Genesis: "quivering, an arrow, through sun-drunken delight"

Someone told me that a beginning is a very delicate time. Someone else told me that a rose by another name might sound more thorny.

So let me briefly tell the story of the quotation that titles this page: "quivering through sun-drunken delight."

For this was the original question; first there was void, then the idea, then the idea got named, stamped, catalogued, and indexed. It could have been anything. From what to choose? It had to be literature of some kind, because it had to be something with which someone else could in principle identify (say if they read the book alluded to), something that could draw in the audience. At the same time it had to be personal, because that's what's interesting.

So what could it be? The first and most obvious course to me was to turn to my old chum Robert Graves. Unfortunately, there is no way to make "I, BKF" sound like it didn't come from an illiterate spambot, and anyway someone I know has already spelunked this cavern, the blogging thief. For those paying extra attention I will say that "BKF the God" although appealing to my vanity would be worse. There ends the infatuation with Robert Graves, barring the possibilty of working "boiled asparagus" in somehow.

Others passed in file for review, consideration, and rejection. I am going to study math, math is huge, math is Platonist voyeurism, but there are hardly any poetic mathematicians and no mathematical poets (more than Euclid have since looked on beauty bare). So it cannot be math -- and anyway math only draws in half the audience, it neglects the key purposes of the title (and does not even describe what I imagine will be a great amount of the content here). Same goes for any number of other niches which maybe I will speak on later, or anyway claim to have considered through my tortured but numinous search for The Idea-in-the-Void's Name -- it will be an easy segue into an extemporaneous disquisition. (Birth of a regular feature.)

Except for one, which hit with the force of divine revelation --

In the original German it is (I think): "da flog ich wohl schaudernd, ein Pfeil, durch sonnentrunkenes Entzuecken" (I say I think because I hardly understand German and Babelfish is truly rotten at making sense of even simple prose) -- in translation (thank you, Walter Kaufmann!): "I flew, quivering, an arrow, through sun-drunken delight."

It is one of my favourite epigram-fragments from Nietzsche's Zarathustra. It summons up all the golden things I wanted in a title. Just reading it I laugh, it is luminous, prankish in its luminosity, something the rejects before couldn't muster at the muster. And -- because of what I just said, what I am saying -- that makes it personal -- hence this post, "und Gott sprach."

Some more context to the fragment:

...My wise longing cried and laughed thus out of me -- born in the mountains, verily, a wild wisdom -- my great broad-winged longing! And often it swept me away and up and far, in the middle of my laughter; and I flew, quivering, an arrow, through sun-drunken delight, away into distant futures which no dream had yet seen, into hotter souths than artists ever dreamed of, where gods in their dances are ashamed of all clothes -- to speak in parables.... ["On Old and New Tablets," Zarathustra III, W. Kaufmann, trans.]

If you didn't think that [this post] was brief, if you thought it was humourless, colourless except in the ultraviolet, in a word, turgid -- forebear; it's been a while since I've done this. But things are getting better: I'm an editor, not just a typer, I can punch it up. Things are getting better all the time. That's our motto at Sun-Drunken.