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When he came across a young Irish girl making studies of wild flowers, he advised her to put something ugly into the picture. The beauty of the flowers would be emphasised by the contrast. A few days later he captured a toad, and put it in his trouser pocket. He brought it to the artist, very pleased with himself. She retaliated by catching some grasshoppers and putting them in a bonbon jar. She knew that he was very fond of sweets. When he unscrewed the lid, out they jumped. The intimate circle of summer tourists deemed this an excellent exchange of practical jokes.

- I Am Dynamite

قال أبو تمَام في مغنيّة تغنَي بالفارسيَة ولم يفهمْ ما تقول:

وَلَمْ أفْهَم مَعانِيهَا ولكن
ورتْ كَبدِي فَلَمْ أَجْهل شجاها

فبتُّ كأنَّني أعْمَى مُعنًّى
يحبُّ الغانِياتِ ولا يراها (٢)

فالمشبه هنا حال الشاعر يثير نغم المغنية بالفارسية في نفسه كوامن الشوق وهو لا يفهم لغتها، والمشبه به حال الأعمى يعشق الغانيات وهو لا يرى شيئا من حسنهن، ووجه الشبه هو صورة قلب يتأثر وينفعل بأشياء لا يدركها كل الإدراك.

(٢) ورت كبدي: ألهبته، والشجا: الحزن والطرب، والمعنى: لم أجهل ما بعثته في نفسي من الحزن، والمعنى: المتعب الحزين.

علم البيان

He had written music to accompany Lou’s poem, the ‘Prayer to Life’, which he had renamed ‘Hymn to Life’ (Hymnus an das Leben).
He expressed the hope that it should be played in his memory at some future time, by which he presumably meant his funeral, and he reiterated the idea that, at least in this small way, he and Lou had now been joined together for posterity.

- I Am Dynamite

I genuinely hate academia

"To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment."

What a curious coupling, fairy tales and medicine. As much as I tried to forget it and press forward with my dissertation I kept returning to that idea. How is pathology a bedfellow to fairy tales?

Here is my best conclusion: For centuries, disease was almost indistinguishable from magic – spontaneous, metamorphic, at times exotic, powerful, and mysterious. For centuries, disease provoked both wonder and fear; it elicited a kind of grotesque enchantment. Disease, I like to think Osler is suggesting, tells a story. It has traceable beginnings, chaotic middles and dramatic ends. To us, the victims, it is the villain which must be vanquished; but I imagine if diseases could talk they would cast themselves as the heroes and heroines struggling to survive against impossible odds.

- William Osler, Medicine, and Fairy Tales by Ryan Habermeyer

Though not a fan of perplexing expressions and convoluted verbalism, but they are of a tremendous and practical use; they cipher content and conceal intention. They are the rhetorical analog of cryptography.

The esoteric & sufist religious movements understood the value of secrecy and concealment. They often describe their texts & books as "layered," that is: they have a superficial meaning that you, the outsider, can understand, and they have a deeper layer of meaning which only the initiated can comprehend, much like inside jokes, and slang in the modern sense.

كانَ لَبيد بن ربيعة من أشهَرِ شعراءِ الجاهلية وفرسانِها، فلما دخلَ الإسلام ترَكَ الشعر وما قالَ بعدَ إسلامِه إلا بيتًا واحدًا:
ما عاتَبَ الحُرَّ الكَريمَ كَنَفسِهِ
وَالمَرءُ يُصلِحُهُ الجَليسُ الصالِحُ

توفي سنة 41 هـ ويُروى أنّه عاش ما يقارب الـ 157 سنة أو الـ 120 سنة.

Some men have sighed over the abduction of their wives, but more over the fact that nobody wished to abduct them.

- Human All Too Human

With his mother (1890)

The first days of his madness:
On entering Nietzsche’s room, Overbeck discovered his friend cowering on the corner of a sofa. Ostensibly he was proofreading the pages of a book. He was holding the printed sheets up close to his bewildered face, like a child pretending to read. He knew the actions expected for the task. The paper must be this far from his nose; he must scan from left to right and back again. The words on the page obviously meant nothing to him.
At Overbeck’s entrance, he rushed at him, embraced him violently and broke into sobbing. Then he sank back on the sofa, twitching, moaning and quivering. Overbeck was a quiet, steady man who was not given to emotional display but on seeing his old friend in this state his legs gave way; he staggered and almost collapsed.

As the train rushed through the dark St Gotthard tunnel running beneath the Alps, Overbeck heard Nietzsche’s voice clear and coherent singing the ‘Gondola Song’, one of his own poems that he had inserted into his book Ecce Homo:
My soul, a stringed instrument,
Invisibly touched,
Sang secretly to itself,
A Gondola song,
Tremulous, rich with joy.
Was anyone listening?