I
“In Rome, I conversed with philosophers who felt that to extend a man’s life is to extend his agony and multiply his deaths.”
II
“This palace is a fabrication of the gods,” I thought at the beginning. I explored the uninhabited interiors and corrected myself: “The gods who built it have died.” I noted its peculiarities and said: “The gods who built it were mad.”
III
“I thought that Argos and I participated in different universes; I thought that our perceptions were the same, but that he combined them in another way and made other objects of them; I thought that perhaps there were no objects for him, only a vertiginous and continuous play of extremely brief impressions, I thought of a world without memory, without time;”
IV
“With the relics of its ruins they erected, in the same place, the mad city I had traversed: a kind of parody or inversion and also a temple of the irrational gods, who govern the world and of whom we know nothing, save that they do not resemble man. This establishment was the last symbol to which the Immortals condescended; it marks a stage at which, judging that all undertakings are in vain, they determined to live in thought, in pure speculation. They erected their structure, forgot it and went to dwell in the caves. Absorbed in thought, they hardly perceived the physical world.”
“These things were told me by Homer…He was like a god who might create a cosmos and then create a chaos.”
***
“Indoctrinated by a practice of centuries, the republic of immortal men had attained the perfection of tolerance and almost that of indifference. They knew that in an infinite period of time, all things happen to all men.”
***
“The body, for them, was a submissive domestic animal and it sufficed to give it, every month, the pittance of a few hours of sleep, a bit of water and a scarp of meat. Let no one reduce us to the status of ascetics. There is no pleasure more complex than that of thought and we surrendered ourselves to it.
V
“I have been Homer; shortly, I shall be No One, like Ulysses; shortly, I shall be all men; I shall be dead.”
Girl & Cat Productions 