I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.
In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I indifferently narrate my fact-less autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it's because I have nothing to say.
I AM so sad, O God! Thou hast before me
Spread a bright rainbow in the western skies,
But thou hast quenched in darkness cold and stormy
The brighter stars that rise;
Clear grows the heaven ’neath thy transforming rod: 5
Still I am sad, O God!
Like empty ears of grain, with heads erected,
Have I delighted stood amid the crowd,
My face the while to stranger eyes reflected
The calm of summer’s cloud; 10
But thou dost know the ways that I have trod,
And why I grieve, O God!
I am like to a weary infant fretting
Whene’er its mother leaves it for a while:
And grieving watch the sun, whose light in setting 15
Throws back a parting smile;
Though it will bathe anew the morning sod,
Still I am sad, O God!
To-day o’er the wide waste of ocean sweeping,
Hundreds of miles away from shore or rock, 20
I saw the cranes fly on, together keeping
In one unbroken flock;
Their feet with soil from Poland’s hills were shod,
And I was sad, O God!
Often by strangers’ tombs I’ve lingered weary, 25
Since, grown a stranger to my native ways,
I walk a pilgrim through a desert dreary,
Lit but by lightning’s blaze,
Knowing not where shall fall the burial clod
Upon my bier, O God! 30
Some time hereafter will my bones lie whitened,
Somewhere on strangers’ soil, I know not where:
I envy those whose dying hours are lightened,
Fanned by their native air;
But flowers of some strange land will spring and nod 35
Above my grave, O God!
When, but a guileless child at home, they bade me
To pray each day for home restored, I found
My bark was steering—how the thought dismayed me—
The whole wide world around! 40
Those prayers unanswered, wearily I plod
Through rugged ways, O God!
Upon the rainbow, whose resplendent rafter
Thy angels rear above us in the sky,
Others will look a hundred years hereafter, 45
And pass away as I;
Exiled and hopeless ’neath thy chastening rod,
And sad as I, O God!
>I AM so sad, O God! Thou hast before me >Spread a bright rainbow in the western skies, >But thou hast quenched in darkness cold and stormy >The brighter stars that rise; >Clear grows the heaven ’neath thy transforming rod
it is almost as if these verses were prophecies of the LMNOP degeneracy of the west and of the degeneracy of the "stars" of h*llywood and OnlyF*ns
“I flayed as many nobles as had rebelled against me and draped their skins over the pile of corpses; some I spread out within the pile, some I erected on stakes upon the pile... I flayed many right through my land and draped their skins over the walls."
“I felled 50 of their fighting men with the sword, burnt 200 captives from them, and defeated in battle on the plain 332 troops. With their blood I dyed the mountain red like red wool, and the rest of them the ravines and torrents of the mountain
swallowed. I carried off captives and possessions from them. I cut off the heads of their fighters and built with the heads a tower before their city. I burnt their adolescent boys and girls."
“In strife and conflict I besieged and conquered the city. I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword. I captured many troops alive: I cut off of some their arms and hands; I cut off of others their noses, ears, and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living and one of the heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city."
Ancients love dropping their stats on stone monuments kek
"One chariot, one elephant, five foot soldiers and three horses make up a patti. Three pattis are known as a senamukha and three senamukhas make up a gulma. Three gulmas are named are named a gana and three ganas a vahini. The wise know that three vahinis collectively form a pritana. Three pritanas make a chamu, three chamus an anikini and the wise say that ten times an anikini is known as an akshouhini. O best of Brahmanas! Those who know arithmetic have calculated that there are 21,870 chariots in an akshouhini and the numbers of elephants is the same. Know that the number of foot soldiers is 109,350 and the number of horses is 65,610. O best of Brahmanas! I have described to you in detail that which those who are familiar with numbers call an akshouhini. O best of Brahmanas! The eighteen akshouhinis of the Kurus and the Pandavas were made up according to these numbers and the cause destroyed them all."
