melancholia

 I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air…

The world was void,

The populous and the powerful – was a lump,

Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless –

A lump of death – a chaos of hard clay.

Byron – Darkness

”If the face of the earth were covered with lice as the sea-shore is covered with grains of sand, the human race would be destroyed, a prey to dreadful pain. What a sight! With me, motionless on my angel wings, in the air to contemplate it!

Comte de Lautréamont – Maldoror and Poems, translation by Paul Knight

The spectacle of man – what an emetic! Love – a duel of salivas… All the feelings milk their absolute from the misery of glands. Nobility is only in the negation of existence, in a smile that surveys annihilated landscapes (E.M. Cioran – A Short History of Decay, translation by Richard Howard.) 

, if death and love collide, we must hang on to our capacity for love until it transforms the power of death.