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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Thursday, 19 June 1924
June 19 Jupiter.
Case where an author might be grossly misinterpreted through a small error in date.
Death laughs, breathing close and relentless In the nostrils and eyelids of lust, With a pinch in his fingers of scentless And delicate dust.—Dolores
Would certainly be taken to refer to Cocaine, so much so that a scholar might passionately insist that the passage was spurious or the book antedated.
The advance of Chess. A generation ago Chess writers simply stood stupefied at the skill of masters who won the "Immortal Game" and similar peaks. We new analyze those games and see that the Masters merely played conventional moves. The other man, so to speak, struck himself by lightning. I have played dozens of games, perhaps hundreds, which would have been cited as masterpieces in the days of Morphy and to-day they are not even worth recording. The point is that one's faculty of amazement has shifted to the victim. We ask how any reputed player could make such blunders. One notorious example—Morphy's opponents seem always to have been itching to play P to R 3 as long as the move was on the board. It is the psychology of the bird fascinated by the snake, the attempt to evade or postpone the inevitable disaster by something which they thought harmless and cautious and unlikely to irritate their formidable opponent.
Breaking the "law of the land". There is no excuse for breaking the law unless the law is intolerable and provides no remedy for it. Thus, every breach of law is either a crime or the beginning of a revolution. Its moral value depends on which.
OATH. Modern Scholars. Shame, self-plagiarist, O Hist'ry! See! "Doctores et magistri" Still to-day in full consistry, Just as Paracelsus spent his Time and breath describing them:— "Et pediculos pedentes Et fircantes [?] podicem.
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