The Black Obelisk

Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It's one of the most important secrets of living.

I want to think and at the same time that's the last thing in the world I want to do.

Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.

Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.

I cannot really play. Either at piano or at life; never, never have I been able to. I have always been too hasty, too impatient; something always intervenes and breaks it up. But who really knows how to play, and if he does know, what good is it to him? Is the great dark less dark for that, are the unanswerable questions less inscrutable, does the pain of despair at eternal inadequacy burn less fiercely, and can life ever be explained and seized and ridden like a tamed horse or is it always a mighty sail that carries us in the storm and, when we try to seize it, sweep us into the deep? Sometimes there is a hole in me that seems to extend to the center of the earth. What could fill it? Yearning? Dispair? Happiness? What happiness? Fatigue? Resignation? Death? What am I alive for? Yes, for what am I alive?

I am a modern man with a strong tendency to self-destruction.

But probably that's the way of the world - when we have finally learned something we're too old to apply it - and so it goes, wave after wave, generation after generation. No one learns anything at all from anyone else.

... but that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.

I, too, am going to go away soon,' she says, 'I am weary and weary of my weariness. Everything is beginning to be a little empty and full of leave-taking and melancholy and waiting.

The miracle has passed me by; it has touched but not changed me; I still have the same name and I know I will probably bear it until the end of my days; I am no phoenix; resurrection is not for me; I have tried to fly but I am tumbling like a dazzled, awkward rooster back to earth, back behind the barbed wires.

No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.

Perhaps there is really nothing else when everything is falling to pieces, I think, except this bit of togetherness and even that is a sweet deception, for when someone else really needs you you cannot follow him or stand by him. I have noticed that often enough in the war when I looked into the face of a dead comrade. Each one of us has his own death and must suffer it alone; no one can help him then.

One often feels as though something had happened before, I remember. It comes quite close to you and stands there and you know it was just this way once before, exactly so; for an instant you almost know how it must go on, but then it disappears as you try to lay hold of it like smoke or a dead memory. "We could never remember, Isabelle," I say. "It's like the rain. That has also become one, out of two gasses, oxygen and hydrogen, which no longer remember they were once gasses. Now they are only rain and have no memory of an earlier time.

Our damnable memory is a sieve. It wants to survive. And survival is only possible through forgetfulness.

My rage outweighs my shame, as always happens when one is really ashamed and knows he ought to be.

I am thinking of those strange moments when unexpectedly a kind of second sight like a deceptive memory seems suddenly to give us glimpses of many earlier lives.

He was pious... He must... He can’t possibly have remembered that this way he would not be allowed to lie in consecrated earth.” “He probably didn’t think about it at all. But don’t grieve at what your pastor says. I know thousands of very pious Catholics who lie in unconsecrated earth.” “Where?” “On the battlefields in Russia and France. They lie there all together in mass graves, Catholics and Jews and Protestants, and I don’t think it makes a bit of difference to God.

What's the matter with you anyway?" Riesenfeld shouts "You look like a moon-struck kangaroo!

Where is it, Rudolf?” she whispers, pressing herself against me. “Tell me where it is! Has a piece of me been left behind everywhere? In all the mirrors I have looked into? I have seen lots of them, countless ones! Am I scattered everywhere in them? Has each of them taken some part of me? A thin impression, a thin slice of me? Have I been shaved down by mirrors like a piece of wood by a carpenter’s plane? What is still left of me?” I take her by the shoulders. “All of you is still here,” I say. “On-the contrary, mirrors add something. They make it visible and give it to you—a bit of space, a lighted bit of our-self.” “Myself?” She continues to cling to my hand. “But suppose it is not that way? Suppose myself is buried all over in thousands and thousands of mirrors? How can I get it back? Oh, I can never get it back! It is lost! Lost! It has been rubbed away like a statue that no longer has a face. Where is my face? Where is my first face? The one before all the mirrors? The one before they began to steal me!” “No one has stolen you,” I say in desperation. “Mirrors don’t steal. They only reflect.

A woman who is desired by someone else, even a love-starved coffinmaker, immediately becomes more precious than before. Man, as it happens, lives by relative rather than absolute values.