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“Day by day you must keep before your eyes death and exile and everything else that seems frightening, but most especially death; and then you’ll never harbour any mean thought, nor will you desire anything beyond due measure.”

Epictetus - Enchiridion

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O, the heart is not made of stone As I said, it's made of flame I'll never understand it, are you close To me, or did you simply love me?

Imitation of Annensky, Anna Akhmatova

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Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath

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The soul, like the moon, is never lost—only shadowed.

Jakob Böhme | 1575-1624

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Jean-François Lyotard, on the Kantian Sublime

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Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl's Love Song

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“This is June, the month of grass and leaves … already the aspens are trembling again, and a new summer is offered me.”

— Henry David Thoreau

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Jean-François Lyotard, on the Kantian Sublime

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One must go to the depths of human suffering, discover its strange capacities, in order to salute the similarly limitless gift that makes life worth living. The one definitive disgrace one can bring upon oneself in the face of such suffering, because it would make that conversion of sign impossible, would be to confront it with resignation. From whatever angle you noted the reactions that the worst evil you could conceive of left you open to, I always saw you put the heaviest accent on rebellion. There is, in fact, no more barefaced lie than the one that consists in asserting, even - and above all - when faced with an irretrievable situation, that rebellion is good for nothing. Rebellion is its own justification, completely independent of the chance it has to modify the state of affairs that gives rise to it. It’s a spark in the wind, but a spark in search of a powder keg. I revere the dark fire that comes into your eyes whenever you are reminded of the unsurpassable wrong that was done to you and which is inflamed and clouded over again at the memory of the miserable priests who tried to approach you on that occasion. I also know that the very same fire raises its bright flames so high for my benefit, twines them into living chimeras before my eyes. And I know that the love which at this point counts on nothing but itself does not recover and that my love for you is reborn from the ashes of the sun. Also, each time a train of thought treacherously brings you back to the point where one day all hope was denied you and, at the precipice where you then stand, threatens, like an arrow seeking a wing, to hurl you again into the abyss, having experienced myself the vanity of all words of consolation and holding all attempts at distraction to be unworthy, I have convinced myself that only a magic formula could be effective here, but what spell could instil in itself and instantaneously give you the whole force of living, of living with all the intensity possible, when I know that it came back to you so slowly? The one I decide to confine myself to, the only one I judge acceptable to call you back to me when it happens that you suddenly lean towards the opposite slope, consists in these words which, when you start to turn your head away, I just want to lightly brush your ear with: ‘Osiris is a black god’.

Andre Breton: Arcanum 17

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Alda Merini | excerpts from Antique Lyric

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When giving your love or offspring a kiss, repeat to yourself, “I am kissing a mortal”. Then you won't be so distraught if they are taken from you.

Epictetus - Enchiridion

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The human psyche is so vast, and the ego frame so small, that we can never know ourselves fully. Safe to say, insofar as we are human, we carry the full range of human possibilities, traits, tendencies, self-delusions, and wholly unknown continents within each of us. Much of this dissociated material constitutes what Jung called the shadow, those parts of our personality that are unknown to us, but which play out in the world surreptitiously, or those parts that when brought into consciousness are disappointing, contrary to our professed values, or stretch our self-concepts beyond the comfortable.

James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Ruin Our Lives

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For the wild nature was not yet overcome, and light and darkness wrestled so long the one with the other, till the sun arose, and with its heat forced this tree, so that it did bear pleasant sweet fruit; that is, till there came the Prince of Light, out of the heart of God, and became man in nature, and wrestled in his human body, in the power of the divine light, in the wild nature.

Jakob Böhme, Aurora | 1575-1624

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True love, like any other strong and addicting drug, is boring — once the tale of encounter and discovery is told, kisses quickly grow stale and caresses tiresome… except, of course, to those who share the kisses, who give and take the caresses while every sound and color of the world seems to deepen and brighten around them. As with any other strong drug, true first love is really only interesting to those who have become its prisoners. And, as is true of any other strong and addicting drug, true first love is dangerous.

Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

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The Double Cluster: h Persei (NGC 869, top) and χ Persei (NGC 884, bottom) // cafuego & Catherine Ryan Hyde

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“Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.”

Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath

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Louise Glück, from A Travel Diary; Winter Recipes from the Collective: Poems, 2021