Merge East

     98. 'But I am fearful and exceedingly bewildered, as I ponder the terrors of old age, death, and disease; I can find no peace, no self-command, much less can I find pleasure, while I see the world as it were ablaze with fire.'
     99. 'If desire arises in the heart of the man, who knows that death is certain, — I think that his soul must be made of iron, who restrains it in this great terror and does not weep.'
     100. Then the prince uttered a discourse full of resolve and abolishing the objects of desire; ....
— From The Buddha-Karita (Life of Buddha) of Asvaghosha, Cowell (tr.), in Buddhist Mahayana Texts (Mahayanasutras), Sacred Books of the East, XLIX, Max Muller (gen. ed.), Book IV, p. 47.

     35. 'Deer are lured to their destruction by songs, insects for the sake of the brightness fly into the fire, the fish greedy for the flesh swallows the iron hook, — therefore wordly objects produce misery as their end.
     36. 'As for the common opinion, "pleasures are enjoyments," none of them when examined are worthy of being enjoyed; fine garments and the rest are only the accessories of things, — they are to be regarded as merely the remedies for pain.
    37. 'Water is desired for allaying thirst; food in the same way for removing hunger; a house for keeping off the wind, the heat of the sun, and the rain; and dress for keeping off the cold and to cover one's nakedness.
     38. 'So too a bed is for removing drowsiness; a carriage for remedying the fatigue of a journey; a seat for alleviating the pain of standing; so bathing as a means for washing, health, and strength.
     39. 'External objects therefore are to human beings means for remedying pain, not in themselves sources of enjoyment; what wise man would allow that he enjoys those delights which are only used as remedial?
     40. 'He who, when burned with the heat of bilious fever, maintains that cold appliances are an enjoyment, when he is only engaged in alleviating pain, — he indeed might give the name of enjoyment to pleasures.
     41. 'Since variableness is found in all pleasures, I cannot apply to them the name of enjoyment; the very conditions which mark pleasure, bring also in its turn pain....
— From The Buddha-Karita (Life of Buddha) of Asvaghosha, Cowell (tr.), in Buddhist Mahayana Texts (Mahayanasutras), Sacred Books of the East, XLIX, Max Muller (gen. ed.), Book XI, pp. 116-117.

     52. 'Only he who, having once let go a malignant incensed serpent, or a blazing hay-torch all on fire, would strive again to seize it, would ever seek pleasures again after having once abandoned them.
     53. 'Only he who, though seeing, would envy the blind, though free the bound, though wealthy the destitute, though sound in his reason the maniac, — only he, I say, would envy one who is devoted to worldly objects.
     54. 'He who lives on alms, my good friend, is not to be pitied, having gained his end and being set on escaping the fear of old age and death; he has here the best happiness, perfect calm, and hereafter all pains are for him abolished.
— Ibid., pp. 119.

A Strong Week of Emerson

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Basic Selections from Emerson, Eduard C. Lindeman (ed.), from Apothems (excerpts from Journals: numerals are date, Emerson's age, notebook, and page):

p. 166. The greater is the man, the less are books to him. Day by day he lessens the distance between him and his authors, and soon finds very few to whom he can pay so high a compliment as to read them. (1838 - 35 - V 54)

p. 167. But now I am not sure that the educated class ever ascend to the idea of virtue; or that they desire truth: they want safety, utility, decorum. (1838 - 35 - V 81)

p. 180. All writing is by the grace of God. People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad. In these sentences that you show me, I can find no beauty, for I see death in every clause and every word. There is a fossil or a mummy character which pervades this book. The best sepulchers, the vastest catacombs, Thebes and Cairo, Pyramids, are sepulchers to me. I like gardens and nurseries. Give me initiative, spermatic, prophesying, man-making words. (1841 - 38 - VI 132-133)

p. 182. You should never ask me what I can do. If you do not find my gift without asking, I have none for you. Would you ask a woman wherein her loveliness consists? Those to whom she is lovely will not discover it so. Such questions are but curiosity and gossip. Besides, I cannot tell you what my gift is unless you can find it without my description. (1842 - 38 - VI 186-187)

p. 184. The sons of great men should be great; if they are little, it is because they eat too much pound cake, which is an accident; or, because their fathers married dolls. (1842 - 39 - VI 267)

p. 187. I respect cats, they seem to have so much else in their heads besides their mess .... I prefer a tendency to stateliness to an excess of fellowship. (1843 - 40 - VI 439)

p. 194. When I see my friend after a long time, my first question is, Has anything become clear to you? (1847 - 43 - VII 278)

p. 196. Happy is he who looks only into his work to know if it will succeed; never into the times or the public opinion, and who writes from the love of imparting certain thoughts and not from the necessity of sale — who writes always to the unknown friend. (1848 - 44 - VII 440)

p. 199. The badness of the times is making death attractive. (1850 - 46 - VIII 112)

