/lit/ - Literature

>"If Jupiter would only give me back
>the years that passed, let me be as I was
>when I cut down the foremost ranks beneath
>Praeneste's very walls - when, as a victor,
>I burned their heaped-up shields, with this right hand
>sent down to Tartarus King Erulus
>to whom at birth Feronia, his mother,
>gave three lives and - how terrible to tell -
>three sets of weapons for his use: three times
>he had to be cut down by death; and yet
>this right hand robbed him then of all his lives
>and stripped him of as many suits of armor."

Badass passage but if it means my best years are behind me that's pretty sad.

By then I was incapable of love, for I repeat, with me loving meant tyrannising and showing my moral superiority. I have never in my life been able to imagine any other sort of love, and have nowadays come to the point of sometimes thinking that love really consists in the right--freely given by the beloved object--to tyrannise over her.

Even in my underground dreams I did not imagine love except as a struggle. I began it always with hatred and ended it with moral subjugation, and afterwards I never knew what to do with the subjugated object. And what is there to wonder at in that, since I had succeeded in so corrupting myself, since I was so out of touch with "real life," as to have actually thought of reproaching her, and putting her to shame for having come to me to hear "fine sentiments"; and did not even guess that she had come not to hear fine sentiments, but to love me, because to a woman all reformation, all salvation from any sort of ruin, and all moral renewal is included in love and can only show itself in that form.

I did not hate her so much, however, when I was running about the room and peeping through the crack in the screen. I was only insufferably oppressed by her being here. I wanted her to disappear. I wanted "peace," to be left alone in my underground world. Real life oppressed me with its novelty so much that I could hardly breathe.