Very fascinating philosophical memoir about the nature of love, being hurt, and dying. It's scatterbrained but in a way which I don't at all mind. It's like pulling back the veil on someone's soul.

les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus

– Proust quote about "the true paradises are the paradises that one has lost"

Keep your mind in hell and despair not

In personal life, people have absolute power over each other, whereas in professional life, beyond the terms of the contract, people have authority, the power to make one another comply in ways which may be perceived as legitimate or illegitimate. In personal life, regardless of any covenant, one party may initiate a unilateral and fundamental change in the terms of relating without renegotiating them, and further, refusing even to acknowledge the change.

Imagine how a beloved child or dog would respond, if the Lover turned away. There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. To be at someone's mercy is dialectical damage: they may be merciful and they may be merciless. Yet each party, woman, man, the child in each, and their child, is absolute power as well as absolute vulnerability. You may be less powerful than the whole world, but you are always more powerful than yourself

Full of bangers:

The three I harbour within me—body, soul and paraclete—press against the same triplicity in you.

this time I want to do a different differently. You may be weaker than the whole world that you were always stronger than yourself. Let me send my power against my power. So what if I die. Let me discover what it is that I want in fear from love.

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gestures of histrionic largesse

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this medieval tale (of King Arthur, who loses Guinevere to lance a lot) contains Merlin‘s wisdom about the rule of reason. It tells what happened when a sovereign people (“the king“) without coercion decree law for themselves. Their humanity is forgotten, and so will be the law. Sadness is the condition of the king. For he has to experience his power and his vulnerability, his love and his violence, within and without the law.

let’s play a game called BAP or Gillian:

This decision by the intellectuals that reason itself has ruined modern life, and should be dethroned and banned in the name of its silenced others, is comparable to the decision to stop small children, girls and boys, from playing with guns, pugnacious video games, or any violent toys. This brutally sincere, enlightened probity, which thinks it will stop war and aggression, in effect aggravates their propensity. This decision evinces loss of trust in the way that play (fairy stories, terrifying films) teaches the difference between fantasy and actuality. The child who is able to explore that border will feel safe in experiencing vio-lent, inner, emotional conflict, and will acquire compassion for other people. The child who is locked away from aggressive experiment and play will be left terrified and paralysed by its emotions, unable to release or face them, for they may destroy the world and himself or herself. The censor aggravates the syndrome she seeks to alleviate; she seeks to rub out in others the border which has been effaced inside herself.

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Does not all writing, even if it claims at Gelassenheit—to let things be—arrogate such illegitimate authority

. Kant, father of enlightenment, born out of reformation to its logical end of discerning unrevealed religion in the form of rationalism:

Immanuel Kant was an ardent Pietist, a follower of that Protestant Counter-Reformation, the Reformation of the Reformation. He knew that, since Luther, authority and scepticism keep changing places: one person's authority is another's scepticism. Descartes drew his voie d'examen from Calvinism; in turn, the French Counter-Reformation drew its fideism from Descartes's scepticism.

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