Source: Inferno
“We must pass through the darkness, to reach the light.”
“Death will find a way.
Even the gods must pass.”
Source: She Is the Darkness (1997), Chapter 85 (p. 574)
“None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell.”
Savitri (1918-1950), Book Two : The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds
Context: p>As in a studio of creative Death
The giant sons of Darkness sit and plan
The drama of the earth, their tragic stage.
All who would raise the fallen world must come
Under the dangerous arches of their power;
For even the radiant children of the gods
To darken their privilege is and dreadful right.
None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell.This too the traveller of the worlds must dare.</p
“For joys fall not to the rich alone, nor has he lived ill, who from birth to death has passed unknown.”
Nam neque divitibus contingunt gaudia solis,
nec vixit male, qui natus moriensque fefellit.
Book I, epistle xvii, line 9
Epistles (c. 20 BC and 14 BC)
Evolution (1895; 1909)
Context: Thus life by life and love by love
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath and death by death
We followed the chain of change.
Till there came a time in the law of life
When o’er the nursing sod,
The shadows broke and soul awoke
In a strange, dim dream of God.
"Anima Poetæ : From the Unpublished Note-books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge" (1895) edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, p. 238
Paris Review interview (1958)
Context: The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.
Source: The Magnificent Defeat
