When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamín Labatut

According to Schwarzschild, the most frightful thing about mass at its most extreme degree of concentration was not the way it altered the form of space, or the strange effects it exerted on time: the true horror, he said, was that the singularity was a blind spot, fundamentally unknowable.

Goethe also had help writing his Divan, but his inspiration was not divine, rather the wife of one of his friends, Marianne von Willemer. She was as fanatical an admirer of Hafez as Goethe himself, and they wrote the book together, revising the drafts in letters rife with eroticism, in which the German poet imagines biting her nipples and ejaculating in her mouth, while she dreams of sodomizing him, in spite of the fact that they met only once, and there is no evidence they were able to fulfil any of their fantasies.

“I no longer ask myself when the war will be over. I ask whether it is at all possible for a thing such as this to end.”