1
" In that face, deformed by hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist, who does not come from the tribe of Judas, as his heralds have it, or from a far country. The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them. Jorge did a diabolical thing because he loved his truth so lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy falsehood. "
― Umberto Eco , The Name of the Rose
3
" The Dream
Lord Byron
Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off waking toils,
They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past -they speak
Like sibyls of the future; they have power -
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
They make us what we were not -what they will,
And shake us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanished shadows -Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow? -What are they?
Creations of the mind? -The mind can make
Substances, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.
I would recall a vision which I dreamed
Perchance in sleep -for in itself a thought,
A slumbering thought, is capable of years,
And curdles a long life into one hour.
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Il sogno
Lord Byron
Duplice è la nostra vita: il Sonno ha il suo proprio mondo,
un confine tra le cose chiamate impropriamente
morte e esistenza: il Sonno ha il proprio mondo,
e un vasto reame di sfrenata realtà;
e nel loro svolgersi i sogni hanno respiro,
e lacrime e tormenti e sfiorano la gioia;
lasciano un peso sui nostri pensieri da svegli,
tolgono un peso dalle nostre fatiche da svegli,
dividono il nostro essere; diventano
parte di noi stessi e del nostro tempo,
e sembrano gli araldi dell'eternità;
passano come fantasmi del passato, parlano
come Sibille dell'avvenire; hanno potere -
la tirannia del piacere e del dolore;
ci rendono ciò che non fummo, secondo il loro volere,
e ci scuotono con dissolte visioni,
col terrore di svanite ombre. Ma sono veramente così?
Non è forse tutto un'ombra il passato? Cosa sono?
Creazioni della mente? La mente sa creare
sostanza, e popolare pianeti, di sua fattura,
di esseri più splendenti di quelli mai esistiti, e dare
respiro e forma che sopravvivono alla carne.
Vorrei richiamare una visione che ho sognato
forse nel sonno, poiché in sé un pensiero,
un pensiero assopito, racchiude anni,
e in un'ora condensa una lunga vita. "
― Lord Byron
6
" And so, when the chips are down, I must say, though not without a sense of repugnance, that if you wish to show your belief in democracy, you also have to do so when you are in the minority, convinced both intellectually and, not least, in your innermost self, that the majority, in the name of democracy, is crushing everything you stand for and that means something to you, indeed, all that gives you the strength to endure, well, that gives a kind of meaning to your life, something that transcends your own fortuitous lot, one might say. When the heralds of democracy roar, triumphantly bawling out their vulgar victories day after day so that it really makes you suffer, as in my own case, you still have to accept it; I will not let anything else be said about me, he thought. "
― Dag Solstad , Shyness and Dignity
11
" Monster” is derived from the Latin noun monstrum, “divine portent,” itself formed on the root of the verb monere, “to warn.” It came to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous creatures like the sphinx who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts, because the ancients considered the appearance of such beings to be a sign of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, “Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening. "
― Susan Stryker