We Shall Not Cease From Exploration

[SqDanceCallingSteve]

There are two ways of disliking art. One is to dislike it. The other, to like it rationally.

-- Oscar Wilde


Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein


All our language is composed of brief little dreams.

-- Paul Valéry

[SqDanceCallingSteve]

There is no fire like passion, there is no shark like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like greed.
-- The Dhammapada

Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.
-– Flaubert

I pray thee peace, I will be flesh and blood;
For there was never yet philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently,
However they have writ the style of gods,
And made a push at chance and sufferance.
-- Much Ado About Nothing (V, i)

[SqDanceCallingSteve]

Revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out. . . . This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal, and do well.

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

The worst solitude is to have no real friendships.

There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

Atheism is rather in the lip than in the heart of man.


-- Sir Francis Bacon

[SqDanceCallingSteve]

“He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of tosh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

HL Menken, on President Warren Harding


“After a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.”

RL Stevenson

[Hayao Yamaneko]

Atheism is rather in the lip than in the heart of man.

This is nice for showing that even Bacon, creator of the scientific method, had recourse to sophist tricks when threatened by the idea that people mightn't feel the same way as him about god/lessness.

Of course yr Dawkinses don't help in that their yappiness can tend to confirm Bacon's impression.

[SqDanceCallingSteve]

Sergeant: What they could use around here is a good war. What else can you expect with peace running wild all over the place? You know what the trouble with peace is? No organization. And when do you get organization? In a war. Peace is one big waste of equipment. Anything goes, no one gives a damn. How many horses have they got in this town? How many young men? Nobody knows! They haven't bothered to count 'em! That's peace for you! I've been in places where they haven't had a war in seventy years and you now what? The people haven't even been given names! They don't know who they are! It takes a war to fix that. In a war, everyone registers, everyone's name's on a list. The shoes are stacked, the corn's in the bag, you count it all up – cattle, men, etc. – and you take it away!

***

Mother Courage: He must be a very bad commander.

Cook: Just a gluttonous one. Why bad?

Mother Courage: Because he needs brave soldiers. If his plan of campaign was any good, why would he need brave soldiers, wouldn't plain, ordinary soldiers do? Whenever there are great virtues, it's a sure sign something's wrong.

Cook: You mean it's a sure sign something's right.

Mother Courage: I mean what I say? Why? When a general or king is stupid and leads his soldiers into a trap, they need this virtue of courage... Loyalty's another virtue, and you need plenty of it if the king's always asking too much of you. All virtues which a well-regulated country with a good king or a good general wouldn't need. In a good country, virtues wouldn't be necessary. Everybody could be quite ordinary, middling, and, for all I care, cowards.


***

Mother Courage: … The ones they like fare worst. They drag them around till they're finished. Those they don't care for they leave alone. I've seen so many girls, pretty as they come in the beginning, then all of a sudden they're so ugly they'd scare a wolf. They can't even go behind a tree on the street without having something to fear from it. They lead a frightful life. Like with trees: the tall straight ones are cut down for roof timber, and the crooked ones can enjoy life. So this wound here is really a piece of luck.

Bertolt Brecht – Mother Courage and Her Children

[SqDanceCallingSteve]

Words ruin one's thoughts, paper makes them ridiculous, and even while one is still glad to get something ruined and something ridiculous down on paper, one's memory manages to lose hold of even this ruined and ridiculous something. Paper can turn an enormity into a triviality, an absurdity. If you look at it this way, then whatever appears in the world, by way of the spiritual world, so to speak, is always a ruined thing, a ridiculous thing, which means that everything in this world is ridiculous and ruined. Words were made to demean thought, he would even go so far as to state that words exist to abolish thought.

