I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.

— Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

90s Russia

Divina Commedia - Inferno, Canto XXXII, Dante and Virgil before Lucifer
Italian Manuscript; XIV Century

Silver Grill Cafe, Vancouver, 1975.

“This is what happens to us in music: First one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it. Then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness. Finally, there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing. As it is in music, that is how we have learned to love all things we now love. Even love has to be learned.”

—The Gay Science, §334 (edited excerpt).

Berlin By Night. 1964

Power of knowing without being known.

— Margaret Atwood, The Door; from ‘Secrecy’

When Finland had to surrender the Karelian isthmus after the end of the Winter War to the USSR, 12% of the total population of Finland lived there, ~500,000 people. They were offered Soviet citizenship.

They all declined.

The Night (2020), dir. Kourosh Ahari

“Nobody up to now has examined the value of that most famous of all medicines, called morality. The first step would be, for once, to question it.”

—The Gay Science, §345 (edited excerpt).

Renée Vivien, tr. by Jeanette H. Foster, from “A Woman Appeared To Me,”

“What makes one heroic? Going out to meet at the same time one’s highest suffering and one’s highest hope.”

—The Gay Science, §268.