During the long travail
our ancestors spoke to us, and we listened,
and we tried to make you hear life in our song
but now it maters not at all to me
whether you know what I am talking about–or not:
I know why we are not blinded
by your brightness, are able to see you,
who cannot see us. I know
why we are still here.

-James Baldwin, from Jimmy’s Blues

In Favour of Criticism.  Something now appears to you as an error which you used to love as a truth, or as a probability. You cast this opinion aside and imagine that your reason has thereby gained a victory. But perhaps that error was as necessary for you then - for the old “you” (you are always another person) - as all your current “truths” : that “error” being a skin as it were which concealed and veiled from you much that you were not yet permitted to see.  Your new life and not your reason has killed that opinion for you: you do not need it any longer, and now it breaks down of its own accord and the irrationality crawls out of it as a worm into the light.  When we criticize something it is not something arbitrary and impersonal, it is, at least very often, a proof that there are lively, active forces in us which are growing and need to shed a skin.  We deny, and must deny, because something in us wants to live and affirm itself, something which we perhaps do not as yet know or do not as yet see!  There is so much in favor of criticism.

- The Gay Science,  section 307

3. Mourning for the image, insofar as I fail to perform it, makes me anxious; but insofar as I succeed in performing it, makes me sad. If exile from the Image-repertoire is the necessary road to “cure,” it must be admitted that such progress is a sad one. This sadness is not a melancholy–or, at least, it is an incomplete melancholy (and not at all a clinical one), for I accuse myself of nothing, nor am I prostrated. My sadness belongs to that fringe of melancholy where the loss of the loved being remains abstract. A double lack:  I cannot even invest my misery, as I could when I suffered from being in love. In those days I desired, dreamed, struggled; the benefit lay before me, merely delayed, traversed by contretemps. Now, no more resonance. Everything is calm, and that is worse. Though justified by an economy–the image dies so that I may live–amorous mourning always has something left over:  one expression keeps recurring: “What a shame!”

[…]

5. I try to wrest myself away from the amorous Image-repertoire: but the Image-repertoire burns underneath, like an incompletely extinguished peat fire; it catches again; what was renounced reappears; out of the hasty grave suddenly breaks a long cry.

Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, “Exiled from the Image-repertoire”

We were friends, and have become strangers to each other.  But perhaps this is as it ought to be - and we do not want either to conceal or obscure the fact as if we had to be ashamed.  We are two ships each of which has its own goal and course.  Our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did – and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and in one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had but one goal.  But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones.  Perhaps we shall never see one another again, or perhaps we may meet again but fail to recognize one another: our exposure to different seas and suns has altered us!  That we had to become strangers to one another is the law above us – by the same token we should also become more sacred to each other and the memory of our former friendship more sacred.  There is probably a tremendous but invisible stellar orbit in which our very different ways and goals may be included as small parts of this path – let us rise up to this thought.  But our life is too short and the power of our vision too limited for us to be more than friends in the sense of this sublime possibility.  Let us then believe in our stellar friendship, though we should have to be terrestrial enemies to one another.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science “Stellar Friendship”