2.1 For every transgression, there are two boundaries; the boundary transgressed, and the new one that it creates.
2.2 To say what we are really like is not to describe what we may be capable of becoming.
2.3 Every age has its own seriousness and its own frivolity. Sometimes they are obvious. Sometimes they are too obvious.
2.4 Sans la mémoire, il n'y a pas de repentir.
2.5 L'amour heureux n'a pas d'histoire. (de Rougement) Histoire d'O is a love story. (Paulhan).
2.6 Consciousness is not like a sentence. We enter it like the sea.
2.7 There are two great balms in human existence - forgetfulness and ignorance.
2.8 Le corps vide et le vide du corps.
2.9 In response to Montaigne, the truth is that we cannot keep our feet on the ground, but we will lie in it.
2.10 Ulysses returns to Ithaca - heroic, bronzed and weary - only to find a mausoleum. His desiccated loves lie about like ancient fallen leaves. And so his voyage begins.
2.11 Love requires an object that need not exist.
2.12 The problem of eros as relation.
2.13 There is no eros without separation. Desire means crossing over.
2.14 In the erotic relation there are always a third and a fourth term: the ideal object and the ideal subject producing multiple parallaxes. There are as many gods and goddesses are there are lovers.
2.15 It is not a world without God that must inspire dread. That is nothing. It is this world with God...
2.16 Loving and knowing go very much in opposite directions. We love in spite of things being as they are.
2.17 An origin has no meaning without an ending. Histories always involve reading backwards.
2.18 Because we are not at the end of history we cannot say why.
2.19 A spiral form is both circular and linear.
2.20 We live our lives in one direction, and come to understand them in the other. But they do not come back for us.
2.21 Being is the indelible trace.
2.22 The illusion of illusions is that there is something.
2.23 Even those who lie must have a truth.
2.24 Where does the owl go at night?
2.25 A vicious society is one in which vices have become constituting elements to such a degree that they may even seem like virtues.
2.26 In creating our utopias, the past always seems a bit like Carthage: corrupt and to be destroyed, razed to the earth, plowed over and salted.
2.27 Time is everywhere in eternity.
2.28 The prehistory of the Fall is indescribable as a way of thinking. In that sense, the garden gate is closed.
2.29 It seems to be a uniquely human capacity to make one thing stand for another. Where the capacity exists, it may be endless.
2.30 Two cynicisms which may be true: 1. Consciousness is indivisible and our separate lives are an illusion. 2. Eros is self-love made possible by the illusion of separate existence.
2.31 A thing is fitting which is neither necessary nor contingent.
2.32 Feeling a stranger in one's own time does not mean that one would feel at home in another. Uncanniness (das Unheimliche) as a condition of existence.
2.33 We cannot be dead except for others.
2.34 Finding something obscene in a brothel is impossible. Make the brothel big enough, and you remove the possibility entirely.
2.35 The fly of everyday failure beating its transparent wings against the glass.
2.36 What is the shadow cast by our existence, and where is the light?
2.37 That we are, so to speak, the lone arrow of a blind and mindless archer who loosed a bolt by accident and has no thought of retrieving it. Perhaps unlikely; not impossible.
2.38 There are certain events in history which may be explained in a cause-and-effect way, but the explanation falls short of a justification. Nothing seems sufficient to explain their moral depravity. In that sense, such events as these seem to stand outside of time, in a dimension untouched by the engine of causation. Their existence is more than a problem.
2.39 Man is the only creature on Earth who desires and therefore creates his own higher purpose. This is not an argument against the existence of God, merely against a particular conception of It.
2.40 Is it not our increased, but far from perfect, capacity for self-awareness, coupled with memory, producing a consciousness of mortality which longs precedes the moment of death, that defines one of the attributes of the human on this planet?
2.41 Deus sive natura is not a very comforting thought to anyone who has studied nature. What men do with nature might be considered a way of managing dread.
2.42 Very often (indeed, all the time) things that are unthinkable happen anyways.
2.43 Everyone sees the same sun.
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Aphorisms & Reflections
Non-FictionA collection of aphorisms and other short writings on a range of metaphysical and aesthetic topics, with observations about the work of particular artists and writers.
