Care of the Soul

Thomas Moore

Quotations reprinted without permission from the Harper Perennial edition

Cherished truths sink into Saturn's black earth like chaff at harvest time.

From the prison cell where he [Oscar Wilde] was being punished for his love of a man, he wrote his extraordinary letter, "De Profundis," in which he remarks: "The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens start by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?"

p. 145, Krapp's Last Tape , Samuel Beckett

Krapp playing his tapes and muttering his curses is also an image of ourselves turning our memories over in our minds again and again, in a process of distillation. Over time something essential emerges from this saturnine reduction -- the gold in the sludge. Saturn was sometimes called sol niger , the black sun. In his darkness there is to be found a precious brilliance, our essential nature, distilled by depression as perhaps the greatest gift of melancholy.

For most people, their cardinal virtue is also their pivotal fault.

"Every disease is a musical problem. It's cure,
 a musical solution. The more rapid and complete
 the solution, the greater the musical talent
 of the doctor."

                 -- Novalis

"The disease desires its wife, that is, the medicine.
 The medicine must be adjusted to the disease, both
 must be united to from a harmonious whole, just as
 in the case of man and woman."

                 -- Paracelsius