Even More Emerson

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Basic Selections from Emerson, Eduard C. Lindeman (ed.), from Apothems (excerpts from Journals: numerals are date, Emerson's age, notebook, and page):

p. 152. The kingdom of thought is a proud aristocracy. (1824 - 20 - I 317)

p. 154. Why has my motley diary no jokes? Because it is a soliloquy and every man is grave alone. (1824 - 21 - I 393)

p. 157. A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the motion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary, but everything hath affinities infinite.... (1830 - 27 - II 300)

It is a luxury to be understood. (1831 - 27 - II 368)

Persist, only persist in seeking the truth. Persist in saying you do not know what you do not know, and you do not care for what you do not care.... (1831 - 27 - II 379)

No man can write well who thinks there is any choice of words for him. (1831 - 28 - II 401)

p. 158. The things taught in colleges and schools are not an education, but the means of education. (1831 - 28 - II 404)

Books are to be read, and every library should be a circulating library. (1831 - 28 - II 407)

"Some minds think about things; others think the things themselves." Schelling (1831 - 28 - II 422)

The bubble of the Present is every moment hardening into the flint of the Past. (1832 - 28 - II 485)

p. 159. I count no man much because he cows or silences me. Any fool can do that. But if his conversation enriches or rejoices me, I must reckon him wise. (1834 - 30 - III 265)

p. 160. Write solid sentences, and you can even spare puctuation. (1834 - 30 - III 272)

I had observed long since that, to give the thought a just and full expression, I must not prematurely utter it. Better not talk of the matter you are writing out. It was as if you had let the spring snap too soon. I was glad to find Goethe say to the same point, that "he who seeks a hidden treasure must not speak." (1834 - 30 - III 273)

Do you not see that a man is a bundle of relations, that his entire strength consists not in his properties, but in his innumerable relations? (1836 - 33 - IV 167)

Economy does not consist in saving the coal, but in using the time whilst it burns. (1837 - 33 - IV 225)

Hanging Loose

....There are objections to every course in life and action, and the practical wisdom infers an indifferency, from omnipresence of objection. The whole frame of things preaches indifferency. Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere. Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without question. Nature hates peeping, and our mothers speak her very sense when they say, "Children, eat your victuals, and say no more of it." To fill the hour — that is happiness; to fill the hour and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live amid surfaces and the true art of life is to skate well on them. Under the oldest mouldiest conventions a man of native force prospers just as well as in the newest world, and that by skill of handling and treatment. He can take hold anywhere. Life itself is a mixture of power and form, and will not bear the least excess of either. To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom....
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Experience," Essays First and Second Series, Second Series, p. 252.

....Then the new molecular philosophy shows astronomical interspaces betwixt atom and atom, shows that the world is all outside; it has no inside.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ibid., p. 254.


....A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg or a finger they will drown him. They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices. Charity would be wasted on this poor waiting on the symptoms. A wise and hardy physician will say, Come out of that, as the first condition of advice.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ibid., p. 265.


     "Therefore then, O Sariputra, owing to a Bodhisattva's indifference to any kind of personal attainment he dwells as one who has relied solely on the perfection of wisdom. In the absence of an objective support to his thought [in the absence of any thought-coverings (or: "impediments" to thought)] he has not been made to tremble, he has overcome what can upset, in the end sustained by Nirvana. All those who appear as Buddhas in the three periods of time — through having relied on the perfection of wisdom they fully awake to the utmost, right and perfect enlightenment.
     "Therefore one should know the Prajñaparamita as the great spell, the spell of great knowledge, the utmost spell, the unequalled spell, allayer of all suffering, in truth — for what could go wrong? In the
Prajñaparamita has this spell been uttered. [This spell is joined (or devoted) to the Prajñaparamita .] It runs like this: GONE, GONE, GONE BEYOND, GONE ALTOGETHER BEYOND, O WHAT AN AWAKENING, ALL HAIL! [GATE GATE PARAGATE, PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA] It is thus, O Sariputra, that a Bodhisattva should train himself in the course of the deep perfection of wisdom."
— From The "Heart of Perfect Wisdom" In 25 Lines, in The Short Prajñaparamita Texts, Edward Conze (tr.), p. 141.

