A friend of mine and I, in our early 20s, were obsessed with the idea of the paradox. Reading this recently from Kierkegaard makes me think we were indeed on to something:

Kierkegaard, The Absolute Paradox: “However, one should not think slightingly of the paradoxical; for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity. … The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think. This passion is at bottom present in all thinking.”

A lovely apophatic musing by Fernando Pessoa:

“Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity. If we knew the truth, we’d see it; everything else is systems and approximations. The inscrutability of the universe is quite enough for us to think about; to want to actually understand it is to be less than human, since to be human is to realize it can’t be understood.”

A lovely apophatic rumination from Fernando Pessoa:

“Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity. If we knew the truth, we’d see it; everything else is systems and approximations. The inscrutability of the universe is quite enough for us to think about; to want to actually understand it is to be less than human, since to be human is to realize it can’t be understood.”