...the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never described or passed on.

It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds

We all have appointments with the past.

It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.

Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!

Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.

The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation, said De Jong, still bearing interest, increasing many times over and continually burgeoning anew.