winter house

"My dear friend, what is this our life? A boat that swims in the sea, and all one knows for certain about it is that one day it will capsize. Here we are, two good old boats that have been faithful neighbors, and above all your hand has done its best to keep me from "capsizing"! Let us then continue our voyage—each for the other's sake, for a long time yet, a long time! We should miss each other so much! Tolerably calm seas and good winds and above all sun—what I wish for myself, I wish for you, too, and am sorry that my gratitude can find expression only in such a wish and has no influence at all on wind or weather!"

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Letter to Franz Overbeck : November 14, 1881

'...Czar Peter III (who used to play with toy soldiers, and once had a mouse court-marshaled and hanged for daring to scale two cardboard forts)...'

In: Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch

the place where they came to grief

"But I always found what Alphonso told us at that time about the life and death of moths especially memorable, and of all creatures I still feel the greatest awe for them. In the warmer month of the year one or other of those nocturnal insects quite often strays indoors from the small garden behind my house. When I get up early in the morning, I find them clinging to the wall, motionless. I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out again carefully they will stay where they are, never moving, until they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death, held fast by the tiny claws that stiffened in their last agony, until a drought of air detaches them into a dusty corner."

- W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz