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forehead, pressed on the arm, face to the ground, breathing quietly. And you are watching, are one of the watchmen, you find the next one by brandishing a burning stick from the bushwood pile beside you. Why are you watching? Someone must watch, it is said. Someone must be there.

Franz Kafka - complete stories - p436

4.14.74

One's mind regains in absence that dominion over earthly things which has been shaken by their nude contact; you force yourself hardily into the material presence of a mountain or a river, whose name belongs to poetry and ancient religion, rather than to the external world; your feelings, wound up and kept ready for some sort of half expected rapture, are chilled and born down for the time under all this load of real earth and water:

57

but let these once pass out of sight, and then again the old fanciful notions are restored, and the mere realities which you have just been looking at are thrown back so far into the distance the very event of your intrusion upon such scenes begins to look dim and uncertain as through it belonged to mythology.

p74 - Eothen by AW Kinglake (1844)

Sampson Lab, Manston + Co - London

Chap. IV

If man cannot create anything or make a dent in anything or anybody, if he cannot break out of the prison of his total narcissism, he can escape the unbearable sense of powerlessness and nothingness only by affirming himself in the act of destruction of the life that he is unable to create.

Destruction is the creative, self-transcending act of the hopeless and crippled, the revenge of the unlived life upon itself.

Erich Fromm "The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness"