Cover photograph supplied by Anton Biletskyi-Volokh.
A thematic selection of translated notebook fragments.
Squandering is greed that was forbidden.
I open people’s inner worlds to them. Expensively.
The people judging you, rejecting you and not letting you live are most often you yourself, inside your head. Mum stopped scolding you long ago, but you carry on doing it all for her, all by yourself.
People who reach towards death in various ways seem to deny that death will arrive anyway, without their participation.
The deeper you are in suffering, the fewer other options you see.
Suffering is a particular kind of self-regulation. Suffer enough, lose your strength: the illusion of rest.
The search for justice is built on a belief in the symmetry of the world. It is not that there is no symmetry at all, but the world is often chaotic, which makes it absorbing and enchanting.
Where there is a wound, there is no irony.
Comfort differs from pity because you comfort someone equal and worthy. If you pity rather than comfort yourself, you seem worthless to yourself.
When the pain recedes, boredom often comes to the fore. With drama and suffering, at least you know how to occupy yourself.
Euphoria is good as a reward for completing a task. But trying to live in constant euphoria is, firstly, very costly and, secondly, very stupefying: it kills interest in the world.
An early loss that has not been lived through can shape two opposite coping strategies: never letting go of anything, or never having anything.
Unhappiness as a way of controlling the world. If the world will not be controlled, you need to become more unhappy.
Denying the importance of a situation is a way to endure the unbearable, but it does not let you live through the unbearable.
Sometimes people expect difficult challenges and assignments while being unable to follow simple recommendations.
- Any fool can do the simple ones. Give me something more complicated; I will definitely manage that!
While grievances against your parents remain, you stay in a wounded child’s position and cannot separate from those people, however unbearable they may be.
The problem with confidence in yourself is often not confidence, but yourself. Without a sense of self, there is no confidence either.
The problem with egocentrism is that even the most interesting ego is still less interesting than the whole world. Take your mind off yourself.
A stable identity lets you avoid falling apart and losing yourself under external influences. Remaining yourself, whatever the circumstances may offer.
Feeling bad does not come from nowhere. If someone does something that is not so good, feeling not so good is a regulatory mechanism.