Taedium Vitae

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“. . . he had long since given up on Schopenhauer. He accused him of betraying his own great creation, a philosophy that in its negativity far outstripped Christianity, by lapsing in his later years into pseudo-mysticism and a stuffy, academic doctrine of individual salvation. At the moment, he was in search of a substitute for this German apostate, and had reason to believe he had found one in a dyed-in-the-wool Spanish mystic. He had resolved literally to delve into this new friend, sound out his meaning, and with every deciphered line to cover up the lie he was himself living, to wit: that he lacked the courage to do damage to his pitiful carcass by his own hand, and was thus under sentence of looking forward to a normal demise somewhere on a bed of straw.”

From The Island of Second Sight by Albert Vigoleis Thelen, (translated by Donald O. White)

Tragelaph?

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As far as I am concerned the sun can stay below sea level to all eternity, so long as I can scrape up enough money to stoke my coal stove and put some oil in my lamp. p.12

Inordinately shy and a stay-at-home possessed of Sitzfleisch in quantities enviable even among brothers, enabling me to become the long-distance translator that I am to this very day, I have made virtue out of necessity: whenever I am forced to enter the company of other people, something positive usually happens to me. Never enough, mind you, to suppress my congenital aversion to contact with the external world, but just enough to catch me up, as in a safety net, in my tumble from solitude.p.13

Within this breast of mine, as if by a miracle of Santa Maria del Pilar, my own and my tragelaph* Vigoleis’ heart keeps on pumping constantly and undauntedly . . . p.9

From The Island of Second Sight by Albert Vigoleis Thelen, (translated by Donald O. White)

*Tragelaph stumped me. While I enjoyed the Virgin Mary reference, to the only recorded instance of Mary mystically bilocating while still alive, tragelaph, I suppose draws on a figurative usage as something composed of incongruous elements, rather than a mythical creature which is part goat and part deer.