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an eternity of futility and scorn that obtained in each and every second of life for those who had set out as thinkers, futility because as soon as you abandoned thought and tried simply to look at things, thought cropped up again in a new form, a form from which, in other words, there was no escape whatever man thought or did not think, because he remained the prisoner of thought either way,
clearly preferred short sentences, with longer or shorter silences between sentences, silences that carried as much significance as the sentences themselves because he obviously gave careful consideration to all his utterances,
“the love of animals is the one true love in which one is never disappointed,”
He was aware of an invincible, stifling power already busily attacking his manicured paths and trails from all sides, crushing feeders, moldering the box- and pole traps and settling over the entire forest like some enormous infernal serpentine vine in mockery of the spasmodic human will that endeavors to tone everything, all that is complex and unknowable, down to its own heroic simplicity
This upwelling elemental compassion was filled with remorse but at the same time also with a frightening stubbornness, that obduracy of the misled which follows in the wake of a wrong committed in ignorance.
he finally understood that he had been living his life steeped in the deepest ignorance, allowing himself to be led by the nose, firmly believing he was obeying the order of divine providence when he had divided the world into noxious and beneficial, while in reality both categories originated in the same heinous ruthlessness that had infernal light lurking in its depths,
A burst of compassion thus swept him among the fallen, and this same compassion made him revolt against that loyalty that had till now shackled him to the tyranny of the law, and since he now believed that there had to be a higher law beyond human reckoning, he had crossed the borderline past which — he realized — he would remain forever alone.
— it depended only on us — would offer an opportunity to fulfill the until now stillborn promise of our handcuffed imaginations, and since our paraphiliac experiments had been aimed at precisely this impossibility, the total liberation of the imagination — in Gusztáv’s words — “from the infernal void of esse,” it was very hard for us now to renounce this chance of its realization, the tantalizing prospect that perhaps this time we would succeed in emerging into the boundless spaciousness of freedom, from where — even if only for a split second before extinction — we could contemplate the
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