Dissout & coagule

“Common sense is a compendium of slanders like “We’ll always need bosses”, “Without authority mankind would sink into barbarism and chaos” and so on. Custom has mutilated man so thoroughly that when he mutilates himself he thinks he is following a law of nature. And perhaps he is chained so firmly to the pillory of submission through suppressing the memory of what he has lost. Anyway, it benefits the slave mentality to associate power with the only possible form of life, survival. And it fits well with the master’s purposes to encourage such an idea.”

If a spirit of revolt once existed within Christianity, I defy anybody who still calls himself a Christian to understand that spirit. Such people have neither the right nor the capacity to inherit the heretical tradition. Today heresy is an impossibility. The theological language used to express the impulses of so many fine revolts was the mark of a particular period; it was the only language then available, and nothing more than that. Translation is now necessary not that it presents any difficulties. Setting aside the period in which I live, and the objective assistance it gives me, how can I hope to improve in the twentieth century on what the Brethren of the Free Spirit said in the thirteenth: “A man may be so much one with God that whatever he does he cannot sin. I am part of the freedom of Nature and I satisfy all my natural desires. The free man is perfectly right to do whatever gives him pleasure. Better that the whole world be destroyed and perish utterly than that a free man should abstain from a single act to which his nature moves him.”

It’s four o’clock A.M. It’s still too hot. Wet heat’s squeezing this city. The air’s mist. The liquid’s that seeping out of human flesh pores is gonna harden into a smooth shiny shell so we’re going to become reptiles.

(... ) These are small, miscellaneous details, quite suited, in fact, to one who was violently ravaged by literature; the worst of all perturbations after his having spent many long, slow, studious hours on benches or in libraries, now master of a style that was perhaps premature but sure of itself, intense and exciting, spurring him to tackle unprecedented subjects—in search of “new sensations,” he insisted, “not known,” and he flattered himself that they could be found in the bazaar of illusions vulgarly known as big cities; in which the demon adolescent did discover, one evening, a grandiose vision, prolonged by drunkenness alone.