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[Anonymous No.11738937]

AESTHETICS OF INDIFFERENCE

For each separate thing, the dreamer should strive to feel the complete indifference which it, as a thing, arouses in him. The ability to spontaneously abstract whatever is dreamable from each object or event, leaving all of its reality as dead matter in the Exterior World – that is what the wise man should strive for. Never to feel his own feelings sincerely, and to raise his pallid triumph to the point of regarding his own ambitions, longings and desires with indifference; to pass alongside his joys and anxieties as if passing by someone who doesn’t interest him…
The greatest self-mastery is to be indifferent towards ourselves, to see our body and soul as merely the house and grounds where Destiny willed that we spend our life. To treat our own dreams and deepest desires with arrogance, en grand seigneur , politely and carefully ignoring them. To act modestly in our own presence; to realize that we are never truly alone, since we are our own witnesses, and should therefore act before ourselves as before a stranger, with a studied and serene outward manner – indifferent because it’s noble, and cold because it’s indifferent. In order not to sink in our own estimation, all we have to do is quit having ambitions, passions, desires, hopes, whims or nervous disquiet. The key is to remember that we’re always in our own presence – we’re never so alone that we can feel at ease. With this in mind, we will overcome having passions and ambitions, for these make us vulnerable; we won’t have desires or hopes, since desires and hopes are plebeian and inelegant; and we won’t have whims or be disquieted, because rash behaviour is unpleasant for others to witness, and agitated behaviour is always a vulgarity. The aristocrat is the one who never forgets that he’s never alone; that’s why etiquette and decorum are the privilege of aristocracies. Let’s internalize the aristocrat. Let’s take him out of his gardens and drawing rooms and place him in our soul and in our consciousness of existing. Let’s always treat ourselves with etiquette and decorum, with studied and for-other-people gestures.

[Anonymous No.11738943]

>>11738937
Each of us is an entire community, an entire neighbourhood of the great Mystery,* and we should at least make sure that the life of our neighbourhood is distinctive and elegant, that the feasts of our sensations are genteel and restrained, and that the banquets of our thoughts are decorous and dignified. Since other souls may build poor and filthy neighbourhoods around us, we should clearly define where our own begins and ends, and from the façades of our feelings to the alcoves of our shyness, everything should be noble and serene, sculpted in sobriety, without ostentation. We should try to find a serene way to realize each sensation. To reduce love to the shadow of a dream of love, a pale and tremulous interval between the crests of two tiny, moonlit waves. To turn desire into a useless and innocuous thing, a kind of knowing smile in our soul; to make it into something we never dream of achieving or even expressing. To lull hatred to sleep like a captive snake, and to tell fear to give up all its outer manifestations except for anguish in our eyes, or rather, in the eyes of our soul, for only this attitude can be considered aesthetic.

[Anonymous No.11739779]

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