"...the desert as a place of solitariness and meeting; a place of fear and shifting identity..."

<3333 that I found while googling for inspiration for a title for my Calormen fic (8000+ words, my longest ever wtfffff. For whatever reason, my fics that significantly mention the desert tend to get long-ish.)---

"You do not go into the desert to find identity but to lose it, to lose your personality, to become anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. It is very hard in the desert. You must become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear the silence speak."

"It has been argued that the experience of the desert is primarily auditory rather than visual. For in a landscape where the eye is often blinded or confused by shifting sands and the distortions of heat, it is the ear that is most acutely attuned to the voice of the wind, which is, perhaps, the voice of God. Perhaps it was no accident, therefore, that the Israelites, emerging from the desert where God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, became the people of the book."

"Only in the purity and the silence of the desert can this still small voice be heard and that is what the desert wanderer seeks to recover. There, as a place outside the law where nothing superficial can be tolerated, we stand under judgment."

omg. <33

The quotes are from the introduction of David Jasper's The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art, and Culture. The first one is actually a quote from Edmond Jabes.

So then I googled Edmond Jabes, 'cos who the hell is he, and he was a poet/philosopher, and he wrote stuff like this:

He who pretends to give all deprives us of our future. Giving means opening out, means forging our tomorrows from the best in us gathered for others. God hampers universal brotherhood. He forbids man to imagine kindness.

But for those who are in love with the absolute, obsessed by eternity, turning to God to adore or destroy Him means reaching the depth of human anguish. For we are desperately driven to claim responsibility for the death of God in order to love Him more than ourselves, against ourselves.

A great love carries within it a mourning for love.

From The Book of Questions.

omg.


IN OTHER NEWS, I watched The Godfather again and Sonny is still one motherfuck of a badass motherfucker and I was like <33333 and also secretly like, "Hmm, if ever I join Yuletide, I must remember to request fic about Sonny..."

SANTINOOOOOOOO.

What else? Oh yes: UNICORNS TONIGHT.