“Wild eyes were another sign. It is something I have seldom seen — the expression of an ecstatic state — though much is foolishly written of them, as if they grew like Jerusalem artichokes along the road. The eyes are black, right enough, whatever their normal color is; they are black because their perception is condensed to a coal, because the touch and taste and perfume of the lover, the outcry of a dirty word, a welcome river, have been reduced in the heat of passion to a black ash, and this unburnt residue of oxidation, this calyx, replaces the pupil so it no longer receives but sends, and every hair is on end, though perhaps only outspread on a pillow, and the nostrils are flared, mouth agape, cheeks sucked so the whole face seems as squeezed as a juiced fruit; I know, for once Lou went into that wildness while we were absorbing one another, trying to kiss, not merely forcefully, not the skull of our skeleton, but the skull and all the bones on which the essential self is hung, kiss so the shape of the soul is stirred too, that's what is called the ultimate French, the furtherest frick, when a wiener makes a concept cry out and climax; I know, for more than once, though not often, I shuddered into that other region, when a mouth drew me through its generosity into the realm of unravel, and every sensation lay extended as a lake, every tie was loosed, and the glue of things dissolved. I knew I wore the wild look then. The greatest gift you can give another human being is to let them warm you till, in passing beyond pleasure, your defenses fall, your ego surrenders, its structure melts, its towers topple, lies, fancies, vanities, blow away in no wind, and you return, not to the clay you came from — the unfired vessel — but to the original moment of inspiration, when you were the unabbreviated breath of God.”
>Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfricker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad. >Hiro used to feel that way too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about being trying to be the baddest motherfricker in the world. The position is taken. The crowing touch, the one thing that really puts true world-class badmotherfrickerdom totally out of reach, of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn't for the hydrogen bomb, a man could still aspire. >Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
Stan Parker would sometimes fail to recognize his wife. He would see her for the first time. He would look at her and feel. This is a different one, as if she had been several. She was, of course, according to which dream rose to the surface. Sometimes she was beautiful. Or again, they would look at each other in the course of some silence, and she would wonder, she would wonder what she had been giving away. But he respected and accepted her mysteries, as she could never respect and accept his. Then she would become sour and strident, from thinking about it, and she would wring out the dishcloth tight, and slam it on the hook, and shake the water from her hands. At these moments too he saw her for the first time, and was surprised how sour and ugly she was, a greyness in her coarse face that shone with the exertion of some work. Yes, she is ugly and bitter, he said, and he could not have touched her unpleasant skin.
One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten.
The citadel of Ishuäl succumbed during the height of the Apocalypse. But no army of inhuman Sranc had scaled its ramparts. No furnace-hearted dragon had pulled down its mighty gates. Ishuäl was the secret refuge of the Kûniüric High Kings, and no one, not even the No-God, could besiege a secret.
Months earlier, Anasûrimbor Ganrelka II, High King of Kûniüri, had fled to Ishuäl with the remnants of his household. From the walls, his sentries stared pensively across the dark forests below, their thoughts stricken by memories of burning cities and wailing multitudes. When the wind moaned, they gripped Ishuäl’s uncaring stone, reminded of Sranc horns. They traded breathless reassurances. Had they not eluded their pursuers? Were not the walls of Ishuäl strong? Where else might a man survive the end of the world?
The plague claimed the High King first, as was perhaps fitting: Ganrelka had only wept at Ishuäl, raged the way only an Emperor of nothing could rage. The following night the members of his household carried his bier down into the forests. They glimpsed the eyes of wolves reflected in the light of his pyre. They sang no dirges, intoned only a few numb prayers.
Before the morning winds could sweep his ashes skyward, the plague had struck two others: Ganrelka’s concubine and her daughter. As though pursuing his bloodline to its thinnest tincture, it assailed more and more members of his household. The sentries upon the walls became fewer, and though they still watched the mountainous horizon, they saw little. The cries of the dying crowded their thoughts with too much horror.
Soon even the sentries were no more. The five Knights of Trysë who’d rescued Ganrelka after the catastrophe on the Fields of Eleneöt lay motionless in their beds. The Grand Vizier, his golden robes stained bloody by his bowel, lay sprawled across his sorcerous texts. Ganrelka’s uncle, who’d led the heartbreaking assault on Golgotterath’s gates in the early days of the Apocalypse, hung from a rope in his chambers, slowly twisting in a draft. The Queen stared endlessly across festering sheets.
