The Hyperboreans

"-Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans--we know well enough how remote our place is. "Neither by land nor by water will you find the road to the Hyperboreans": even Pindar1,in his day, knew that much about us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death--our life, our happiness...We have discovered that happiness; we know the way; we got our knowledge of it from thousands of years in the labyrinth. Who else has found it?--The man of today?--"I don't know either the way out or the way in; I am whatever doesn't know either the way out or the way in"--so sighs the man of today...This is the sort of modernity that made us ill,--we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay. This tolerance and largeur of the heart that "forgives" everything because it "understands" everything is a sirocco to us. Rather live amid the ice than among modern virtues and other such south-winds! . . . We were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others; but we were a long time finding out where to direct our courage. We grew dismal; they called us fatalists. Our fate--it was the fulness, the tension, the storing up of powers. We thirsted for the lightnings and great deeds; we kept as far as possible from the happiness of the weakling, from "resignation" . . . There was thunder in our air; nature, as we embodied it, became overcast--for we had not yet found the way. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal..." The Antichrist.F Nietzsche.

Thomas the Obscure

"Night soon appeared to him to be darker,more terrible than any other night whatsoever,as it had really emerged from a wound of thought which could no longer think itself,as thought captured ironically by something other than thought.This was night itself.Images which created its darkness flooded into him,and his body transformed into a demoniacal mind sought to represent them to himself.He saw nothing and,far from being overcome,he made out of this absence of visions the culminating point of his glance.his eye,useless for sight,took on extraordinary proportions,began to develop in an inordinate fashion,dwelling on the horizon,allowed night to penetrate into its centre in order to create for itself an iris.Through this void,therefore,it was his glance and the object of his glance that became mingled.This eye,which saw nothing,did not simply grasp the source of its vision.It saw as wound an object,which meant that it did not see.His own glance entered into him in the form of an image at the tragic moment when his glance was regarded as the death of all image."
Maurice Blanchot,"Thomas the Obscure".

Inner Experience(extract)