Written March–July 2024 and dedicated to German impressionist painter Casper David Friedrich

1. As the drip of water withers away a mighty stone, so too is self-control built up by steadfastness and habit.
2. For trust is built up commensurate with the measure of freedom endowed. Ecce Homo! The image of God.
3. Love that seeks to control is specious at best and noxious at worst: relinquishing-in-freedom as a necessary prerequisite in the cycle of love, a departure and return.
4. Stoicism, a state of pure apathia, seems more like psychopathy than equanimity. For it is human, all too human to feel the pain of the world. Indeed, it is also divine. Agony: Theanthropic Existence.
5. Protagoras said “Man is the measure of all things.” As it is, men measure their height and round up…generously.
6. The Stoics attenuated the human experience by exhorting one to live according to Nature or God; in contrast, the Christian must embrace the full scope of emotions as divine: Jesus wept.
7. Random acts of kindness have been replaced by random acts of suffering: Fate, the benefactor.
8. Sacrificial love is the soul unfolding itself through the Other in a miraculous processing of becoming: The Life of God, a symphony in four movements.
9. Dread is an anxiety of life, a spector in the daylight—a sleep paralysis while conscious. Meanwhile, Chaos rolls the die and the Fates laugh.
10. As the soul is imprisoned by the body, so too is the body shackled to the fate of Time. Chronos: the mighty slave driver.
11. Behold! Wisdom calls out from her grave—the dead speak, and only those who are sagacious enough to open these books will reap both her wisdom and her sorrow.
12. The banality of evil and the ambiguity of suffering can only be mollified by a gallant act of madness—insanity and genius: a razor’s edge.
13. I am beaten by Time and subjected to her tortures; I am humiliated and made her slave: ‘Yea! Give me life, give me life!,’ cry out I, ‘life and life only!’
14. Far better to accept a poignant reality than to be chagrined by a dream yet unfulfilled. For there is nothing new under the sun: a pessimist’s transcendent hope.
15. The loquaciousness and inanity of society, in short, a rogue, is only tempered in part by a wry smile and eyes of vexation: a cultural holiness.
16. Security that engenders inaction is conquered only by an insatiable curiosity and a lust for freedom: gaudium hominis.
17. A marriage of poverty is a battle of the sexes but a marriage of fortitude is a battle of the souls: for all geniuses need a formidable sparring partner.
18. Contrary to Nietzsche’s assertion, it is not a common bed that reduces a marriage to ashes, but lack of a common Weltanschauung. This is, after all, common sense.
19. For books of wisdom yet cry out, and heroic tales long to be heard; however, there is a world clamor in the air, subtle, sinister, sulfurous—a diabolic harbinger of things to come.
20. Oh life, Impenetrable life! Sober, solemn, insufferable!