He must have a spiritual enjoyment of the moment of killing. Killing cleanly and in a way which gives you esthetic pleasure and pride has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race. [...] One of its greatest pleasures, aside from the purely aesthetic ones, such as wing shooting, and the ones of pride, such as difficult game stalking, [...] is the feeling of rebellion against death which comes from its administering. Once you accept the rule of death, thou shalt not kill is an easily and a naturally obeyed commandment. But when a man is still in rebellion against death, he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes: that of giving it. This is one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing.Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, Chap. 19.
To each of the four roots, or elements, into which the Greeks divided all matter, a particular spirit was later made to correspond.J.L.Borges, The Book of the imaginary beings.
Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist and physician, gave them their names: the Gnomes of earth, the Nymphs of water, the Salamanders of fire, and the Sylphs, or Sylphides, of air. All of these words come from the Greek. The French philologist Littre traced the etymology of "sylph" to the Celtic languages, but it seems quite unlikely that Paracelsus, who gave us the name, knew anything about those tongues.
No one any longer believes in the Sylphs, but the word is used as a trivial compliment applied to a slender young woman. Sylphs occupy an intermediate place between super natural and natural beings; Romantic poets and the ballet have not neglected them.
That element, also, which is so destructive to matter, produces certain animals; for in the copper-smelting furnaces of Cyprus, in the very midst of the fire, there is to be seen flying about a four-footed animal with wings, the size of a large fly: this creature is called the "pyrallis", and by some the "pyrausta". So long as it remains in the fire it will live, but if it comes out and flies a little distance from it, it will instantly die.Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, Book XI, Chap. 42.
Only one person, one time, ever saw the monster Acheron; this took place in the twelfth century in the Irish town of Cork.J.L.Borges, The Book of the imaginary beings.
The original version of the story, written in Gaelic, is now lost, but a Benedictine monk from Regensburg (Ratisbon) translated it into Latin, and from this translation the tale passed into a number of languages, among them Swedish and Spanish. Of the Latin version there are some fifty-odd manuscripts extant, agreeing in all the essentials.
Visfo Tundali (Tundal's Vision) is the story's name, and it has been considered one of the sources of Dante's poem. Let us begin with the word "Acheron." In the tenth book of the Odyssey it is one of the rivers of hell, flowing somewhere on the western borders of the inhabited world. Its name is reechoed in the Aeneid, in Lucan's Pharsatia, and in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Dante engraves it in a line: Su la trista riviera d'Acheronte ("On the sad shores of the Acheron") .
In one myth, Acheron is a Titan sutfering punishment; in another, dating earlier, he is placed close to the South Pole, below the constellations of the antipodes. The Etruscans had "books of fate" that taught divination and "books of Acheron" that taught the ways of the soul after bodily death. In time, Acheron came to stand for hell. Tundal was an Irish gentleman, well-mannered and brave, but of hardly irreproachable habits. He once fell ill while at the home of a lady friend, and for three days and nights was taken for dead, except for a bit of warmth in his heart. When he recovered his senses, he told that his guardian angel had shown him the lands beyond this world. Of the many wonders he saw, the one which interests us here is the monster Acheron. He is bigger than any mountain. His eyes flame and his mouth is so large that nine thousand persons could fit in it. Two damned men, like pillars or atlantes, prop it open; one stands on his feet, the other on his head. Three throats lead inside and belch undying fire. From deep in the beast's belly comes the continuous wailing of the countless lost souls who are being devoured. Devils tell Tundal that the monster is called Acheron. His guardian angel deserts him, and Tundal is swept inside with the others. There he finds himself in the midst of tears, darkness, gnashing teeth, fire, unbearable burning, icy cold, dogs, bears, lions, and snakes. In this legend, hell is a beast with other beasts inside it. In 1758, Emanuel Swedenborg wrote: "It has not been granted me to perceive Hell's general shape, but I have been told that in the same way that Heaven has a human shape, Hell has the shape of a devil."
The concept of the sickness unto death must be understood, however, in a peculiar sense. Literally it means a sickness the end and outcome of which is death. Thus one speaks of a mortal sickness as synonymous with a sickness unto death. In this sense despair cannot be called the sickness unto death. But in the Christian understanding of it death itself is a transition unto life In view of this, there is from the Christian standpoint no earthly, bodily sickness unto death. For death is doubtless the last phase of the sickness, but death is not the last thing. If in the strictest sense we are to speak of a sickness unto death, it must be one in which the last thing is death, and death the last thing. And this precisely is despair.Søren Kierkegaard, "The Sickness Unto Death".
Yet in another and still more definite sense despair is the sickness unto death. It is indeed very far from being true that, literally understood, one dies of this sickness, or that this sickness ends with bodily death. On the contrary, the torment of despair is precisely this, not to be able to die. So it has much in common with the situation of the moribund when he lies and struggles with death, and cannot die. So to be sick unto death is, not to be able to die -- yet not as though there were hope of life; no the hopelessness in this case is that even the last hope, death, is not available. When death is the greatest danger, one hopes for life; but when one becomes acquainted with an even more dreadful danger, one hopes for death. So when the danger is so great that death has become one's hope, despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die.
It is in this last sense that despair is the sickness unto death, this agonizing contradiction, this sickness in the self, everlastingly to die, to die and yet not to die, to die the death. For dying means that it is all over, but dying the death means to live to experience death; and if for a single instant this experience is possible, it is tantamount to experiencing it forever.
