Spirited away

I like to think(it has to be!)

Her main fear was lest she should fall ill of the disease, the apathetic malady, of Oblomovka. Yet, for all her efforts to slough these phases of torpor and of spiritual coma, a dream of happiness other than the present used to steal upon her, and wrap her in a haze of inertia, and cause her whole being to halt, as for a rest from the exertions of life. Again, to this mood there would succeed a phase of torture and weariness and apprehension- a phase of dull sorrowfulness which kept asking itself dim, indefinite questions and ceaselessly pondering upon them. And as she listened to those questions she would examine herself, yet never discover what it was she yearned for, nor why, at times, she seemed to tire of her comfortable existence, to demand of it new and unfamiliar impressions, and to be gazing ahead in search of something.

On the one edge, death, on the other, life. Here despair, there, hope….

A greek author conceals so infinitely much in his crude naïveté when he says: ‘pantos gar oudeis Erota epfugen i feuksetai mechri an kallos i kai ofthalmoi Bleposin’ (for certainty no one has yet altogether escaped love, and none shall so long as there is beauty and eyes to see)

Shall I believe I am nothing? Shall I believe I am god?

“There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart’s impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another’s unhappiness ...; and the other, the only kind that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.”

Man is in love and love what vanishes, what more is there to say?

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self transcendence; in vain. By its very nature, every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand,incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

“I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.

“We know how to speak many false things as though they were true;