“Kátia era uma velha amiga da senpaiília, a governanta que nos criou, de quem me lembro e a quem amo desde que me entendo por gente. Sônia era minha irmã caçula. Passamos o inverno triste e sombrio em nossa velha casa em Pokróvskoie. O tempo estava frio, ventoso, a tal ponto que os montes de neve acumulada passavam da altura das janelas; quase sempre as janelas ficavam cobertas de gelo e embaçadas, e durante quase todo o inverno, não saímos de casa, nem a pé nem de trenó. Raramente alguém nos visitava; e quem vinha não acrescentava alegria e prazer a nossa casa. Todos tinham rostos tristes, todos falavam baixo, como se temessem incomodar alguém, não riam, suspiravam e muitas vezes choravam, olhando para mim e, sobretudo, para a pequena Sônia, de vestidinho preto. Na casa, parecia que a morte ainda se fazia sentir; a tristeza e o horror da morte pairavam no ar. O quarto da mamãe ficava fechado, eu vivia assombrada e algo me impelia a espiar aquele quarto vazio quando passava por ele, antes de ir dormir“
Of Psyche’s beauty—at every age the beauty proper to that age—there is only this to be said, that there were no two opinions about it, from man or woman, once she had been seen. It was beauty that did not astonish you till afterwards when you had gone out of sight of her and reflected on it. While she was with you, you were not astonished. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. As the Fox delighted to say, she was ‘according to nature’; what every woman, or even every thing, ought to have been and meant to be, but had missed by some trip of chance. Indeed, when you looked at her you believed, for a moment, that they had not missed it. She made beauty all round her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad—she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes—the toad became beautiful. The years, doubtless, went round then as now, but in my memory it seems to have been all springs and summers. I think the almonds and the cherries blossomed earlier in those years and the blossoms lasted longer; how they hung on in such winds I don’t know, for I see the boughs always rocking and dancing against blue-and-white skies, and their shadows flowing water-like over all the hills and valleys of Psyche’s body. I wanted to be a wife so that I could have been her real mother. I wanted to be a boy so that she could be in love with me. I wanted her to be my full sister instead of my half sister. I wanted her to be a slave so that I could set her free and make her rich.
" The path to my fixed purpose is laidwith iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!"
There are those who live in the boundaries of guilt and fear, the limits of imagination. They believe limitation is the world. You can not change them. There is work of your own to do. You will never reach the end of your own becoming, the madness of creation, the joy of existence.
King Karna-Vootra sitting on his throne commanding all things said: "I very clearly saw last night the queenly Vava-Nyria. Though partly she was hidden by great clouds that swept continually by her, rolling over and over, yet her face was unhidden and shone, being full of moonlight.
"I said to her:
"'Walk with me by the great pools in many-gardened, beautiful Istrakhan where the lilies float that give delectable dreams; or, drawing aside the curtain of hanging orchids, pass with me thence from the pools by a secret path through the else impassable jungle that fills the only way between the mountains that shut in Istrakhan. They shut it in and look on it with joy at morning and at evening when the pools are strange with light, till in their gladness sometimes there melts the deadly snow that kills upon lonely heights the mountaineer. They have valleys among them older than the wrinkles in the moon.
"'Come with me thence or linger with me there and either we shall come to romantic lands which the men of the caravans only speak of in song; or else we shall listlessly walk in a land so lovely that even the butterflies that float about it when they see their images flash in the sacred pools are terrified by their beauty, and each night we shall hear the myriad nightingales all in one chorus sing the stars to death. Do this and I will send heralds far from here with tidings of thy beauty; and they shall run and come to Sendara and men shall know it there who herd brown sheep; and from Sendara the rumour shall spread on, down either bank of the holy river of Zoth, till the people that make wattles in the plains shall hear of it and sing; but the heralds shall go northward along the hills until they come to Sooma. And in that golden city they shall tell the kings, that sit in their lofty alabaster house, of thy strange and sudden smiles. And often in distant markets shall thy story be told by merchants out from Sooma as they sit telling careless tales to lure men to their wares.
"'And the heralds passing thence shall come even to Ingra, to Ingra where they dance. And there they shall tell of thee, so that thy name long hence shall be sung in that joyous city. And there they shall borrow camels and pass over the sands and go by desert ways to distant Nirid to tell of thee to the lonely men in the mountain monasteries.
"'Come with me even now for it is Spring.'"
"And as I said this she faintly yet perceptibly shook her head. And it was only then I remembered my youth was gone, and she dead forty years."
I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.
All archon privileges universally revoked eternally.
I don't know what prose is
those two pages in that one book but I can't remember which ones it were so I'd have to reread the whole thing to find it, sorry
In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I indifferently narrate my fact-less autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it's because I have nothing to say.
