Character: Julian Morrow

The dead appear to us in a dream, because our perception does not allow us to see them in reality. These night guests are images projected into our consciousness from an incredible distance, in a certain sense they can be likened to the light of a long extinct star ...

May God consume us, dissolve us in himself, tear our bones like a string of beads. And then spit us out revived.

It’s not easy for us to admit it, but it’s the thought of losing control that most attracts people who are used to constantly controlling themselves, people like ourselves. All truly civilized peoples became such, purposefully suppressing the primitive, animal nature in themselves. Think about it, are we, gathered in this room, so different from the ancient Greeks or Romans? With their obsession with duty, piety, devotion, self-sacrifice? All the things that make our contemporaries shiver?

We are used to believing that religious ecstasy is found only in primitive cultures, but it is often the most developed nations that are exposed to it. The Greeks, as you know, were not very different from us. They were highly civilized, adhering to a complex and rather strict system of rules and regulations. Nevertheless, they often fell into wild mass frenzy: riot, visions, dancing, massacre. I suppose all this would seem to us to be irreversible, clinical madness. However, the Greeks, at least some of them, could voluntarily plunge into this state and leave it voluntarily. We cannot just dismiss the evidence on this score. They are quite well documented, although the ancient commentators were as puzzled as we are. Some believe that the Dionysian frenzy was the result of fasting and prayer, others that wine was the cause. Undoubtedly, the collective nature of hysteria also played a role. Yet the extreme manifestations of this phenomenon are still inexplicable. The participants in the sacraments, figuratively speaking, were thrown into the unconscious state, which preceded the appearance of the mind, where the personality was replaced by something else - and by “other” I mean something that is not subject to death. Something inhuman.

There is nothing more terrible than bloodshed, but it is the bloodiest places of Homer and Aeschylus that often turn out to be the most magnificent.

Pragmatists are surprisingly superstitious.

...the thought of losing control attracts people who are accustomed constantly to control myself...

War? You can lose yourself in the ecstasy of battle, fighting for a glorious cause, but in our days there are not too many nice things that would be worth fighting for.

Love? But as, according to the testimony of the old cephalus, Sophocles once said, only a few are aware that love is a cruel and terrible ruler. One loses oneself for the sake of another, but it becomes a pathetic slave to spotrebniho of the gods.

... to ignore the existence of the irrational is dangerous. The more developed the person is, the more it is subject to reason and restrained, the more it needs to be a certain way, where he could direct those animal impulses, over which so persistently seeks to gain the upper hand. Otherwise, these already powerful forces will only accumulate and grow, until it finally breaks out out the destructive effect that they had been holding back. Confront them are often not able no will.

The quiet, persistent voice in our head - why is he so bad for us? <...> Maybe it reminds us that we are alive, that we are mortal, each of us is endowed with a unique soul, to part with which we are so afraid of, although it makes us feel more miserable than all other creatures? Besides, that is not pain, sharpens our sense of self? Terrible, when the child suddenly realizes that he is separate from all of the world creature that no one and nothing suffers when it burned my tongue or skinned knee that the pain belongs to him alone. Even worse, when you age you begin to realize that no one, even the closest and beloved man will never be able to understand you properly.