"Why was it he felt so perfectly attuned to winter, to its fatalistic expectation of the worst, then, when the worst came, its rustic heroisms and shouldering of burdens, improvised ingeniousness, constructive despair?" - Violet Trefusis, 'Pirates at Play'.

"In every single moment of life we are beings that will die, and each moment would be otherwise if this were not our innate condition, somehow operative within it. Just as we are not already fully present in the instant of our birth, but rather something of us is continually being born, so too we do not die only in our last instant." - Georg Simmel 1918 (tr. Andrews and Levine, 2010)

The same thoughts encountered again and again, the space not exactly mapped, since it has the dream-like way of unexpectedly returning on itself, but traversed this way and that, filled to the edges with old footprints, all the walls banged on, windows flown through, all the hollow spots tested. Apparently there is no way out but that the conviction that there is no exit may itself be the exit.

If the ideal is the extension of functions that serve life and living into taking themselves as their pure end, so that art is perception as an end in itself, science as practical causality and ontology freed from the need to be useful, and so on, then what results when the most basic reality function of all, the 'constitution' of other minds, of the self as both object and subject at once, is driven into autotelic purity?