–- Thomas Bernhard, The Lime Works



Hamlet: There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
V, ii



Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

The Tempest, V, i

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxECpwmIEWQ

[SqDanceCallingSteve]

The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
-– Muriel Rukeyser


Play as an end means that life itself has intrinsic value.
-– H. H. Brinton


We do feel, in our most valued musical experiences, that we are making contact with a great spirit, and not simply with a prodigious musical faculty.
-– JWN Sullivan


I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. Your review is in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.
-– Composer Max Reger's response to a critic who compared his music to what might be written by a crabbed myopic spider


I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
–- Wallace Stevens


You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.
–- Eric Hoffer

[walto]

The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
-– Muriel Rukeyser

Wittgenstein made much the same point in the Tractatus.

[SqDanceCallingSteve]

Lenin didn’t even seem to look on himself as a human being — he was merely a servant of a political idea. Possessed maniacs of this kind are truly terrifying.

But, as they say, history’s victors are never judged. Or, as somebody once said in response to these words, “They may not be judged, but they do often get strung up without a trial.”

-- Teffi, 'Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others and Me'


In every dispute between parent and child, both cannot be right, but they may be, and usually are, both wrong. It is this situation which gives family life its peculiar hysterical charm.

-- – Isaac Rosenfeld


The music business is a cruel and shallow trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men lie like dogs. There is also a negative side.

-– Hunter S. Thomson

[Steve Minkin]

"By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself.
This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that
happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment -- and soul-making
means differentiating this middle ground.

It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate -- an inner place or deeper person or
ongoing presence -- that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse. Soul
appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed. Though I cannot identify soul with anything
else, I also can never grasp it apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like
the moon which mediates only borrowed light. But just this peculiar and paradoxical intervening variable gives one the
sense of having or being soul. However intangible and indefinable it is, soul carries highest importance in hierarchies
of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even of divinity.

In another attempt upon the idea of soul I suggest that the word refers to that unknown component which makes
meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern. These four
qualifications I had already put forth some years ago. I had begun to use the term freely, usually interchangeably with
psyche (from Greek) and anima (from Latin). Now I am adding three necessary modifications. First, soul refers to the
deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance soul makes possible, whether in love or in religious
concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our
natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy -- that mode which recognizes all
realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical."

James Hillman -- Re-Visioning Psychology

[walto]

That's a nice quote, SqD. What's it come from?

[Steve Minkin]

I'm reading BLUE FIRE, selected writings by James Hillman. Hillman had local followers in the 70s, centered on a Jungian professor named Gordon Tappan at Sonoma State who was a Hillman disciple. Hillman's been on my 'to read' list forever -- seeing this anthology gives me the opportunity.

[Steve Minkin]

Psychological polytheism . . . implies a life that can embrace conflicting directions, one that doesn't resort to hierarchies and overarching principles to impose order . . .

To polytheistic consciousness, the one does not appear as such but is contained as one among many and within each of the many . . .

When William James described A Pluralistic Universe, he set this sentence in italics: "Reality MAY exist in distributive form, in the shape not of an all but of a set of eaches, just as it seems to be." Then he added: "There is this is favor of eaches, that they are at any rate real enough to have made themselves at least appear to everyone, whereas the absolute [wholeness, unity, the one] has as yet appeared immediately to only a few mystics, and indeed to them very ambiguously."

-- James Hillman, A Blue Fire

[Steve Minkin]

Houston Smith, paraphrasing the Baghavad Gita on taming the mind: 'Like calming a caged monkey with Saint Vitus' Dance who has just been stung by a bee.'


I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

-- Nietzsche

[walto]

"There is this is favor of eaches..."

And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches.

[walto]

