Source: The Historian (2005), Ch. 5
Context: In the Year of Our Lord 1456 Drakula did many terrible and curious things. When he was appointed Lord in Wallachia, he had all the young boys burned who came to his land to learn the language, four hundred of them. He had a large family impaled and many of his people buried naked up to the navel and shot at. Some he had roasted and then flayed.
There was a footnote, too, at the bottom of the first page. The typeface of the note was so fine that I almost missed it. Looking more closely, I realized it was a commentary on the word impaled. Vlad Tepes, it claimed, had learned this form of torture from the Ottomans. Impalement of the sort he practiced involved the penetration of the body with a sharpened wooden stake, usually through the anus or genitals upward, so that the stake sometimes emerged through the mouth and sometimes through the head.
I tried for a minute not to see these words; then I tried for several minutes to forget them, with the book shut.
The thing that most haunted me that day, however, as I closed my notebook and put my coat on to go home, was not my ghostly image of Dracula, or the description of impalement, but the fact that these things had — apparently — actually occurred. If I listened too closely, I thought, I would hear the screams of the boys, of the “large family” dying together. For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history’s terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth. And once you’ve seen that truth — really seen it — you can’t look away.
As quoted by Ned Rorem The Dick Cavett Show (PBS) (6 October 1981)
"Lazarus" · Video at YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-JqH1M4Ya8
Song lyrics, Blackstar (2016)
Context: Look up here, I’m in heaven
I’ve got scars that can’t be seen
I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen
Everybody knows me now Look up here, man, I’m in danger
I’ve got nothing left to lose
I’m so high it makes my brain whirl
Dropped my cell phone down below Ain’t that just like me
Variant: We look not at the things which are what you would call seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things which are not seen are eternal.
Source: A Wrinkle in Time
Fiction, Distress (1995)
Source: Time Cat (1963), Chapter 10 “Odranoel” (pp. 100-101)
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 603.
