man is a monkey, trying to be a tree
“Behind what the Greeks called eídolon, which is at once the idol, the statue, the simulacrum, the phantom, lies the mental image. This fanciful and insubstantial creature imitates the world and at the same time subjects it to a frenzy of different combinations, confounding its forms in inexhaustible proliferation…."
Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, pp. 133