Lux lucet in tenebris

The phenomenology of these types of pathological experiences suggests in some cases the sufferer can no longer participate in the world and temporality is lost. The sufferer cannot project themselves into a future of events and there is therefore no sense of ‘things getting better.’ . . . Here the future appears to be held in abeyance; and yet the sufferer experiences and appreciates this ‘stopped’ future in the present because this stopped future is embedded in the present. Here ‘now’ and ‘yet-to-come’ are no longer moving apart from each other . . . because they are bound to one another in suffering. With the future ‘closed,’ the sufferer’s experience of the past also becomes disordered because the past can no longer be experienced as a horizon onto the open future. The past itself becomes fixed once and for all because it cannot be abolished by any future living, because the suffering present displaces the past and future and deprives the lived present of its value . . . The present, enclosed between the faults of the past . . . and the noncompensatory future . . . becomes impoverished and the course of time begins to slow down.

“We can never put enough distance between ourselves and what we love. To think that God is, is still to think of him as present; this is a thought according to our measure, destined only to console us. It is much more fitting to think that God is not, just as we must love him purely enough that we could be indifferent to the fact that he should not be. It is for this reason that the atheist is closer to God than the believer.”

My madness is dear to me.

Gliding back from these hortative tones into the mood which befits the contemplative man, I repeat that it can only be learnt from the Greeks what such a sudden and miraculous awakening of tragedy must signify for the essential basis of a people’s life. It is the people of the tragic mysteries who fight the battles with the Persians: and again, the people who waged such wars required tragedy as a necessary healing potion. Who would have imagined that there was still such a uniformly powerful effusion of the simplest political sentiments, the most natural domestic instincts and the primitive manly delight in strife in this very people after it had been shaken to its foundations for several generations by the most violent convulsions of the Dionysian demon? If at every considerable spreading of the Dionysian commotion one always perceives that the Dionysian loosing from the shackles of the individual makes itself felt first of all in an increased encroachment on the political instincts, to the extent of indifference, yea even hostility, it is certain, on the other hand, that the state-forming Apollo is also the genius of the principium individuationis, and that the state and domestic sentiment cannot live without an assertion of individual personality. There is only one way from orgasm for a people,—the way to Indian Buddhism, which, in order to be at all endured with its longing for nothingness, requires the rare ecstatic states with their elevation above space, time, and the individual; just as these in turn demand a philosophy which teaches how to overcome the indescribable depression of the intermediate states by means of a fancy. With the same necessity, owing to the unconditional dominance of political impulses, a people drifts into a path of extremest secularisation, the most magnificent, but also the most terrible expression of which is the Roman imperium.

“[…] the desire to be loved, to be held close to the other shape; to put off the veil of darkness and see burning eyes.”