If reading is a craft that allows us to remember the common experience of humankind, it follows that totalitarian governments will try to suppress the memory held by the page. Under such circumstances, the reader’s struggle is against oblivion.

Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher]

Hermetic quote Manuel Library at Night reader's struggle against oblivion

Consider also:

  1. “Rather, what may seem to be mystification is a way of making that information symbolic because it is hidden. Because it is hidden, it cannot be explained. Because it cannot be said, it stands in for, or acts as a pointer to, the unsayable. We map the extra, tacit, inarticulable dimension into the ordinary realm by the use of secrets. Or: the secret is the diagonal that allows the third, inarticulate dimension to be mapped into the plane, the domain of words.”
  2. The Book of Monelle
  3. “Importantly, he also encourages us to remember that this deity is really just one reflection of the divine. If we lose sight of this, we risk overly identifying with a partial force, rather than the one spiritual star in our sight—the HGA.”
  4. “Saint, hero, and poet are all inspired; the difference is that saint and hero work in their “… own flesh and blood and not in paper or parchment…” (PASL, 333). Their very lives are works of art, because they have permanently found the anti-self, and so, live in an inspired ecstasy. The poet lives in the tension between inspiration and the workaday world. According to this theory, the ecstatic state of mind, immersion in the anti-self, allows the daimon to inspire the artist.”
  5. “The smell pierced her. It coiled and drifted and wove through her, conjuring the last drip of whiskey in her father’s crystal decanter, the first strawberries of summer, the last scrap of Christmas pudding smeared over gold-chased bone china and licked off with lazy tongue swipes. It smelled like a sticky wetness on her fingers, coaxed out of a pretty girl in the cloak room at a Mayfair ball, slipped into a pair of silk gloves and placed on a young colonel’s scarlet shoulder during the waltz.”