     Thereupon the Lord at the time taught the Perfection of Wisdom as follows: "The Bodhhisattva, the great being, should have an even thought, he should have a friendly thought towards all beings, he should be thankful, he should be grateful, and he should desist in his heart from all evil."
     And this Heart of Perfect Wisdom should be repeatedly recited ["You all listen well! I now for your sake teach this mantra of the holy prajñaparamita in a Few Words which is the Mother of the Buddhas."]: HOMAGE TO THE TRIPLE JEWEL! HOMAGE TO SAKYAMUNI, THE TATHAGAT, THE ARHAT, THE FULLY ENLIGHTENED ONE! i.e. OM MUNE MUNE, MAHAMUNAYE SVAHA. [Om, O the Sage, O the Sage! Homage to the great Sage! All Hail!]
— From The Perfection of Wisdom in a Few Words, in The Short Prajñaparamita Texts, Edward Conze (tr.), p. 145.

Nature of Soul

     The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is the great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand and become wisdom and virtue and power and beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. Only by the vision of that Wisdom can the horoscope of the ages be read, and by falling back on our better thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of prophecy which is innate in every man, we can know what it saith. Every man's words who speaks from that life must sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare not speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity and to report what hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "The Over-Soul," in Essays: First and Second Series, First Series, pp. 156-157.

....But genius is religious. It is a larger imbibing of the common heart. It is not anomalous, but more like and not less like other men. There is in all great poets a wisdom of humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise. The author, the wit, the partisan, the fine gentleman, does not take place of the man. Humanity shines in Homer, in Chaucer, in Spenser, in Shakespeare, in Milton. They are content with truth. they use the positive degree....
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ibid., p. 168.

     The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment. The great moments of history are the facilities of performance through the strength of ideas, as works of genius and religion. "A man," said Oliver Cromwell," never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going." Dreams and drunkenness, the use of opium and alcohol are the semblance and counterfeit of this oracular genius, and hence their dangerous attraction for men. For the like reason they ask the aid of wild passions, as in gaming and war, to ape in some manner these flames and generosities of the heart.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Circles," in Ibid., pp. 187-188.

     It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great power on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the etheral tides to roll and circulate through him, then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately then only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or "with the flower of the mind"; not with the intellect used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life; or as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone but with the intellect inebriated by nectar....
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "The Poet," in Essays: First and Second Series, Second Series, p. 232.

     If any of us knew what we were doing, or where we are going, then when we think we best know! We do not know to day whether we are busy or idle. In time when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that much was accomplished and much was begun in us. All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that it is wonderful where or when we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere, like those that Hermes won with dice of the Moon, that Osiris might be born. It is said all martyrdoms looked mean when they were suffered. Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel and hangs on every other sail in the horizon Our life looks trivial, and we shun to record it. Men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual retreating and reference....
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Experience," in Ibid., pp. 156-157.

Occult Input

     Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls. When the fruit is despatched, the leaf falls. The circuit of the waters is mere falling. The walking of man and all animals is a falling forward. All our manual labor and works of strength, as prying, splitting, digging, rowing and so forth, are done by dint of continual falling, and the globe, earth, moon, comet, sun, star, fall for ever and ever.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Spiritual Laws," in Essays: First and Second Series, First Series, p. 81.

     No man can learn what he has not preparation for learning, however near to his eyes is the object. A chemist may tell his most precious secrets to a carpenter, and he shall be never the wiser — the secrets he would not utter to a chemist for an estate. God screens us evermore from premature ideas. Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ibid., p. 87.

...."No book," said Bently, "was ever written down by any but itself." The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort, friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man. "Do not trouble yourself too much about the light on your statue," said Michel Angelo to the young sculptor; "the light of the public square will test its value."
     In like manner the effect of every action is measured by the depth of the sentiment from which it proceeds. The great man knew not that he was great. It took a century or two for that fact to appear. What he did, he did because he must; it was the most natural thing in the world, and grew out of the circumstances of the moment. But now, every thing he did, even to the lifting of his finger or the eating of bread, looks large, all-related, and is called an institution.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ibid., p. 92.

