Steven

“Second post-historical corollary: Common Exchange is mystical exchange. The unit of measure--that is, the capacity of anything to be translated into anything else, equivalence (only the elect are equal), reciprocity-- these are esoteric notions, and post-history makes them become the only immediate reality, since it is on them that it bases the circulation of commodities and on such circulation that it models every other exchange.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Forty-Nine Steps

“First post-historical corollary: The letter is nothing but the spirit. Among the experimental practices that nihilism, an astute rhetorician, has tried to put into operation in its theater, the first and main one is esotericism. A chilling oxymoron has thus been created, one that grips our whole life. Appearance having now been dissolved as referring to another, what one gets is unremitting tautology, the repetition of divine names, a constant exchange of incorruptible mystical commodities, whether they be words, bodies, images, phantasms, or objects. Seen from a distance, this dizzying circulation produces an effect of static hypnosis, a miserable condition of demigods who would like to die but cannot.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Forty-Nine Steps

“The sole concern of learning is to go after this strayed heart. That is all.”
― Mencius, Mencius

“Before the army's watering hole has
been reached, the commander does not speak of thirst; before the fires
have food on them, the commander does not speak of hunger.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War