
“It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.”
Le Pur et l'Impur (The Pure and the Impure) (1932)
“It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.”
“God, being a great abyss, to men his depth reveals
Who climb the highest peak of the eternal hills”
The Cherubinic Wanderer
Speak, Memory: A Memoir (1951)
Context: The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).
Source: Confessions of a Young Man http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12278/12278-h/12278-h.htm (1886), Ch. 12.
Context: I will admit that an artist may be great and limited; by one word he may light up an abyss of soul; but there must be this one magical and unique word. Shakespeare gives us the word, Balzac, sometimes, after pages of vain striving, gives us the word, Tourgueneff gives it with miraculous certainty; but Henry James, no; a hundred times he flutters about it; his whole book is one long flutter near to the one magical and unique word, but the word is not spoken; and for want of the word his characters are never resolved out of the haze of nebulae. You are on a bowing acquaintance with them; they pass you in the street, they stop and speak to you, you know how they are dressed, you watch the colour of their eyes.
Source: 1960 - 1970, Interview with David Sylvester 2. Spring 1965, p. 255