Katabasis

“Hell’s lonely,” said Peter. “You’ll want company.”
“Hell is other people, I’ve heard.”

“The true lover of philosophy is always thinking about death.” — PLATO

You could do anything if you were delusional.

Favoritism was well and fine if she was the favorite.

But magicians lived in air, dancing on a tentative staircase of ideas, and it was a source of endless delirium, to know that the instant the world began to bore you, you could snap your fingers, and you’d be in free fall once again.

Magick taunts physics and makes her cry.

Alice Law, you naughty girl. You’re trying to go to Hell.

Orpheus’s notes, already in archaic Greek, were largely in shreds like the rest of him.

One was hurt most by what one knew.

Everyone knew that the nicer a library was, the better the work you did within it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein had once argued there were no philosophical problems, just problems of language.

Immortality here was no gift. Nothing was fleeting, precious, and so nothing was valuable. Not even thoughts, for none of their thoughts were original, but mere echoes of one another, everything they would ever be capable of thinking in a gilded box with the spotlight merely roving. Nothing added; no discovery, no delight. No growth here. Just withered stumps of time.

There was no line in the sand, nothing that declared a hard and fast distinction between the cruel man’s blows and the tyrant’s cunning manipulation.

Where Violence was harsh and mindless, Cruelty was littered with intention. Cruelty fucked with you on purpose.

But it had never been about the recommendation letters. It was only about revenge, and bloody control, and having Grimes understand at last how it felt to be someone else’s toy.

What hurt was how easily he could reduce her to a thing.

The best argument Socrates could make against suicide in the Phaedo was that mortals were like possessions of the gods, and that the gods would be irritated if one of their possessions freed itself from their mortal prison by self-destruction. The Christian injunction against suicide only seemed to be a reframing of that.

What cages of beliefs kept Helen going?

It was the first time a poet seemed to understand that wrath was not merely external; was not just a screaming raving tornado of destruction. Sometimes you swallowed it down like a hot coal. Sometimes it only ever burned you, slowly, from the inside out, until you choked.

It made sense that so many progressed from Lust to Greed, if one trusted Dante’s account of things. They were both sins of incontinence and desire; only greed was the sin of desire turned against others, a sin committed when one realized that others, too, would do anything it took to get what they wanted.