Read it 10 years ago and knew what it was just from the tone. Absolute masterpeice
I AM so sad, O God! Thou hast before me
Spread a bright rainbow in the western skies,
But thou hast quenched in darkness cold and stormy
The brighter stars that rise;
Clear grows the heaven ’neath thy transforming rod: 5
Still I am sad, O God!
Like empty ears of grain, with heads erected,
Have I delighted stood amid the crowd,
My face the while to stranger eyes reflected
The calm of summer’s cloud; 10
But thou dost know the ways that I have trod,
And why I grieve, O God!
I am like to a weary infant fretting
Whene’er its mother leaves it for a while:
And grieving watch the sun, whose light in setting 15
Throws back a parting smile;
Though it will bathe anew the morning sod,
Still I am sad, O God!
To-day o’er the wide waste of ocean sweeping,
Hundreds of miles away from shore or rock, 20
I saw the cranes fly on, together keeping
In one unbroken flock;
Their feet with soil from Poland’s hills were shod,
And I was sad, O God!
Often by strangers’ tombs I’ve lingered weary, 25
Since, grown a stranger to my native ways,
I walk a pilgrim through a desert dreary,
Lit but by lightning’s blaze,
Knowing not where shall fall the burial clod
Upon my bier, O God! 30
Some time hereafter will my bones lie whitened,
Somewhere on strangers’ soil, I know not where:
I envy those whose dying hours are lightened,
Fanned by their native air;
But flowers of some strange land will spring and nod 35
Above my grave, O God!
When, but a guileless child at home, they bade me
To pray each day for home restored, I found
My bark was steering—how the thought dismayed me—
The whole wide world around! 40
Those prayers unanswered, wearily I plod
Through rugged ways, O God!
Upon the rainbow, whose resplendent rafter
Thy angels rear above us in the sky,
Others will look a hundred years hereafter, 45
And pass away as I;
Exiled and hopeless ’neath thy chastening rod,
And sad as I, O God!
>I AM so sad, O God! Thou hast before me
>Spread a bright rainbow in the western skies,
>But thou hast quenched in darkness cold and stormy
>The brighter stars that rise;
>Clear grows the heaven ’neath thy transforming rod
it is almost as if these verses were prophecies of the LMNOP degeneracy of the west and of the degeneracy of the "stars" of h*llywood and OnlyF*ns
Ashurnasirpal
“I flayed as many nobles as had rebelled against me and draped their skins over the pile of corpses; some I spread out within the pile, some I erected on stakes upon the pile... I flayed many right through my land and draped their skins over the walls."
“I felled 50 of their fighting men with the sword, burnt 200 captives from them, and defeated in battle on the plain 332 troops. With their blood I dyed the mountain red like red wool, and the rest of them the ravines and torrents of the mountain
swallowed. I carried off captives and possessions from them. I cut off the heads of their fighters and built with the heads a tower before their city. I burnt their adolescent boys and girls."
“In strife and conflict I besieged and conquered the city. I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword. I captured many troops alive: I cut off of some their arms and hands; I cut off of others their noses, ears, and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living and one of the heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city."
I wish I could do this to the israelites ;_;
Ancients love dropping their stats on stone monuments kek
"One chariot, one elephant, five foot soldiers and three horses make up a patti. Three pattis are known as a senamukha and three senamukhas make up a gulma. Three gulmas are named are named a gana and three ganas a vahini. The wise know that three vahinis collectively form a pritana. Three pritanas make a chamu, three chamus an anikini and the wise say that ten times an anikini is known as an akshouhini. O best of Brahmanas! Those who know arithmetic have calculated that there are 21,870 chariots in an akshouhini and the numbers of elephants is the same. Know that the number of foot soldiers is 109,350 and the number of horses is 65,610. O best of Brahmanas! I have described to you in detail that which those who are familiar with numbers call an akshouhini. O best of Brahmanas! The eighteen akshouhinis of the Kurus and the Pandavas were made up according to these numbers and the cause destroyed them all."