     The lesson which these observations convey is, Be, not seem. Let us acquiesce. Let us take our bloated nothingness out of the path of the divine circuits. Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the Lord's power and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ibid., p. 95.

     It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and clod companion. If he is unequal he will presently pass away; but thou art enlarged by thy own shining, and no longer a mate for frogs and worms, dost soar and burn with the gods of the empyrean. It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the unworthy object and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth and feels its independency the surer. Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it may defy both.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Friendship," in Ibid., p. 128.

     There is a difference between one and another hour of life in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. For this reason the argument which is always forthcoming to silence those who conceive extraordinary hopes of man, namely the appeal to experience, is for ever invalid and vain. We give up the past to the objector, and yet we hope. He must explain this hope. We grant that human life is mean, but how did we find out it was mean? What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine inuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim? Why do men feel that the natural history of man has never been written, but he is always leaving behind what you have said of him and it becomes old, and books of metaphysics worthless? The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "The Over-Soul," in Ibid., pp. 155-156.

To Reach Within

     There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none....
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First and Second Series, First Series, from "Self-Reliance," p. 28.

     A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood." — Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ibid., p. 35.

     So use all that is called Fortune. most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the Chancellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of chance, and shall sit thereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ibid., p. 54.

     I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon at church. The preacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy, unfolded in the ordinary manner the doctrine of the Last Judgment. He assumed that judgment is not executed in this world, that the wicked are successful; that the good are miserable; and then urged from reason and from Scripture a compensation to be made to both parties in the next life. No offence appeared to be taken by the congregation at this doctrine. As far as I could observe when the meeting broke up they separated without remark on the sermon.
     Yet what was the import of this teaching? What did the preacher mean by saying that the good are miserable in the present life? Was it that houses and lands, offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are to be had by unprincipled men, whilst the saints are poor and despised; and that a compensation is to be made to these last hereafter, by giving them the gratifications another day — bank-stock and doubloons, venison and champagne? This must be the compensation intended; for what else? Is it that they are to have leave to pray and praise? to love and serve men? Why, that they can do now. The legitimate inference the disciple would draw was — 'We are to have such a good time as the sinners have now'; or, to push it to its extreme import — 'You sin now, we shall sin by and by; we would sin now, if we could, not being successful, we expect our revenge to-morrow.'
     The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad are successful; that justice is not done now. The blindness of the preacher consisted in deferring to the base estimate of the market of what constitutes a manly success, instead of confronting and convicting the world from the truth; announcing the presence of the soul; the omnipotence of the will; and so establishing the standard of good and ill, of success and falsehood.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Compensation," in Ibid., pp. 56-57.

     These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented in every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; ....
     The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The microscope cannot find the animalcule which is less perfect for being little. Eyes, ears, taste, smell, motion, resistence, appetite, and organs of reproduction that take hold on eternity — all find room to consist in the small creature. So do we put our life into every act. The true doctrine of omnipresence is that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ibid., pp. 60-61.

Internal Transformation

....All my idols — and I possess a veritable pantheon — I would offer up as sacrifices. What powers of utterance they had given me I would use to curse and blaspheme. Had not the prophets of old promised destruction? Had they ever hesitated to befoul their speech, in order to awaken the dead? If for companions I had never aught but derelicts and wastrels, was there not a purpose in it? Were not my idols also derelicts, and wastrels — in a profound sense? Did they not float on the tide of culture, were they not tossed hither and thither like the unlettered wretches of the workaday world? Were their daemons not as heartless and ruthless as any slave driver? Did not everything conspire — the grand, the noble, the perfect works as well as the low, the sordid, the mean — to render life more unlivable each day? Of what use the poems of death, the maxims and counsels of the sage ones, the codes and tablets of the law-givers, of what use leaders, thinkers, men of art, if the very elements that made up the fabric of life were incapable of being transformed?
— Henry Miller, from Nexus, in Henry Miller On Writing, Thomas H. Moore (Sel. & Ed.), p. 77.

....The form of meditation one follows will depend on one's maturity of mind. Though the various modes of meditation may appear different, yet they all converge on the same point; there is no need to doubt this. "Knowing one's own Self is knowing God. Not knowing the nature of him who meditates but meditating on God as foreign to one's own Self is like measuring one's shadow with one's foot. You go on measuring while the shadow also goes on receding further and further." So say the scriptures. Hence meditation on the Self is best, because the Self alone is the Supreme Self of all the gods.
— Ramana Maharshi, The Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi, Arthur Osborne (ed.), p. 36.

