Distilling is beautiful. First of all, because it is a slow, philosophic and silent occupation, which keeps you busy but gives you time to think of other things, somewhat like riding a bike. Then, because it involves a metamorphosis from liquid to vapor (invisible), and from this once again to liquid; but in this double journey, up and down, purity is attained, an ambiguous and fascinating condition, which starts with chemistry and goes very far. And finally, when you set about distilling, you acquire the consciousness of repeating a ritual consecrated by the centuries, almost a religious act, in which from imperfect material you obtain the essence, the usia, the spirit, and in the first place alcohol, which gladdens the spirit and warms the heart.

• time
• art
• chemistry
• consciousness
• ritual
• spirit
• alcohol
• distillation
• craft
• meditation

After two months I had about forty analyses: the plants with a higher phosphorus content were sage, celandine, and parsley.

• plants
• herbology
• chemistry
• alchemy

A skeptical generation stands at the threshold of adulthood, bereft not of ideals but of certainties, indeed distrustful of the grand revealed truth: disposed instead to accept the small truths, changeable from month to month on the convulsed wave of cultural fashions, whether guided or wild.

• society
• truth

Neither Nietzsche nor Hitler nor Rosenberg were mad when they intoxicated themselves and their followers by preaching the myth of the Superman to whom everything is permitted in recognition of his dogmatic and congenital superiority, but worthy of meditation is the fact that all of them, teachers and pupils, became progressively removed from reality as little by little their morality came unglued from the morality common to all times and all civilizations, an integral part of our human heritage which in the end must be acknowledged.

• dogma
• morality
• reality
• myth
• meditation
• civilization
• community

Suicide is an act of man and not of the animal.  It is a meditated act, a non-instinctive, unnatural choice, and in the Lager there were few opportunities to choose: people lived precisely like enslaved animals that sometimes let themselves die but do not kill themselves.

• suicide
• animals
• choice

Power is like a drug: the need for either is unknown to anyone who has not tried them, but after the initiation, which can be fortuitous, the dependency and need for ever larger doses is born, as are the denial of reality and the return to childish dreams of omnipotence.

• power
• reality
• dreams

In The Brothers Karamazov Grushenka tells the fable of the little onion*.  A vicious old woman dies and goes to hell, but her guardian angel, straining his memory, recalls that she once, only once, gave a beggar the gift of a little onion she had dug up from her garden.  He holds the little onion out to her, and the old woman grasps it and is lifted out of the flames of hell.  This fable has always struck me as revolting: what human monster did not throughout his life make the gift of a little onion, if not to others, to his children, his wife, his dog?  That single, immediately erased instant of pity is certainly not enough to absolve Muhsfeldt**.  It is enough, however, to place him too, although at its extreme boundary, within the gray band, that zone of [moral] ambiguity.'\n\n *http://quotesfromtheunderground.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/brothers-karamazov/\n\n **http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Muhsfeldt

• dostoyevsky
• morality
• life
• memory
• children
• hell