The History of Sugar To be zero is to be both nothing and everything, a unified totality. From this state, creation occurs via differentiation of original binary - the formless void is divided - fire brings light and dark, annihilating the grey. What remains is one and zero, and with these two, motion, as boundaries between shift, prompting all extrapolations - the ten thousand things.
Think of a self (and next to God there is nothing so eternal as a self), and then that this self gets
the notion of asking whether it might not let itself become or be made
into another. . . than itself. And yet such a despairer, whose only wish
is this most crazy of all transformations, loves to think that this change
might be accomplished as easily as changing a coat. For the immediate
man does not recognize his self, he recognizes himself only by his
dress, he recognizes (and here again appears the infinitely comic trait)
he recognizes that he has a self only by externals. There is no more
ludicrous confusion, for a self is just infinitely different from externals.
When then the whole of existence has been altered for the immediate
man and he has fallen into despair, he goes a step further, he thinks
thus, this has become his wish: "What if I were to become another,
were to get myself a new self?" Yes, but if he did become another, I
wonder if he would recognize himself again! It is related of a peasant
who came cleanly shaven to the Capital, and had made so much money
that he could buy himself a pair of shoes and stockings and still had
enough left over to get drunk on -- it is related that as he was trying
in his drunken state to find his way home he lay down in the middle of
the highway and fell asleep. Then along came a wagon, and the driver
shouted to him to move or he would run over his legs. Then the
drunken peasant awoke, looked at his legs, and since by reason of the
shoes and stockings he didn’t recognize them, he said to the driver,
"Drive on, they are not my legs." So in the case of the immediate man
when he is in despair it is impossible to represent him truly without a
touch of the comic; it is, if I may say so, a clever trick to talk in this
jargon about a self and about despair.