The Swan Sequence

“…with her fragile, often bloodstained fingers she'd shown me the path toward true eternal peace, and also toward an asceticism based not on sacrifice but on the impossibility of accepting other, inferior pleasures.”

THE SIREN BY GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA (1957)

The golden crow lights on the western huts;

Evening drums beat out the shortness of life.

There are no inns on the road to the grave —

Whose is the house I go to tonight?

Prince Otsu (663-686)

ON THE EVE OF HIS EXECUTION

Translated by Burton Watson

"I woke, dying,

In the summer sun of the hillside,

with my eyes

Far from human.”

“Sheep Child”

James Dickey (1923-1997)

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”

Plutarch (46-119 AD)

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is - infinite.”

William Blake (1757-1827)

“Do the gods light this fire in our hearts or does each man's mad desire become his god?”

Virgil, The Aeneid

“To sit alone in the lamplight, with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen sensations— such is a pleasure beyond compare.”

Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness 1340

“Arts, culture, reverence, honor, all things fade,

save treason, and the dagger of her trade

or murder with his silent bloody feet.”

Libertatis Sacra Fames by Oscar Wilde