The two arcane words pullulated in the text of the Poetics; it was impossible to elude them.
what an unpleasant word
the tall proud tomes that cast a golden penumbra in an angle of the drawing room were not—as he had dreamed in his vanity—a mirror of the world, but simply one more thing added to the universe
The Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” is thus invalidated: to say I think is to postulate the I, and is a petitio principii.
In the course of a life dedicated to belles-lettres and, occasionally, to the perplexities of metaphysics, I have glimpsed or foreseen a refutation of time
it is an anachronistic reductio ad absurdum of a preterite system or, what is worse, the feeble artifice of an Argentinian gone astray in the maze of metaphysics
