The Title: 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes famous statement: Cogito ergo sum (Latin: I think, therefore I am).
The empire of ice cream: Wallace Stevens once wrote a poem about death with that title which goes, in part:
...Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
...Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
The vampire Kurt Barlow to the adulterer Corey Bryant in Stephen King's 'salem's Lot:
"They have never known hunger or want, the people of [America]...They think they have known sadness, but their sadness is that of a child who has spilled his ice cream on the grass at a birthday party. There is no...attenuation in them. They spill each other's blood with great vigor...[America] is an amazing paradox. In other lands, when a [person] eats to his fullest day after day, [he] becomes fat...sleepy...piggish. But in this land...it seems the more you have the more aggressive you become...Also like a child at a birthday party, who will push away another baby even though he himself can eat no more."
bright things come to confusion: The soliloquy of The Fool at the end of Act Three, Scene Two of Shakespeare's King Lear:
When priests are more in word than matter;
When brewers mar their malt with water;
When nobles are their tailors' tutors;
No heretics burned, but wenches' suitors;
When every case in law is right;
No squire in debt, nor no poor knight;
When slanders do not live in tongues;
Nor cutpurses come not to throngs;
When usurers tell their gold i' the field;
And bawds and whores do churches build—
Then shall the realm of Albion
Come to great confusion;
Then comes the time, who lives to see't,
That going shall be use'd with feet.
I.e.,when clergy are hypocrites and people don't listen to them anymore; when beer is watered; when fashion becomes an individual thing; when members of minority religions are not persecuted, but when men courting women "burn" or "get burned" instead; when nobody is a lawbreaker, nobody is in debt, nobody talks against anyone, and thievery does not exist(because everybody is rich, everyone breaks the law, everything people say is regarded as true, and nobody is a thief when they take somebody's stuff); when loan sharks practice openly; when churches are built by sexually free-and-easy people—then you will know that England(Albion) is in big trouble, and everyone will be walking, not riding, if they want to get somewhere. In other words: watch out when society throws out the rule book.("Naught may endure but mutability."— Percy Bysshe Shelley.)
All this means is, society has decided to revise the rule book.
lances of Achilles: In medieval legend, the spear of the Greek warrior Achilles, king of the island of Aegina, had the power to both heal and kill.
Alis volat propriis: Latin: "It flies with its own wings."
a maximis ad minima: Latin: "from the greatest to the least."
even a cat,etc.: An English proverb: "A cat can look at a king." Quoted by Alice in the Wonderland tales. It has been interpreted as meaning that there are things that are allowed to be done in the presence of a superior. You could perhaps interpret it as: no one who is human is so exalted as to exist in a vacuum or be immune to love.
Walter Mitty: The protagonist of James Thurber's famous short story, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," a meek, imposed-upon individual who took refuge from life in daydreaming. Somewhere, deep inside, possibly unaware, the powerless who escape into fantasy resent their lot—resent it deeply. Had Thurber chosen to do so, perhaps he could have had Mitty poison his overbearing wife.
which of God's blessings, etc.: Throughout the 55th sura(chapter) of the Koran, Al-Rahman(The Merciful), the refrain "Which of your Lord's blessings would you deny?" is repeated over and over again.