THE VOID
☆ Venus in Furs ☆
“the real comic muse is the one under whose laughing mask tears roll down.”
Yet I am not writing with ordinary ink, but with red blood that drips from my heart. All its wounds long scarred over have opened and it throbs and hurts, and now and then a tear falls on the paper.
Above all else I am a dilettante in life.
(Dilettante- An amateur, someone who dabbles in a field out of casual interest rather than as a profession or serious interest.)
You are cold, while you yourself fan flames. By all means wrap yourself in your despotic furs, there is no one to whom they are more appropriate, cruel goddess of love and of beauty!
"Such a woman in her magnificent selfishness is likewise an ideal. If I am not permitted to enjoy the happiness of love, fully and wholly, I want to taste its pains and torments to the very dregs; I want to be maltreated and betrayed by the woman I love, and the more cruelly the better. This too is a luxury."
Her glance was so radiant, so full of promised happiness, that in a moment all the torments of these days were forgotten and all their wounds healed.
Love knows no virtue, no profit;
The odd part of my situation is that I am like the bear in Lily’s park. I can escape and don’t want to; I am ready to endure everything as soon as she threatens to set me free.
“Not yet—you may first kiss my hand.” She held it out to me with a certain proud indifference, and I the dilettante, the donkey, the miserable slave pressed it with intense tenderness against my lips which were dry and hot with excitement.