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...and it really was extremely sudden, the way it struck him that, good heavens, he understood nothing, nothing at all about anything, for Christ's s… - László Krasznahorkai
" "...and it really was extremely sudden, the way it struck him that, good heavens, he understood nothing, nothing at all about anything, for Christ's sake, nothing at all about the world, which was a most terrifying realization, he said, especially the way it came to him in all its banality, vulgarity, at a sickeningly ridiculous level, but this was the point, he said, the way that he, at age 44, had become aware of how utterly stupid he seemed to himself, how empty, how utterly blockheaded he had been in his understanding of the world these last 44 years, for, as he realized by the river, he had not only misunderstood it, but had not understood anything about anything, the worst part being that for 44 years he thought he had understood it, while in reality he had failed to do so; and this in fact was the worst thing of all that night of his birthday when he sat alone by the river, the worst because the fact that he now realized that he had not understood it did not mean that he did understand it now, because being aware of his lack of knowledge was not in itself some new form of knowledge for which an older one could be traded in, but one that presented itself as a terrifying puzzle the moment he thought about the world, as he most furiously did that evening, all but torturing himself in an effort to understand it and failing, because the puzzle seemed ever more complex and he had begun to feel that this world-puzzle that he was so desperate to understand, that he was torturing himself trying to understand, was really the puzzle of himself and the world at once, that they were in effect one and the same thing, which was the conclusion he had so far reached, and he had not yet given up on it, when, after a couple of days, he noticed that there was something the matter with his head.
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About László Krasznahorkai
László Krasznahorkai (; born 5 January 1954) is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter known for difficult and demanding novels, often labeled postmodern, with dystopian and melancholic themes. Several of his works, including his novels Satantango (, 1985) and The Melancholy of Resistance (, 1989), have been turned into feature films by Hungarian film director Béla Tarr.
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Krasznahorkai László
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Additional quotes by László Krasznahorkai
this epidemic of fear was not born out of some genuine, daily increasing certainty of disaster but of an infection of the imagination whose susceptibility to its own terrors might eventually lead to an actual catastrophe, in other words the false premonition that a man who had lost his bearings might succumb to once the inner structure of his life,
It was a long struggle against invisible foes, or to put it more accurately, against invisible foes that might not have been there at all, but it was a victorious struggle, in the course of which they understood that the victory would only be unconditional if they annihilated or, if he might put it in such old fashioned terms, said Korin, exiled, exiled anything that might have stood against them, or rather, fully absorbed it into the repulsive vulgarity of the world they now ruled, ruled if not exactly commanded, and thereby besmirched whatever was good and transcendent, not by saying a haughty 'no' to good and transcendent things, no, for they understood that the important thing was to say 'yes' from the meanest of motives, to give them their outright support, to display them, to nurture them; it was this that dawned on them and showed them what to do, that their best option was not to crush their enemies, to mock them or wipe them off the face of the earth, but, on the contrary, to embrace them, to take responsibility for them and so to empty them of their content, and in this way to establish a world in which it was precisely these things that would be the most liable to spread the infection so that the only power that had any chance of resisting them, by whose radiant light it might still have been possible to see the degree to which they had taken over people's lives... how could he make himself clearer at this point, Korin hesitated...
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Tam o anda tüm olan biteni neyin harekete geçirdiğini kavradı, varoluşun itici gücünün mecburiter olduğunu, itici gücün motivasyonu doğurduğunu, motivasyonun ise belirlenmiş ilişkiler içinde saldırgan bir katılımı sağladığını, varlığımızın bulunduğu bu katılım noktasından, araştırmacı reflekslerinin önceden belirlenmiş dizisini kullanarak kendisi için faydalı olanı bulmaya çabaladığı noktada, varlığın tümlüğünün aslında bu arzulanan ilişkinin gerçekte var olup olmamasına bağlı olduğunu, tüm bunların sabrın yeterliliğine, mücadelenin incelikli noktalarına ve tesadüflerine göre şekillendiği ve başarılı hareketin, benliksiz varlığın, tam deneme yanılma niteliği taşıdığını kavradı.
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