Lines from 'Assumption' by Samuel Beckett

Then, when his work had been done and an angry lull was imminent, he whispered.

To avoid the expansion of the commonplace is not enough; the highest art reduces significance in order to obtain that inexplicable bombshell perfection. Before no supreme manifestation of Beauty do we proceed comfortably up a staircase of sensation, and sit down mildly on the topmost stair to digest our gratification: such is the pleasure of Prettiness. We are taken up bodily and pitched breathless on the peak of a sheer crag: which is the pain of Beauty.

In the silence of his room he was afraid, afraid of that wild rebellious surge that aspired violently towards realization in sound. He felt its implacable caged resentment, its longing to be released in one splendid drunken scream and fused with the cosmic discord. Its struggle for divinity was as real as his own, and as futile.

The process was absurd, extravagantly absurd, like boiling an egg over a bonfire.

He drugged himself that he might sleep heavily, silently; he scarcely left his room, scarcely spoke, thus denying even that rare transmutation to the rising tossing soundlessness that seemed now to rend his whole being with the violence of its effort. He felt he was losing, playing into the hands of the enemy by the very severity of his restrictions. By damming the stream of whispers he had raised the level of the flood, and he knew the day would come when it could no longer be denied. Still he was silent, in silence listening for the first murmur of the torrent that must destroy him.

After a timeless parenthesis he found himself alone in his room, spent with ecstasy, torn by the bitter loathing of that which he had condemned to the humanity of silence. Thus each night he died and was God, each night revived and was torn, torn and battered with increasing grievousness, so that he hungered to be irretrievably engulfed in the light of eternity, one with the birdless cloudless colourless skies, in infinite fulfillment.

They found her caressing his wild dead hair.

— Samuel Beckett

Excerpt from Afterword to "Our Late Night; and, A Thought in Three Parts: Two Plays" (Wallace Shawn)

Obviously society has asked writers, as a group, to take time out from normal labor to do this special listening and transcribing, and each individual writer has been assigned a certain part of the spectrum. No writer knows—or can know—whether the section that's been assigned to him contains the valuable code that will ultimately benefit the human species or whether his section consists merely of the more common noise or chatter. But obviously the system can only work if everyone dutifully struggles to do his best with the material that's been given to him, rather than trying to do what has already been assigned to somebody else.

And of course, like every writer, I hope I'll be one of the ones who will be led to do something truly worthwhile. But in another way, it actually doesn't matter whether it's me or not. That's just a game—who did the best? The actually important question is not whether "I" am one of the better cogs in the machine—the important question is whether the whole mechanism of which I'm a part is or is not one of evolution's cleverer species-survival devices, one that might be very helpful—even at the last minute.

— Wallace Shawn

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

7_____ Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

— Wittgenstein, Ludwig

7_____ What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

— Pears, David Francis & McGuinness, Brian [trs]

7_____ Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

— Ogden, C. K. [tr]

A Convolution for the Masses

Quatorzain Contourné: 
ABCA DBCE DFG EFG
or
ABCA DBCE DFG FGE

~ Karel Hrodrik (RdC)

but rather some malign genius...

René Descartes : Meditationes de prima philosophia : Meditations on First Philosophy (from Prima : The First)

12. "Supponam igitur non optimum Deum, fontem veritatis, sed genium aliquem malignum, eundemque summe potentem & callidum, omnem suam industriam in eo posuisse, ut me falleret:"

[12.] "I shall, then, suppose that not the optimal God -- the font of truth --, but rather some malign genius -- and the same one most highly powerful and most highly cunning --, has put all his industriousness therein that he might deceive me:" (tr. George Heffernan, University of Notre Dame Press, 1990.)