Introduction to the Kabbalah

...had he ever seen the completed figure fashioned by his own hand, there would have been no reason why he should not have considered any moment a suitable time to meet death original: mortem with a peaceful mind. For he would have fully satisfied his fatherland, his family, himself, and you, the reader original: lector. The expectation that his character, shining out from the very start of his life, had stirred up about himself would have been surpassed by the fervor of his own mind, rather than being cheated in any way by the violence of fortune original: fortunae.

Fortune rages perpetually throughout the whole world like a stormy and pestilential wind upon the sea, overturning the plans of men with its force. Yet, for a long time now, it seems to have burned with a singular wrath against our house, and to have waited for a suitable time to manifest the power of its cruelty to us. It waited so that, once we had recognized the quality of this young man, but before we could hold the full-grown and perfected fruits of his honor (which we had seen sprouting so abundantly) with a certain hand, it might then rush in, stirred by madness, to plunder and destroy that great hope of ours.

Opportunity so favored Fortune that it left to us these books, written by his hand—the frequent reading of which torments me—for no other purpose than to be a continuous monument original: monumentum of our grief and of Fortune's own atrocity. They remain before our eyes like the empty corpses of his virtues, so that the wound of this calamity original: calamitatis, struck into our family like a poisoned weapon, might endure as something incurable.

For the remains original: funera; literally "funerals" or "death-rites," here used metaphorically for the surviving fragments of the deceased's work. of these books (since no other name remains for them) are of such a kind that they do not allow themselves to be consumed by flames or abolished from our sight. To one attempting to destroy them, they offer a certain spirit from within themselves—a power still aspiring toward this light which it would be a sacrilege to suppress—and they present strong qualities worthy of life. Yet, they never seem able to fully enter into the light which they provide original: praestant, because with that