A Leak In The Safe

He who has thought deeply

Loves what is most vital;

He who has looked into the world

Understands the nobility of youth,

And wise men often incline

Toward the beautiful at the last

– Friedrich Holderlin

The only revenge left for you then will be to steal from life the pleasure of firm and passionate flesh – a pleasure that evaporates faster than good intentions and is the nearest thing to heaven you will find in this stinking world where everything decays, beginning with beauty and ending with memory.

– Carlos Ruiz Zafon

You are ever youthful

Your body is adorned with ornaments

You form the waves of the ocean of erotic love

You are ever ready to show your grace to all devotees

Your hair is braided with jasmine

Your body is as tender as a creeper

– Sama Veda

The house dress she wore was very plain, but cut tight across her chest, and when she walked it all twisted into glamorous shapes.

Some things are meant only to be fevers in the brain.

– Megan Abbott

Whoever clasps a serpent to himself

Is confronted with shadow

– Ludwig Tieck

Lottie walks round. She has a look at me an’ she laughs.

"Ain’t you the big mug?" she says. "Didn’t they tell you that dames sometimes has a gun in their handbag? Have a piece of shoe, honey!"

She steps back and kicks me in the face. I don’t know whether you’ve ever been kicked in the face by a dame, but high heels can hurt considerable.

– Peter Cheyney

But seriously for a moment, the flesh must be dealt with but not through any of the silly techniques provided by the current religions. And it must not be mastered on moral grounds, but simply on the functional grounds of wanting to be more than human. Lastly, in order for it to be mastered, it must first be fulfilled and respected; no repression, no denial, no punishment, no nonsense.

In other words, there is nothing in man, absolutely nothing, which cannot be used in order to further the Great Work, to further his own psycho-spiritual development into an integrated, illuminated human being.

– Israel Regardie

Day by day, I become more aware that everything holds together in a much more personal and infinitely more vivid way than we could imagine.

– Schelling

The absolute, seen by philosophers of preceding centuries as in a transcendent hereafter far away from us, becomes real in the consciousness of man, in the mind conscious of itself, in the self.

– Ernst Benz

Revelation happens by degrees until the moment when it reaches us.

– J .A. Bengel

Summer’s heat and springtime’s mildness,

Conflict and peace alternate here

Wondrously in my heart

In front of the silent divine image;

Angry in the midst of homages,

Shamed, conquered, I have often

Struggled to grasp the woman

Who surpasses my boldest imaginings.

– Friedrich Holderlin

Sweet rest, sweet ecstasy in the grass,

With the aroma of the herbs around me,

Deep current, deep, deeply enraptured current,

When the cloud dissolves into azure

When sweet laughter falls like an illusion

Onto my weary, dizzy head

When a lovely voice murmurs and drips down

Like the lime-tree blossoms onto a grave.

I jumped up and shook myself

Like someone who has just escaped a cataleptic fit,

And dashed along the dark boundary hedges,

Still in doubt whether the star by the ridge of the field

Was really the glow from my bedside lamp

Or the eternal light by the sarcophagus.

– Annette von Droste-Hulshoff

I certainly must admit

That things resembling people appear around me;

That I hear them, yes, that I see them in the flesh

I cannot deny; yet this kingdom of the world

Remains so foreign and hollow to me, that all its turning

Is not sufficient to remove my doubts

Whether being or nonbeing is nosily bustling here,

Whether a world like this even has a soul in its body!

– Clemens Brentano

And the confusion, more and more variegated,

Becomes a magically impetuous river;

Down into the beautiful world

This stream’s greeting lures you.

Joy, the beautiful, credulous child,

Is rocking in the evening breezes:

Where silver is flowing on branches and bushes

You will find the most beautiful girl!

The years pass like clouds

And leave me here alone;

The world has forgotten me,

Then you stepped toward me miraculously

When, to the rustling of the forest,

I sat here lost in thought.

– Joseph von Eichendorff

all selections translated by Stanley Appelbaum