     Firm and disciplined inherence in the Atman without giving the least scope for the rise of any thought other than the deep contemplative thought of the Self, constitutes self-surrender to the Supreme Lord. Let any amount of burden be laid on Him, He will bear it all. It is, in fact, the indefinable power of the Lord that ordains, sustains and controls everything that happens. Why then should we worry, tormented by vexatious thoughts, saying: "Shall we act this way? No, that way," instead of meekly but happily submitting to that Power? Knowing that the train carries all the weight, why indeed should we, the passengers travelling in it, carry our small individual articles of luggage on our laps to our great discomfort, instead of putting them aside and sitting at perfect ease?
— Ramana Maharshi, from Who Am I?, in Ibid., p. 45.

     36. It is those who are not learned that are saved rather than those whose ego has not yet subsided in spite of their learning. The unlearned are saved from the unrelenting grip of the devil of self-infatuation; they are saved from the malady of a myriad whirling thoughts and words; they are saved from running after wealth. It is from more than one evil that they are saved.
— Ramana Maharshi, from Upadesa Saram (The Essence of Instruction), in Ibid., p. 79.

     The Buddha said to his disciples: "After my nirvana, you should rely on four things which will be your teachers: on the Dharma rather than on the man, on the meaning rather than the letter, on wisdom rather than intellect, and on sutras revealing the whole truth rather than on those revealing part of it."
— The Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra, translated by Lu K'uan Yu (Charles Luk), Footnote #1 on p. 133.

Spiritual Direction

.....It is because the reality of Progress can never be determined that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have had to treat it as an article of religious faith. To the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy, the question whether Progress is inevitable or even real is not a matter of primary importance. For them, the important thing is that individual men and women should come to the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, and what interests them in regard to the social environment is not its progressiveness or non-progressiveness (whatever those terms may mean), but the degree to which it helps or hinders individuals in their advance towards man's final end.
— Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, p. 80.

God, if I worship Thee in fear of hell, burn me in hell. And if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, withhold not Thine everlasting Beauty.    — Rabi'a
— Ibid., p. 102.

This is, perhaps, the most difficult of all mortifications — to achieve a "holy indifference" to the temporal success or failure of the cause to which one has devoted one's best energies. If it triumphs, well and good; and if it meets defeat, that also is well and good, if only in ways that, to a limited and timebound mind, are here and now entirely incomprehensible.
— Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, p. 103.

Suppose a boat is crossing a river and another boat, an empty one, is about to collide with it. Even an irritable man would not lose his temper. But suppose there was someone in the second boat. Then the occupant of the first would shout to him to keep clear. And if he did not hear the first time, nor even when called to three times, bad language would inevitably follow. In the first case there was no anger, in the second there was — because in the first case the boat was empty, in the second it was occupied. And so it is with man. If he could only pass empty through life, who would be able to injure him?
— Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, p. 106.

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment; Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderness is intuition.    — Jalal-uddin Rumi
— Ibid., p. 141.

Reason is like an officer when the King appears; The officer then loses his power and hides himself. Reason is the shadow cast by God; God is the sun.    — Jalal-uddin Rumi
— Ibid., p. 141.

....If you dwelt in self-knowledge alone, you would despair; if you dwelt in the knowledge of God alone, you would be tempted to presumption. One must go with the other, and thus you will reach perfection.    — St. Catherine of Siena
— Ibid., p. 165.

Night Thoughts 2

The Virtues grow on immortality:
That root destroy'd, they wither and expire.
A Deity believ'd, will nought avail:
Rewards and punishments make God ador'd;
And hopes and fears give Conscience all her pow'r.
As in the dying parent dies the child,
Virtue, with immortality, expires.
Who tells me he denies his soul immortal,
Whate'er his boast, has told me he's a knave.
His duty 'tis to love himself alone;
Nor care though mankind perish, if he smiles.
Who thinks ere-long the man shall wholly die,
Is dead already; nought but brute survives.
— Reverend Dr. Edward Young, The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, from "Night the Seventh," p. 157.

