Ten thousand eyes transcending towards the deluge

Well, how the kettle boils over. Remember what she said, "Boiled coffee spoiled coffee!"

A life so overrich, so overfull -- indeed it is too much, and to perish would seem an alleviation.

Some men study too long. To theorize is to accept that one no longer has the energy to live.

Lessing's Nathan the Wise: a stupid and childish work exhibiting all the nearsighted and false idealism characteristic of the Enlighted sophisticates.

A truly sublime stream of thought

Man likes that which makes him think of himself.

He likes better that which reminds him he is right.


(And now, an abridgement, that is a break, an intermission to be filled by the midway act, the irremedial Jacques Lacan [favorite guest star of this foray], here presented in a poetic variation. Verily he says all that we wish to be able to say, and with a capricious tongue the wit of which can only be described as the poignant inscription of ideational jouissance {not to mention a pile of loquacious rubbish.})

The myth of unity of the personality,
the myth of synthesis,
of superior and inferior functions,
confusion about automatism,
all these types of organization of the objective field
constantly reveal cracks,
tears and rents,
negation of the facts,
and misrecognition of the most immediate experience.

It is not by accident,
because it couldn't be otherwise,
that by a bizarre stroke of luck
we go through life without meeting anyone
but the unhappy.
One says to oneself that there must be happy people somewhere.
Well then!
unless you get that out of your head,
you have understood nothing about psychoanalysis.
That is what I call taking things seriously.
When I told you things had to be taken seriously,
it was so that you would take precisely this point seriously,
that you never take anything seriously.

All human apprehension of reality
is subject to this primordial condition-
the subject seeks the object of his desire,
but nothing leads him to it.

Observe the number of things in normal subjects,
including yourselves,
that it's truly your fundamental occupation not to take seriously.
The principal difference between you and the insane
is perhaps nothing other than this.
And this is why for many,
even without their acknowledging it,
the insane embody what we would be led to
if we began to take things seriously.
So let us,
without too great a fear,
take our subject seriously


(And finally, to conclude, to conclude in a conclusive manner, the final pages of what are to be the Absinth Pages)

This week I constrained my intake of the sundry stimulants I generally entertain. I allowed no caffeine - no that is a lie, I drank quite a bit of tea, one even with miteine - and was thus quite tired and insociable a majority of the time. I did not imbibe alcohol until last night, nor smoke, again, until last night, and now, strangely, I feel intoxicated by all three. I have felt so all day long, and it has reached a peculiar (and quite enjoyable) pitch in the last hour.

To take in is to change what is, and I am the glutton of intransiencies. I should not hide the fact that I disgust myself. It is the nature of my guilt. By guilt, I refer to the deflating sense of shame that has foreshadowed all of my recent actions. I have felt as if adumbrated by an impious and ignoble cloak which all others can see, and which I have no chance of displacing. That a cloak ought to be covered, surely, is a suspicious thought; but it is difficult, thoroughly difficult, to reconcile oneself to the enervating notion that one is oneself the most shameful object in the world.

And so I have come to ask whether I be not that Lucifer, who fell, quite unlike the martyr that Adam was, as a castoff from the realm of the blessed and eternally fulfilled. If I am, or if I am not, there is only to continue. I am become the absinth of that fated night, and I must drift along as the poison leads.