To Bless Thine Enemy Is

In Adultery, There Is Usually Tenderness And Self-sacrifice; In Murder, Courage; In Profanation And Blasphemy, A Certain Satanic Splendour. Judas Elected Those Offences Unvisited By Any Virtues: Abuse Of Confidence And Informing.

The Gods Weave Misfortunes For Men, So That The Generations To Come Will Have Something To Sing About.” Mallarmé Repeats, Less Beautifully, What Homer Said; “tout Aboutit En Un Livre,” Everything Ends Up In A Book. The Greeks Speak Of Generations That Will Sing; Mallarmé Speaks Of An Object, Of A Thing Among Things, A Book. But The Idea Is The Same; The Idea That We Are Made For Art, We Are Made For Memory, We Are Made For Poetry, Or Perhaps We Are Made For Oblivion. But Something Remains, And That Something Is History Or Poetry, Which Are Not Essentially Different.

As A Boy, I Used To Marvel That The Letters In A Closed Book Did Not Get Scrambled And Lost Overnight.

There Is No Point In Being Overwhelmed By The Appalling Total Of Human Sufferring; Such A Total Does Not Exist. Neither Poverty Nor Pain Is Accumulable.

The Man Who Has Learned That Three Plus One Are Four Doesn't Have To Go Through A Proof Of That Assertion With Coins, Or Dice, Or Chess Pieces, Or Pencils. He Knows It, And That's That. He Cannot Conceive A Different Sum. There Are Mathematicians Who Say That Three Plus One Is A Tautology For Four, A Different Way Of Saying "four" ... If Three Plus One Can Be Two, Or Fourteen, Then Reason Is Madness.