     How frail, men, things! how momentary both.
Fantastic chase, of shadows hunting shades!
The gay, the busy, equal, though unlike;
Equal in wisdom, differently wise!
Thro' flow'ry meadows, and thro' dreary wastes.
One bustling, and one dancing, into death
There's not a day, but, to the man of thought
Betrays some secret, that throws new reproach
On life, and makes him sick of seeing more.
The scenes of bus'ness tells us — "What are men?"
The scenes of pleasure — "What is all beside":
There, others we despise; and here, ourselves.
Amidst disgust eternal, dwells delight?
'tis approbation strikes the string of joy.
— Reverend Dr. Edward Young, Ibid., from "Night the Eighth," p. 168.

    Poor MACHIAVEL! who labour'd hard his plan,
Forgot, that genius need not go to school;
Forgot, that man, without a tutor wise,
His plan had practis'd, long before 'twas writ.
The world's all title-page, there's no contents;
The world's all face; the man who shews his heart
Is whooted for his nudities, and scorn'd.
A man I knew who liv'd upon a smile;
And well it fed him; he look'd plump and fair,
Whilst rankest venom foam'd through ev'ry vein.
— Reverend Dr. Edward Young, Ibid., p. 175.

The sick in body call for aid; the sick
In mind are covetous of more disease;
And when at worst, they dream themselves quite well.
To know ourselves diseas'd, is half our cure.
— Reverend Dr. Edward Young, Ibid., from "Night the Ninth," p. 204

     Thrice happy they! that enter now the court
Heav'n opens in their bosoms: But, how rare!
Ah me! that magnanimity, how rare!
What hero, like the man who stands himself?
Who dares to meet his naked heart alone?
Who hears, intrepid, the full charge it brings,
Resolv'd to silence future murmurs there?
The coward flies; and, flying, is undone.
(Art thou a cowaed? No) The coward flies:
Thinks, but thinks slightly; asks, but fears to know:
Asks, 'What is Truth?' with Pilate; and retires;
Dissolves the court, and mingles with the throng;
Asylum sad, from Reason, Hope, and Heav'n!
— Reverend Dr. Edward Young, Ibid., p. 209.

     Devotion! daughter of astronomy!
An undevout astronomer is mad.
True, all things speak a GOD;  but in the small,
Men trace out Him; in great He seizes man;
Seizes, and elevates, and raps, and fills
With new inquiries, 'mid associates new.
— Reverend Dr. Edward Young, Ibid., p. 223.

Awake then; thy Philander calls: Awake!
Thou, who shalt wake, when the creation sleeps:
When, like a taper, all these sons expire;
When time, like him of Gaza in his wrath,
Plucking the pillars that support the world,
In Nature's ample ruins lies entomb'd:
And Midnight, universal Midnight! reigns.
— Reverend Dr. Edward Young, Ibid., p. 266.

Night Thoughts

     Happy! did sorrow seize such alone:
Not prudence can defend, or virtue save;
Disease invades the chastest temperance;
And punishment the guiltless; and alarm,
Thro' thickest shades pursues the fond of peace:
Man's caution often into danger turns,
And his guard falling, crushes him to death.
Not Happiness itself makes good her name;
Our very wishes give us not our wish:
How distant oft the thing we doat on most,
From that for which we doat felicity?
The smoothest course of nature has its pains,
And truest friends, thro' error, wound our rest.
Without misfortune, what calamities?
And what hostilities, without a foe?
Nor are foes wanting to the best on earth.
But endless is the list of human ills;
And sighs might sooner fail, than cause to sigh.
— Reverend Dr. Edward Young, The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, from "Night the First," p. 8.

Beware, LORENZO! a slow-sudden death
How dreadful that deliberate surprize?
Be wise to day; 'tis madness to defer;
Next day the fatal precedent will plead;
Thus on, till wisdom is push'd out of life,
Procrastination is the thief of time;
Year after year it steals, till all are fled,
And to the mercies of a moment leaves
The vast concerns of an eternal scene.
If not so frequent, would not this be strange?
That 'tis so frequent, this is stranger still.
     Of man's miraculous mistakes, this bears
The palm, "That all men are about to live,"
For ever on the brink of being born.
All pay themselves the compliment to think
They, one day, shall not drivel; and their pride
On this reversion takes up ready praise;
At least, their own; their future selves applauds.
How excellent that life they ne'er will lead!
Time lodg'd in their own hands is Folly's vail;
That lodg'd in Fate's, to wisdom they consign;
The thing they can't but purpose, they postpone;
'Tis not in Folly, not to scorn a fool;
And scarce in human wisdom to do more.
All promise is poor dilatory man,
And that thro' every stage: When young, indeed,
In full content we sometimes nobly rest,
Unanxious for ourselves; and only wish,
As duteous sons, our fathers were more wise:
At thirty man suspects himself a fool:
Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan:
At fifty chides his infamous delay,
Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve;
In all the magnanimity of thought
Resolves; and re-resolves: Then dies the same.
     And why? Because he thinks himself immortal:
All men think all men mortal, but themselves:....
— Reverend Dr. Edward Young, Ibid., pp. 11-12.

O ye LORENZOS of our age! who deem
One moment unamus'd, a misery
Not made for feeble man! who call aloud
For every bawble, drivell'd o'er by sense;
For rattles, and conceits of every cast,
For change of follies, and relays of joy,
To drag you, patient, through the tedious length
Of a short winter's day; — say sages! say,
Wit's oracles! say, dreamers of gay dreams!
How will you weather an eternal night.
Where such expedients fail? where wit's a fool,
Mirth mourns, dreams vanish, laughter drops a tear?
— Reverend Dr. Edward Young, Ibid.,
from "Night the Second," pp. 20-21

Sharp Transitions

     "Pray, but work; suffer, but hope; keeping both the earth and the stars in view. Do not try to settle permanently, for it is a place of pilgrimage; not a home, but a halting-place. Seek the truth, for it is to be found, but only in one place, with the One who Himself is the Way, the Truth, and the Life."
[The last sentence of Strindberg's last major work (written when he was 60 years old); it eulogizes Christianity and evinces his chagrin at his earlier atheistic apostasy.]
— August Strindberg, Zones of the Spirit, p. 286, Arthur Babilotte (ed.), a translation of Strindberg's A Blue Book.

Silence does not always mark wisdom. I was at dinner, some time ago, in company with a man who listened to me and said nothing for a long time; but he nodded his head, and I thought him intelligent. At length, towards the end of the dinner, some apple dumplings were placed on the table, and my man had no sooner seen them than he burst forth with — "Them's the jockies for me!"
[An anecdote of Coleridge's which the editor rejected as being by, but not directly about, a literary man.]
— In The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, James Sutherland (ed.), Introduction, p. vi.

....but I should blush as an author; inasmuch as I set no small store by myself upon this very account, that my reader has never yet been able to guess at anything. And in this, Sir, I am so nice and singular a humour that if I thought you was [sic] able to form the least judgment or probable conjecture to yourself of what was to come in the next page, — I would tear it out of my book.
— Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, p. 68.

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world, — the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!
     I would go fifty miles on foot, for I have not a horse worth riding on, to kiss the hand of that man whose generous heart will give up the reins of his imagination into his author's hands, — be pleased he knows not why, and cares not wherefore.
— Laurence Sterne, Ibid., Volume 3, Ch. XII, p. 147.

     [Here appears a graphic of a hand with a pointing finger] A dwarf who brings a standard along with him to measure his own size, — take my word, is a dwarf in more articles than one — And so much for tearing out of chapters.
[Occurs after he says he has removed a chapter because it was too good and would show up the rest of his work.]
— Laurence Sterne, Ibid., Volume 4, Ch. XXV, p. 257.

     — That provision should be made for continuing the race of so great, so exalted and godlike a Being as man — I am far from denying — but philosophy speaks freely of everything; and therefore I still think and do maintain it to be a pity that it should be done by means of a passion which bends down the faculties, and turns all the wisdom, contemplations, and operations of the soul backwards — a passion, my dear, continued my father [Walter Shandy], addressing himself to my mother, which couples and equals wise men with fools, and makes us come out of caverns and hiding places more like satyrs and four-footed beasts than men.
     I know it will be said, continued my father (availing himself of the Prolepsis), that in itself, and simply taken — like hunger, or thirst, or sleep — 'tis an affair neither good or bad — or shameful or otherwise. — Why then did the delicacy of Diogenes and Plato so recalcitrate against it? and wherefore, when we go about to make and plant a man, do we put out the candle? and for what reason is it that all the parts thereof — the congredients — the preparations — the instruments, and whatever serves thereto, are so held as to be conveyed to a cleanly mind by no language, translation, or periphrasis whatever?
     — The act of killing and destroying a man, continued my father, raising his voice — and turning to my uncle Toby — you see, is glorious — and the weapons by which we do it are honourable — We march with them upon our shoulders — We strut with them by our sides — We gild them — Nay, if it be but a scoundrel cannon, we cast an ornament upon the breech of it. —
    — My uncle Toby laid down his pipe to intercede for a better epithet — and Yorick was rising up to batter the whole hypothesis to pieces — ....
— Laurence Sterne, Ibid., Volume 9, Ch. XXXIII, p. 524.

