Cain S.

“Nobody ever overcomes the phantasms of his childhood. The man is the corrupt dream of the child, and since there is only decay, and no time, what we call days and evenings are the false angels of our existence. There is nothing except sleep and the moon between the boy and the man; dogs dream and bay the moon, who is the mother of the unconscious. Sorrow and pleasure are the stuff of dreams and the energies of myriads of planets. What is the space between the boy and the man? Did the child who is now the man ever live? Did Christ exist and was Brutus at Philippi? The centuries that divide one from Jesus and Brutus contain no time. We still hear the tinkling of the sheep bells at Mamre, and Abraham continues to sleep beneath the terebinths just as Saul sits and broods underneath a tamarisk—but all these are “thoughts of the visions of the night.”
― Edward Dahlberg, Because I Was Flesh

“If in keeping with Hegel’s insight all feeling related to an aesthetic object has an accidental aspect, usually that of psychological projection, then what the work demands from its beholder is knowledge, and indeed, knowledge that does justice to it: The work wants its truth and untruth to be grasped.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

“The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams. And besides, a fresh reality will perhaps make us forget, detest even, the desires on account of which we set out on our journey.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search Of Lost Time 4: The Captive

“This is the story of our people. Women coming out of women, coming out of women, coming out of women, coming out of women, in a chain of explosions of life and beauty. But also of endless cruelty. It is an uninterrupted line of goddesses with two faces. One of a child regarding the future, the other of an old woman wearing a tragic mask rent and bleeding from parturition who strains to read our fortune in the stains of our aleatory past.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid