Mar 14, 2008 13:38
"...then I shuddered as I remembered that, according to a tradition well known in Germany, every man has a double and that when he sees him, death is near" -- Gerard de Nerval, Aurelia
I went to bed early, after reading most of this short dialogue of disintegration, and an image came to me, of the Gemini twins, joined at the hips, and the horror they must experience, being constantly confronted with their double ... I feel like my life, for the last couple of years, has been like this, coding death in my shadow ...
After Nerval remembers a man who had been released from jail the night he'd been imprisoned for insane behavior, under his own name: "...But who exactly was this spirit who was myself and yet outside myself? Was he the double of legend or the mystical brother whom the Orientals call ferouer? Had I not been struck by the tale of the knight who had spent an entire night in a forest battling an unknown adversary who was none other than himself?"
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"the seventh of the many philosophical systems of India recorded by Paul Dressen denies that the self can be an immediate object of knowledge, because if our soul were knowable, a second soul would be required to know the first" ... "Schopenhauer rediscovers this idea around 1843. 'The knower himself,' he repeats, 'cannot be known precisely as such, otherwise he would be the known of another knower'" -- J.L. Borges, Time and J.W. Dunne'
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"I caress the white bears without reaching you" -- Andre Breton, Mad Love