And all the time my very soul would travel with her, invisible and crying soundlessly with pain. I had acquired a dimension of suffering which would poison and devour my whole being, as far as I could see, forever.
Perhaps his demons were quite other.
Oh why is she going away just when I want so much to be with her! She is the answer to the riddle of my life.
Ludens felt that everyone around him was living in the present, a place where he certainly could not live.
I tried to think these thoughts but they remained intolerably abstract, while a pain in my body told me what was real.
But the poem was a Liebestod and although art cannot but console for what it weeps over, the completion of the poem left him sour and sick and utterly convinced of the henceforward impossibility of love.
So it is that we can be terrors to each other, and people in lonely rooms suffer humiliation and even damage because of others in whose consciousness perhaps they scarcely figure at all.
You don’t understand what it’s like when things are terrible in your mind.
What happened after that, and will be related later, was something entirely unexpected and so awful that Ludens had never spoken about it afterwards to anyone.
At the very thought he felt a tendency to tremble.
But he was surrendered, they had surrendered him, into the power of death.
He did not consciously wish for death but he grieved at night for some blank thing which he could not even name.
You don’t know what it’s like to be me, you don’t know what it’s like to be all tattered and destroyed inside.
What we can see determines what we choose. Good is the distant source of light, it is the unimaginable object of our desire. Our fallen nature knows only its name and its perfection. That is the idea which is vulgarized by existentialists and linguistic philosophers when they make good into a mere matter of personal choice. It cannot be defined, not because it is a function of our freedom, but because we do not know it.
There’s a kind of reality, a kind of truth.
He felt obscurely the dividedness of his being, the extent of what was gross, the littleness and value of what was not.
He’s had a bloody awful childhood. Like I had. Those things get passed on and on.
My personal peculiarities could not offend her since she was totally uninterested in my pretensions to be a person.
Theo wanted to call him back. But then he thought, oh let him go, there’s no mending a fruitless love, it just has to be endured.
His eyes closed now, and for a long time they sat quietly thus. Such was their lovemaking.