“That philosopher,” Pen said, “had held a great place amongst the leaders of the world, and enjoyed to the full what it had to give of rank and riches, renown and pleasure, who came, weary-hearted, out of it, and said that all was vanity and vexation of spirit. Many a teacher of those whom we reverence, and who steps out of his carriage up to his carved cathedral place, shakes his lawn ruffles over the velvet cushions, and cries out, that the whole struggle is an accursed one, and the works of the world are evil. Many a conscience-stricken mystic flies from it altogether, and shuts himself out from it within convent walls (real or spiritual), whence he can only look up to the sky, and contemplate the heaven out of which there is no rest, and no good.
“But the earth, where our feet are, is the work of the same Power as the immeasurable blue yonder, in which the future lies into which we would peer. Who ordered toil as the condition of life, ordered weariness, ordered sickness, ordered poverty, failure, success—to this man a foremost place, to the other a nameless struggle with the crowd—to that a shameful fall, or paralysed limb, or sudden accident—to each some work upon the ground he stands on, until he is laid beneath it.” While they were talking, the dawn came shining through the windows of the room, and Pen threw them open to receive the fresh morning air. “Look, George,” said he; “look and see the sun rise: he sees the labourer on his way a-field; the work-girl plying her poor needle; the lawyer at his desk, perhaps; the beauty smiling asleep upon her pillow of down; or the jaded reveller reeling to bed; or the fevered patient tossing on it; or the doctor watching by it, over the throes of the mother for the child that is to be born into the world;—to be born and to take his part in the suffering and struggling, the tears and laughter, the crime, remorse, love, folly, sorrow, rest.”

Thackeray--The History of Pendennis

[Steve Minkin]

We must believe in free will, we have no choice.

--- Isaac Bashevis Singer



In politics stupidity is not a handicap.

-- Napoleon Bonaparte



Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true.

-- William Ralph Inge




Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.


It is no answer to say that we are meant to rid of ourselves of the self: religions like Christianity and Buddhism are desperate stratagems of failure, the failure of men to be men.

There are two ways to be a good writer: like Homer, Shakespeare or Goethe, to accept life completely, or like Pascal, Proust, Leopardi, Baudelaire, to refuse ever to lose sight of its horror.

What grape, to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?

In the small hours when the acrid stench of existence rises like sewer gas from everything created, the emptiness of life seems more terrible than its misery.

The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.

Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.

-- Cyril Connolly



A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to be sure of finding nothing more disgusting before the day is over.

-- Nicolas Chamfort

[walto]

Yes, it was the same Pendennis, and time had brought to him, as to the rest of us, its ordinary consequences, consolations, developments. We alter very little. When we talk of this man or that woman being no longer the same person whom we remember in youth, and remark (of course to deplore) changes in our friends, we don’t, perhaps, calculate that circumstance only brings out the latent defect or quality, and does not create it. The selfish languor and indifference of to-day’s possession is the consequence of the selfish ardour of yesterday’s pursuit: the scorn and weariness which cries vanitas vanitatum is but the lassitude of the sick appetite palled with pleasure: the insolence of the successful parvenu is only the necessary continuance of the career of the needy struggler: our mental changes are like our grey hairs or our wrinkles—but the fulfilment of the plan of mortal growth and decay: that which is snow-white now was glossy black once; that which is sluggish obesity to-day was boisterous rosy health a few years back; that calm weariness, benevolent, resigned, and disappointed, was ambition, fierce and violent, but a few years since, and has only settled into submissive repose after many a battle and defeat. Lucky he who can bear his failure so generously, and give up his broken sword to Fate the Conqueror with a manly and humble heart! Are you not awestricken, you, friendly reader, who, taking the page up for a moment’s light reading, lay it down, perchance, for a graver reflection,—to think how you, who have consummated your success or your disaster, may be holding marked station, or a hopeless and nameless place, in the crowd—who have passed through how many struggles of defeat, success, crime, remorse, to yourself only known!—who may have loved and grown cold, wept and laughed again, how often!—to think how you are the same, You, whom in childhood you remember, before the voyage of life began? It has been prosperous, and you are riding into port, the people huzzaing and the guns saluting,—and the lucky captain bows from the ship’s side, and there is a care under the star on his breast which nobody knows of: or you are wrecked, and lashed, hopeless, to a solitary spar out at sea:—the sinking man and the successful one are thinking each about home, very likely, and remembering the time when they were children; alone on the hopeless spar, drowning out of sight; alone in the midst of the crowd applauding you.

Thackeray--The History of Pendennis

[Steve Minkin]

Some of necessity go astray, because for them there is no such thing as a right path.

―Thomas Mann



You're only as happy as your least happy child.

Unknown, quoted in Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread