastically alters the situation and status of humanity … I do not claim to understand the significance of this, but here is one piece, I think: It would not be a special tragedy if humankind ended, if the human species were destroyed in atomic warfare or the earth passed through some cloud that made it impossible for the species to continue reproducing itself.” Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (Simon & Schuster: 1989) pp. 237–39.
