timeimmemorial:

Still from Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.

Friedrich Nietzsche writes:

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of “world history”—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened.

I’m not going to lie; I read the plot summary for Melancholia and I thought it was probably the most pretentious and self-important thing I had read that day until this Nietzsche quote was referenced with it.

Lotsa thoughts.