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?

The asylum's report on his condition reads:
‘Body healthy and well developed. Muscular. Deep-chested. Heart sounds low-pitched, normal. Pulse regular 70. Pupillar disparity, right larger than the left, reaction to light sluggish. Tongue heavily furred. Exaggerated patellar reflex. Urine clear, acid, containing neither sugar nor albumen.

During Binswanger’s (the doctor in the asylum) classes, Nietzsche took his turn in being one of the patients exhibited as a teaching aid. He did not perceive this as any sort of humiliation. While he did not know what he was doing there, he obviously felt his importance as a personage. He behaved courteously to the medical attendants, repeatedly expressing gratitude, comporting himself towards them as a gracious master to his servants. He thanked them for his splendid reception. He tried to shake the doctor’s hand over and over again. Somewhere in his mind he knew that the doctor was of superior social standing, as he was himself.

When Binswanger wished to show off some disturbances in the patient’s walk, Nietzsche moved so slowly and lethargically that the symptoms could not be seen. ‘Now, Herr Professor,’ Binswanger scolded, ‘an old soldier like you surely can still march!’ Upon which Nietzsche began to pace along the lecture hall with a firm gait.
There were calm intervals of pathetic charm. He asked the doctor with a smile, ‘Give me a little health.’

In his mother's care:
He slept most of the morning. When he had been washed and dressed he would spend the rest of the day in the other room, sitting for hours brooding dully. Sometimes he would play with dolls and other toys. His mother read aloud to him for as long as her voice held out. He did not understand the words but he liked to hear their sound. He did not like visitors. When the barber came to trim his strongly growing beard and moustache, and the masseur to rub some circulation through his atrophying muscles, he objected violently.

His mother records a typical incident when she asked if he wanted a meal, and he replied, ‘Do I have a mouth for it? Should I eat that? my mouth I say, I want to eat … What is that here? an ear What is that here? a nose What is that here? hands I do not love.’ But somewhere in the labyrinthine brain there remained, if not some sort of recollection, then at least a dim shadow of what he had once been: if something pleased him or he found it beautiful, he called it ‘a book’, and he dwelled on the question of whether he was stupid. ‘“No, my dear son,” I say to him, “you are not stupid, your books are now world-shaking.” “No, I am stupid.”’