Chris’s Reviews > Labyrinths > Status Update

'Let us admit what all idealists admit: the hallucinatory nature of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: seek unrealities which confirm that nature. We shall find them, I believe, in the antimonies of Kant and in the dialectics of Zeno.'

'The centre of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere‘.. This phrase was written with exultation in 1584: seventy years later there was no reaction of that fervour left.. men felt lost in time and space. In time, because if future and past are infinite, there cannot really be a when: in space, because if every being is equidistant from the infinite and the infinitesimal, neither can there be a where

'Belief in the Zahir is of Islamic origin, and seems to date from the eighteenth century.. Zahir in Arabic means 'notorious', 'visible'; in this sense it is one of the ninety-nine names of God. and the people.. use it to signify 'beings or things which possess the terrible property of being unforgettable, and whose image finally drive one mad''

'Every man should be capable of all ideas and I understand that in the future this will be the case"

"...one of those parasitic books which situate Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet on La Cannebiere or Don Quixote on Wall Street. Like all men of good taste, Menard abhorred these useless carnivals, fit only as he would say to produce the plebeian pleasure of anachronism or (what is worse) to enthral us with the elementary idea that all epochs are the same or are different."