The ghastly priest doth reign
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain.
~Thomas Babington Macaulay
"And where we had thought to find an abomination,
we shall find a god;
where we had thought to slay another,
we shall slay ourselves;
where we had thought to travel outward,
we shall come to the center of our own existence;
where we had thought to be alone,
we shall be with all the world."
— Joseph Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces)
"A poet doesn't invent his poetry—he finds it," he said, to no one in particular. "The place," he added slowly, "where Alph, the sacred river ran—was found out, not invented." (J.D. Salinger, "The Inverted Forest")
A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. (Finnegans Wake)
He explained that an Aleph is one of the points in space that contains all other points.
"The Aleph?" I repeated.
"Yes, the only place on earth where all places are -- seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending. I kept the discovery to myself and went back every chance I got. As a child, I did not foresee that this privilege was granted me so that later I could write the poem. . ."
~Jorge Luis Borges "The Aleph"
"It's in the cellar under the dining room," he went on, so overcome by his worries now that he forgot to be pompous. "It's mine -- mine. I discovered it when I was a child, all by myself. The cellar stairway is so steep that my aunt and uncle forbade my using it, but I'd heard someone say there was a world down there. I found out later they meant an old-fashioned globe of the world, but at the time I thought they were referring to the world itself. One day when no one was home I started down in secret, but I stumbled and fell. When I opened my eyes, I saw the Aleph."
I tried to reason with him. "But isn't the cellar very dark?" I said.
"Truth cannot penetrate a closed mind. If all places in the universe are in the Aleph, then all stars, all lamps, all sources of light are in it, too."
~Jorge Luis Borges "The Aleph"
Du mußt dein Leben ändern
for here there is no placethat does not see you.
"Archaic Torso of Apollo" (Rainer Maria Rilke)