“Wild eyes were another sign. It is something I have seldom seen — the expression of an ecstatic state — though much is foolishly written of them, as if they grew like Jerusalem artichokes along the road. The eyes are black, right enough, whatever their normal color is; they are black because their perception is condensed to a coal, because the touch and taste and perfume of the lover, the outcry of a dirty word, a welcome river, have been reduced in the heat of passion to a black ash, and this unburnt residue of oxidation, this calyx, replaces the pupil so it no longer receives but sends, and every hair is on end, though perhaps only outspread on a pillow, and the nostrils are flared, mouth agape, cheeks sucked so the whole face seems as squeezed as a juiced fruit; I know, for once Lou went into that wildness while we were absorbing one another, trying to kiss, not merely forcefully, not the skull of our skeleton, but the skull and all the bones on which the essential self is hung, kiss so the shape of the soul is stirred too, that's what is called the ultimate French, the furtherest frick, when a wiener makes a concept cry out and climax; I know, for more than once, though not often, I shuddered into that other region, when a mouth drew me through its generosity into the realm of unravel, and every sensation lay extended as a lake, every tie was loosed, and the glue of things dissolved. I knew I wore the wild look then. The greatest gift you can give another human being is to let them warm you till, in passing beyond pleasure, your defenses fall, your ego surrenders, its structure melts, its towers topple, lies, fancies, vanities, blow away in no wind, and you return, not to the clay you came from — the unfired vessel — but to the original moment of inspiration, when you were the unabbreviated breath of God.”
>Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfricker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
>Hiro used to feel that way too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about being trying to be the baddest motherfricker in the world. The position is taken. The crowing touch, the one thing that really puts true world-class badmotherfrickerdom totally out of reach, of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn't for the hydrogen bomb, a man could still aspire.
>Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
Is fricking a guy's mother instead of a young beautiful woman more alpha because it's humiliating her husband and children?
Yes.
https://www.freeclassicebooks.com/james_joyce.htm
euphoric literature
Stan Parker would sometimes fail to recognize his wife. He would see her for the first time. He would look at her and feel. This is a different one, as if she had been several. She was, of course, according to which dream rose to the surface. Sometimes she was beautiful. Or again, they would look at each other in the course of some silence, and she would wonder, she would wonder what she had been giving away. But he respected and accepted her mysteries, as she could never respect and accept his. Then she would become sour and strident, from thinking about it, and she would wring out the dishcloth tight, and slam it on the hook, and shake the water from her hands. At these moments too he saw her for the first time, and was surprised how sour and ugly she was, a greyness in her coarse face that shone with the exertion of some work. Yes, she is ugly and bitter, he said, and he could not have touched her unpleasant skin.
One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten.
The citadel of Ishuäl succumbed during the height of the Apocalypse. But no army of inhuman Sranc had scaled its ramparts. No furnace-hearted dragon had pulled down its mighty gates. Ishuäl was the secret refuge of the Kûniüric High Kings, and no one, not even the No-God, could besiege a secret.
Months earlier, Anasûrimbor Ganrelka II, High King of Kûniüri, had fled to Ishuäl with the remnants of his household. From the walls, his sentries stared pensively across the dark forests below, their thoughts stricken by memories of burning cities and wailing multitudes. When the wind moaned, they gripped Ishuäl’s uncaring stone, reminded of Sranc horns. They traded breathless reassurances. Had they not eluded their pursuers? Were not the walls of Ishuäl strong? Where else might a man survive the end of the world?
The plague claimed the High King first, as was perhaps fitting: Ganrelka had only wept at Ishuäl, raged the way only an Emperor of nothing could rage. The following night the members of his household carried his bier down into the forests. They glimpsed the eyes of wolves reflected in the light of his pyre. They sang no dirges, intoned only a few numb prayers.
Before the morning winds could sweep his ashes skyward, the plague had struck two others: Ganrelka’s concubine and her daughter. As though pursuing his bloodline to its thinnest tincture, it assailed more and more members of his household. The sentries upon the walls became fewer, and though they still watched the mountainous horizon, they saw little. The cries of the dying crowded their thoughts with too much horror.
Soon even the sentries were no more. The five Knights of Trysë who’d rescued Ganrelka after the catastrophe on the Fields of Eleneöt lay motionless in their beds. The Grand Vizier, his golden robes stained bloody by his bowel, lay sprawled across his sorcerous texts. Ganrelka’s uncle, who’d led the heartbreaking assault on Golgotterath’s gates in the early days of the Apocalypse, hung from a rope in his chambers, slowly twisting in a draft. The Queen stared endlessly across festering sheets.
