14p.
..For the homeless, Gaustine felt love and dread, those were the precise words, and always in that combination. He loved them and feared them in the way you love and fear something you have already been or expect to become.... - P-1
27p.
..Somewhere nearby the Doors‘ Alabama Song is playing, and suddenly it seemed to me that there was a secret conversation going on, that Morrison was actually talking to Auden. Exactly in that refrain, that line, as if resolving the hesitation in Auden‘s least favorite line, We must love one another or die. In Morrison‘s case there is no longer any hesitation, the answer is categorical: I tell you we must die. - P-1
29~30p.
..Zurich is a city for growing old. The world has slowed down, the river of life has settled into a lake, lazy and calm on the surface, the luxury of boredom and sun on the hill for old bones. Time in all of its relativity. It is no coincidence whatsoever that two major discoveries of the twentieth century tied precisely to time were made here, of all places, in Switzerland—Einstein‘s Theory of Relativity and Thomas Mann‘s Magic Mountain. - P-1
35p.
..To be merciless toward the past. Because the past itself is merciless. - P-1
47p.
..The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined. - P-1
62p.
...The bright future gives me heartburn, he once told a group of friends. (That, of course, immediately got written down). Shortly thereafter Brodsky, if I recall, formulated it more beautifully, but it was the same idea: "My objections to that system were not so much political as aesthetic." Nevertheless, I prefer Mr. N.‘s formulation. His objections to the system were physiological. - P-1
66p.
...Without being able to formulate it clearly, he senses that if no one remembers, then everything is permissible. ‘If no one remembers‘ becomes the equivalent of ‘If there is no God.‘ If there is no God, Dostoyevsky said, then everything is permitted. God will turn out to be nothing but a huge memory. A memory of sins. A cloud with infinite megabytes of memory. A forgetful God, a God with Alzheimer‘s, would free us from all obligations. No memory, no crime. - P-1
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