And sometimes I want to win. And sometimes I want to lose so badly I can taste it. To surrender everything I’m made of: the neat, fenced acres of my separateness— that little plot of land I’ve spent a life defending— to let go until there’s nothing left of me but that great vault we spoke of, its endless dark, its pitiless silence.

“But it was a dream. We were wrapped in cotton, in silk threads, in webs, in moss, in fog, in the sea flavor of distance to be annihilated.”

“At midnight, in the month of June, I stand beneath the mystic moon.”

“This is how it must go. There will be catastrophes. Disastrous setbacks and slaughters. But life is going someplace. It wants to know itself; it wants the power of choice. It wants solutions to problems that nothing alive yet knows how to solve, and it’s willing to use even death to find them.”

One day you’ll have whatever it is you’re now so confusedly seeking. That kind of calm that comes from knowing oneself and others. But you can’t rush the arrival of that state of mind. There are things you only learn when no one teaches them. And that’s how it is with life. There’s even more beauty in discovering it for yourself, in spite of the suffering.

“There is love in me the likes of which you’ve never seen. There is rage in me the likes of which should never escape.”