UMBRA

1. (Per speculum et in enigmate). Everything already seems so imaginary to me, that nothing can be lost by being pretended, as nothing can be gained by being real.

Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio on More bad years to come and they will make us more blind

2. A shadow is a region of darkness where light is obstructed. It occupies the entire space behind an opaque object with a light source in front of it. The effective section of a shadow is a two-dimensional silhouette.

WIKIPEDIA

3. There is no link that can move from the visible to the statement, or from the statement to the visible. But what there is is a continuous re-linking that cuts across the fault or the irrational fracture.

Gilles Deleuze. Foucault

4. Ma ditemi: che son li signe bui
di questo corpo...

Dante, Paradise, II, 49-50

5. The nature of things tends to hide itself.

Heraclitus - 6. In the farthest limit radiates beauty;
from the farthest distance it radiates on man,
far from knowledge, far from question,
without effort
now only perceptible to the gaze

Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil

7. What a foolish leap from the surface of the body to the interior of the soul!

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

8. A cloud (it was not clear which mountain it came from as seen from afar; only later was it known to be Vesuvius) was rising. It did not resemble any tree other than a pine.
For spreading from bottom to top in the form of a trunk, so to speak, of a very elongated shape, it was dispersed in some branches, I believe, because, revived by a recent breath, as it diminished it then dissipated across the whole width, abandoned or rather overcome by its weight; sometimes it had a bright white colour, sometimes dirty and spotted, as if it had carried earth or ash to the sky...

Pliny the Younger, Epistulae 6, 16

9. Blind humans, like the light leaf, impotent creatures, made of wretched clay, miserable mortals, who, deprived of wings, spend your fleeting life like shadows or lying reveries.

Aristophanes, The Birds

10. and he also knew that the same was true of art, that it also only exists - oh, does it still exist, can it continue to exist?
does it still exist, can it continue to exist? insofar as it contains will and knowledge, insofar as it renews itself in the unsurpassed, insofar as it realises it, inviting the soul to a continuous mastery of itself and thus making it discover layer after layer of its reality, making it penetrate layer after layer deeper, penetrating layer after layer of its innermost undergrowth of being, moving layer after layer down into the ever unreachable, yet always sensed, always known darkness from which the I is born and to which it returns, dark regions where the I is born and where the I is extinguished, the entrance and exit of the soul, but at the same time the entrance and exit of all that is true for it, shown to the soul by the branch that points the way and shines golden in the darkness of the shadows, by the golden branch of truth, which cannot be found or taken by violent effort, because the grace of the finding and the grace of the descent is one and the same, the grace of a self-knowledge, which belongs as much to the soul and to art as their common truth, as their common knowledge of reality...

Hermann Broch, La murte de Virgilio (Virgil's death)

11. Je vais voir l'ombre que tu devins.

Stéphane Mallarmé

12. Tempus fugit, sicut nubes, quasi naves, velut umbra.

Book of Job -