Strange Solace

The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it.

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

“Happiness … not in another place but this place, not for another hour but this hour.”

“Oh, living is so uncomfortable. Everything presses in: the body demands, the spirit never ceases, living is like being weary but being unable to sleep – living is upsetting. You can’t walk around naked, either in body or in spirit.”

“At the death of the loved being, acute phase of narcissism: one emerges from sickness, from servitude. Then, gradually, freedom takes on a leaden hue, desolation settles in, narcissism gives way to a sad egoism, an absence of generosity.”

“Death may not come this very day, but my complacency is ill-founded. Inevitably the time approaches when I shall die.”

What lives is indestructible, stays free in its most deeply servile form, stays intact and though you split it to the ground, stays unscathed and though you shatter it to the marrow, and its essence flies away in triumph through your fingers.

“The more abysmal the experience of the actual, the greater the implied heights of the virtual.”

“What ordinary people do and what they find happiness in — I don’t know whether or not such happiness is, in the end, really happiness. I look at what ordinary people find happiness in, what they all make a mad dash for, racing around as though they couldn’t stop — they all say they’re happy with it. I’m not happy with it, and I’m not unhappy with it. In the end, is there really happiness, or isn’t there?”

“…the witchery of beautiful eyes.”

“A romantic painting shows a heap of icy debris in a polar light; no man, no object inhabits this desolate space; but for this very reason, provided I am suffering an amorous sadness, this void requires that I fling myself into it; I project myself as a tiny figure, seated on a block of ice, abandoned forever. “I’m cold,” the lover says, “let’s go back”; but there is no road, no way, the boat is wrecked.”

“The illusory paradise that represented a total denial of earthly life is no longer projected into the heavens, it is embedded in earthly life itself.”