Horse trouble

"Apropos of the bicycle: 'Actually one should not deceive oneself about the real purpose of the fashionable new mount, which a poet the other day referred to as the horse of the Apocalypse'"

Walter Benjamin, citing L'Illustration in The Arcades Project p97.

"But just then Ulrich suddenly read somewhere, like a premonitory breath of ripening summer, the expression 'the racehorse of genius.' It stood in the report of a sensational racing success, and the author was probably not aware of the full magnitude of the inspiration his pen owed to the communal spirit. But Ulrich instantly grasped the fateful connection between his entire career and this genius among racehorses. For the horse has, of course, always been sacred to the cavalry, and as a youth Ulrich had hardly ever heard talk in barracks of anything but horses and women. He had fled from this to become a great man, only to find that when, as a result of his varied exertions he perhaps could have felt within reach of his goal, the horse had beaten him to it."

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities p41-42.