Kindle Notes & Highlights
Is it possible that our search for the secret is misguided because we fail to include the unknown as a crucial element in that secret? Is it possible that our loathing of the unknown, our need to dispel it, to destroy it, to violate it through sharp, glittering acts of understanding, makes the unknown swell with dark power, as if it were some beast feeding on our swords? Are we perhaps searching for the wrong secret, the secret we ourselves long for? Or, to put it another way, is it possible that the secret lies open before us, that we already know what it is?
grave youth
It was perhaps the very extremity of these well-deserved claims that should have given us pause, for if an art has indeed been carried to its richest expression, then we may wonder whether the urge that impelled it in the direction of its fulfillment may not impel it beyond its proper limit. In this sense we may ask whether the highest form of an art contains within it the elements of its own destruction—whether decadence, in short, so far from being the sickly opposite of art’s deepest health, is perhaps nothing but the result of an urge identical to both.
