My muse is ringed in black, and my lyre plays funeral dirges. A black veil covers my emotions.

“I [asked] for a proof of God. And I smelled the most intense and overwhelming fragrance of roses.”

For I am I: ergo, the truth of myself; my own sphinx, conflict, chaos, vortex—asymmetric to all rhythms, oblique to all paths. I am the prism between black and white: mine own unison in duality.

“To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it. Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no-one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy. The only relation of consciousness to happiness is gratitude: in which lies its incomparable dignity.”

But gnosis is not primarily rational knowledge. The Greek language distinguishes between scientific or reflective knowledge (“He knows mathematics”) and knowing through observation or experience (“He knows me”), which is gnosis.

To die means to be capable of death as death. The animal perishes. It has death neither ahead of itself nor behind it. Death is the shrine of Nothing, that is, of that which in every respect is never something that merely exists, but which nevertheless presences, even as the mystery of Being itself. As the shrine of Nothing, death harbors within itself the presencing of Being. As the shrine of Nothing, death is the shelter of Being. We now call mortals mortals—not because their earthly life comes to an end, but because they are capable of death as death. Mortals are who they are, as mortals, present in the shelter of being. They are the presencing relation to Being as Being.

“Scrutinizing ever so carefully, crafty in wisdom, parading your arrogance — all this invites mistrust.”

The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness, he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences.

“He was almost intrigued by the idea of giving in to his oddness, turning into one of those remote, ineffectual creatures, so warped by their solitude that they became distasteful to normal people.”

“It can clearly be said that tyranny suppresses and eliminates freedom — but, on the other hand, tyranny is only possible where freedom has been domesticated and has evaporated into vacuous concepts.”

“She felt in turn chosen and damned, cherished daughter of God and terrible child of the devil.”

Post-literacy won’t replace reason with madness, but it might give us madness of a new and different type.