from Hallunications: or The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando, Reinaldo Arenas

"So you finally succumbed to the poison of literature, and you wound up puttering about, poking through rags and papers, stirring up dust and disturbing the termites and bookworms, all to not the slightest avail. All you got was a jumbled heap of unanswered interrogations, which in fact served only to aggravate your by now habitual uneasiness and mental restlessness. Oh, but you would know. And so you asked. And you kept on asking, investigating, delving, digging, diving deeper and still deeper, though no man could tell you one jot of what you sought to know (except maybe that you ought to quit all that reading, now, cut out all that stoking, because that way led not only to madness but still worse to sacrilege as well). And that, then, was how you came to speak out so angrily against all those who would criticize you. As it was also how there came to disappear from your cell (I know not by what chaste hands) the instruments of such lamentable unbalance...You fell into that well from which there is no escape--Letters--and so you felt more and more alone. You were stricken by the Blight of Melancholy. But you still kept on declaiming, proclaiming, speaking out, knocking down unreal doors, and pursuing deep studies of things so rarefied and strange that many there were who were ignorant of their very existence."



madeleine peyroux - don’t wait too long