Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation

"When we see...the evil, the vice, the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the mind of man created, we can hardly avoid being filled with...a moral sadness, a revolt of good will - if indeed it has any place within us. Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simple truthful account of the miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest nations and finest exemplars of virtue forms a most fearful picture and excites emotions of the profoundest and most hopeless sadness."

- Georg Hegel, Reason in History, 1837

Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle,
Earth and high heaven are fixt of old and founded strong,
Think rather, - call to thought, if now you grieve a little,
The days when we had rest, O soul, for they were long.

Men loved unkindness then, but lightless in the quarry
I slept and saw not; tears fell down, I did not mourn;
Sweat ran and blood sprang out and I was never sorry:
Then it was well with me, in days ere I was born.

Now, and I muse for why and never find the reason,
I pace the earth, and drink the air, and feel the sun.
Be still, be still, my soul; it is but for a season:
Let us endure an hour and see injustice done.

Ay, look: high heaven and earth ail from the prime
foundation;
All thoughts to rive the heart are here, and all are vain:
Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation -
Oh why did I awake? when shall I sleep again?

- A.E. Housman, 1896

I cannot call it a nightmare....

"I cannot call it a nightmare, for I was quite conscious of being asleep. But I was equally conscious of being in my room, and lying in bed, precisely as I actually was. I saw, or fancied I saw, the room and its furniture just as I had seen it last, except that it was very dark, and I saw something moving round the foot of the bed, which at first I could not accurately distinguish. But I soon saw that it was a sooty-black animal that resembled a monstrous cat. It appeared to me about four or five feet long, for it measured fully the length of the hearth-rug as it passed over it; and it continued to-ing and fro-ing with the lithe sinister restlessness of a beast in a cage. I could not cry out, although as you may suppose, I was terrified. Its pace was growing faster, and the room rapidly darker and darker, and at length so dark that I could no longer see anything of it but its eyes..."


- from "Carmilla," J. Sheridan Le Fanu, 1872

An unsettling article claims that "A startup company has now launched the first clinical trial in the United States to test the anti-aging benefits of young blood."

Link here:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/young-blood-antiaging-trial-raises-questions

Like the Dirac equation

"Roughly speaking, the scientist tries to name things and the artist tries to avoid naming things. ... The novelist...doesn't want to clarify and distill the meaning of [a concept such as] love so that there is only a single meaning, like the Dirac equation, because no such distillation exists. And any attempt at such a distillation would undermine the authenticity of readers' reactions, destroying the delicate, participatory creative experience of a good reader reading a good book. In a sense, a novel is not complete until it has been read. And each reader completes the novel in a different way."

- Alan Lightman, "Words," A Sense of the Mysterious.

A most intimate uprooting

"To live is to give oneself, perpetuate oneself, and to perpetuate oneself, to give oneself, is to die. Perhaps the supreme delight of procreation is nothing other than a foretasting or savouring of death, the spilling of one's own vital essence. We unite with another, but it is to divide ourselves: that most intimate embrace is naught but a most intimate uprooting. In essence, the delight of sexual love, the genetic spasm, is a sensation of resurrection, of resuscitation in another, for only in others can we resuscitate and perpetuate ourselves."

- Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, 1921.

Our Sunday morning when dawn-priests were applying
Wafer and wine to the human wound, we laid
Ourselves to cure ourselves down: I'm afraid
Our vestments wanted, but Francis' friends were crying
In the nave of pines, sun-satisfied, and flying
Subtle as angels about the barricade
Boughs made over us, deep in a bed half made
Needle-soft, half the sea of our simultaneous dying.

'Death is the mother of beauty.' Awry no leaf
Shivering with delight, we die to be well...
Careless with sleepy love, so long unloving.
What if our convalescence must be brief
As we are, the matin meet the passing bell?...
About our pines our sister, wind, is moving.

- John Berryman

Endless contrapuntal tension

"The idea of the polis, in fact, long preceded its full implementation, just as it long survived its political obsolescence. One major key to Greek history during this period is the endless contrapuntal tension between rational progressivism and emotional conservatism, civic ideals and ties of consanguinity, blood-guilt and jury justice, old religion and new secularizing philosophy. It is in this clash which provides the main dialectic underlying Greek (in effect Attic) drama, and which also lurks behind the constant polarization of polis-dwellers into two mutually destructive groups: the Few and the Many, oligarchs and populists, reactionaries and radicals. Cross-currents abounded; the lines were neither clearly nor neatly drawn; but the central dichotomy existed, to form a major, often a tragic, element in Greek political history. Legitimate political dissent was often hard to distinguish from treachery or pure sedition, stasis; and stasis could, all too easily, escalate into bloody civil war. Conservatives praised eunomia as the bulwark of the community; radicals countered with isonomia, equality under the law, the implementation of which produced - according to one's viewpoint - either democracy or mob rule."

- Ancient Greece, A Concise History by Peter Greene, 1973, pg. 64.

Satan covers a gloomy earth with his sombre wings.

"Bad government, exactions, the cupidity and violence of the great, wars and brigandage, scarcity, misery and pestilence - to this is contemporary history nearly reduced in the eyes of the people. The feeling of general insecurity which was caused by the chronic form wars were apt to take, by the constant menace of the dangerous classes, by the mistrust of justice, was further aggravated by the obsession of the coming end of the world, and by the fear of hell, of sorcerers and of devils. The background of all life in the world seems black. Satan covers a gloomy earth with his sombre wings. In vain the militant Church battles, preachers deliver their sermons; the world remains unconverted. According to a popular belief, current towards the end of the fourteenth century, no one, since the beginning of the great Western schism, had entered Paradise."

- The Waning of the Middle Ages, Joseph Huizinga, 1924. Page 21.