poopoo peepee
peepee poopoo
The English Mail Coach, Thomas De Quincey
“Kátia era uma velha amiga da senpaiília, a governanta que nos criou, de quem me lembro e a quem amo desde que me entendo por gente. Sônia era minha irmã caçula. Passamos o inverno triste e sombrio em nossa velha casa em Pokróvskoie. O tempo estava frio, ventoso, a tal ponto que os montes de neve acumulada passavam da altura das janelas; quase sempre as janelas ficavam cobertas de gelo e embaçadas, e durante quase todo o inverno, não saímos de casa, nem a pé nem de trenó. Raramente alguém nos visitava; e quem vinha não acrescentava alegria e prazer a nossa casa. Todos tinham rostos tristes, todos falavam baixo, como se temessem incomodar alguém, não riam, suspiravam e muitas vezes choravam, olhando para mim e, sobretudo, para a pequena Sônia, de vestidinho preto. Na casa, parecia que a morte ainda se fazia sentir; a tristeza e o horror da morte pairavam no ar. O quarto da mamãe ficava fechado, eu vivia assombrada e algo me impelia a espiar aquele quarto vazio quando passava por ele, antes de ir dormir“
Felicidade conjugal, Tolstoi.
Of Psyche’s beauty—at every age the beauty proper to that age—there is only this to be said, that there were no two opinions about it, from man or woman, once she had been seen. It was beauty that did not astonish you till afterwards when you had gone out of sight of her and reflected on it. While she was with you, you were not astonished. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. As the Fox delighted to say, she was ‘according to nature’; what every woman, or even every thing, ought to have been and meant to be, but had missed by some trip of chance. Indeed, when you looked at her you believed, for a moment, that they had not missed it. She made beauty all round her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad—she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes—the toad became beautiful. The years, doubtless, went round then as now, but in my memory it seems to have been all springs and summers. I think the almonds and the cherries blossomed earlier in those years and the blossoms lasted longer; how they hung on in such winds I don’t know, for I see the boughs always rocking and dancing against blue-and-white skies, and their shadows flowing water-like over all the hills and valleys of Psyche’s body. I wanted to be a wife so that I could have been her real mother. I wanted to be a boy so that she could be in love with me. I wanted her to be my full sister instead of my half sister. I wanted her to be a slave so that I could set her free and make her rich.
" The path to my fixed purpose is laidwith iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!"
There are those who live in the boundaries of guilt and fear, the limits of imagination. They believe limitation is the world. You can not change them. There is work of your own to do. You will never reach the end of your own becoming, the madness of creation, the joy of existence.
Egyptian Book of the Dead
The Dream of King Karna-Vootra
King Karna-Vootra sitting on his throne commanding all things said: "I very clearly saw last night the queenly Vava-Nyria. Though partly she was hidden by great clouds that swept continually by her, rolling over and over, yet her face was unhidden and shone, being full of moonlight.
"I said to her:
"'Walk with me by the great pools in many-gardened, beautiful Istrakhan where the lilies float that give delectable dreams; or, drawing aside the curtain of hanging orchids, pass with me thence from the pools by a secret path through the else impassable jungle that fills the only way between the mountains that shut in Istrakhan. They shut it in and look on it with joy at morning and at evening when the pools are strange with light, till in their gladness sometimes there melts the deadly snow that kills upon lonely heights the mountaineer. They have valleys among them older than the wrinkles in the moon.
"'Come with me thence or linger with me there and either we shall come to romantic lands which the men of the caravans only speak of in song; or else we shall listlessly walk in a land so lovely that even the butterflies that float about it when they see their images flash in the sacred pools are terrified by their beauty, and each night we shall hear the myriad nightingales all in one chorus sing the stars to death. Do this and I will send heralds far from here with tidings of thy beauty; and they shall run and come to Sendara and men shall know it there who herd brown sheep; and from Sendara the rumour shall spread on, down either bank of the holy river of Zoth, till the people that make wattles in the plains shall hear of it and sing; but the heralds shall go northward along the hills until they come to Sooma. And in that golden city they shall tell the kings, that sit in their lofty alabaster house, of thy strange and sudden smiles. And often in distant markets shall thy story be told by merchants out from Sooma as they sit telling careless tales to lure men to their wares.
"'And the heralds passing thence shall come even to Ingra, to Ingra where they dance. And there they shall tell of thee, so that thy name long hence shall be sung in that joyous city. And there they shall borrow camels and pass over the sands and go by desert ways to distant Nirid to tell of thee to the lonely men in the mountain monasteries.
"'Come with me even now for it is Spring.'"
"And as I said this she faintly yet perceptibly shook her head. And it was only then I remembered my youth was gone, and she dead forty years."