Small Demons

At bottom, this is all a very old story. When he grew old, Aristotle, who is not generally considered exactly a tightrope dancer, liked to lose himself in the most labyrinthine and subtle of discourses. He had then arrived at the age of metis: “The more solitary and isolated I become, the more I come to like stories.” He had explained the reason admirably: as in the older Freud, it was a connoisseur’s admiration for the tact that composed harmonies and for its art of doing it by surprise: “The lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for myth is composed of wonders.