I am against revolutions because they always involve a return to the status quo. - Henry Miller

I saw through to the last sign and symbol, but I could not read her face. I could see only the eyes shining through, huge, fleshy-like luminous beasts, as though I were swimming behind them in the electric effluvia of her incandescent vision.

I stood before a mirror and said fearfully: “I want to see how I look in the mirror with my eyes closed.”

These wrods of Richter’s, when I first came upon them, made an indescribable commotion in me. As did the following, which seems almost like a corollary of the above — from Novalis:

The seat of the soul is where inner world and outer world touch each other. For nobody knows himself, if he is only himself and not also another one at the same time.

To take possession of one’s transcendental I, to be the I of one’s I, at the same time, as Novalis expressed it again.

Previously, when I began to write this tale, I set out by saying that Mlle. Claude was a whore. She is a whore, of course, and I'm not trying to deny it, but what I say now is — if Mlle. Claude is a whore then what name shall I find for the other women I know?