Thinking About Thinking

     But when a man thinks for himself, he follows the impulse of his own mind, which is determined for him at the time, either by his environment or some particular recollection. The visible world of a man's surroundings does not, as reading does, impress a single definite thought upon his mind, but merely gives the matter and occasion which lead him to think what is appropriate to his nature and present temper. So it is, that much reading deprives the mind of elasticity; it is like keeping a spring continually under pressure. The safest way of having no thoughts of one's own is to take up a book every moment one has nothing else to do. It is this practice which explains why erudition makes most men more stupid and silly than they are by nature, and prevents their writings obtaining any measure of success. They remain, in Pope's words:
            For ever reading, never to be read! [Dunciad, iii, 194.]
     Men of learning are those who have done their reading in the pages of a book. Thinkers and men of genius are those who have gone straight to the book of Nature; it is they who have enlightened the world and carried humanity further on its way.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, from The Art of Literature, "On Thinking For Oneself," in The Complete Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer, T. Bailey Saunders (ed.), p. 44.

     But apart from this circular argument it seems to me that the idea of dignity can be applied only in an ironical sense to a being whose will is so sinful, whose intellect is so limited, whose body is so weak and perishable as man's. How shall a man be proud, when his conception is a crime, his birth a penalty, his life a labour, and death a necessity!
— Arthur Schopenhauer, from On Human Nature, "Human Nature," in Ibid., pp. 2-3.

     When we are on a journey, and all kinds of remarkable objects press themselves on our attention, the intellectual food which we receive is often so large in amount that we have no time for digestion; and we regret that the impressions which succeed one another so quickly leave no permanent trace. But at bottom it is the same with travelling as with reading. How often do we complain that we cannot remember one thousandth part of what we read! In both cases, however, we may console ourselves with the reflection that the things we see and read make an impression on the mind before they are forgotten, and so contribute to its formation and nurture; while that which we only remember does no more than stuff it and puff it out, filling up its hollows with matter that will always be strange to it, and leaving it in itself blank.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, from Art of Controversy, "Psychological Observations," in Ibid., pp. 58-59.

     And apart from all that I have said, so much at least is clear. What appears under the forms of time, space, and causality, and vanishes again, and in reality is nothing, and reveals its nothingness by death — this vicious and fatal appearance is the will. But what does not appear, and is no phenomenon, but rather the noumenon; what makes appearance possible; what is not subject to the principle of causation, and therefore has no vain or vanishing existence, but abides for ever unchanged in the midst of a world full of suffering, like a ray of light in a storm, — free, therefore from all pain and fatality, — this, I say, is the intelligence. The man who is more intelligence than will, is thereby delivered, in respect of the greatest part of him, from nothingness and death; and such a man is in his nature a genius.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, from Art of Controversy, "Genius and Virtue," in Ibid., pp. 92-93.

Unknown Re-known?

     Nor, again, is it exactly the pleasure it gives you, for this is almost outweighed by the greatness of the effort. It is rather a peculiar kind of instinct, which drives the man of genius to give permanent form to what he sees and feels, without being conscious of any further motive. It works, in the main, by a necessity similar to that which makes a tree bear its fruit; and no external condition is needed but ground upon which it is to thrive.
     On a closer examination, it seems as though, in the case of a genius, the will to live, which is the spirit of the human species, were conscious of having, by some rare chance, and for a brief period, attained a greater clearness of vision, and were now trying to secure it, or at least the outcome of it, for the whole species, to which the individual genius in his inmost being belongs; so that the light which he sheds about him may pierce the darkness and dullness of ordinary human consciousness and there produce some good effect.
     Arising in some such way, this instinct drives the genius to carry his work to completion, without thinking of reward or applause or sympathy; to leave all care for his own personal welfare; to make his life one of industrious solitude, and to strain his faculties to the utmost. He thus comes to think more about posterity than about contemporaries; because, while the latter can only lead him astray, posterity forms the majority of the species, and time will gradually bring the discerning few, who can appreciate him. Meanwhile it is with him as with  the artist described by Goethe; he has no princely patron to prize his talents, no friend to rejoice with him:
     Ein Furst der die Talente schätzt,
     Ein Freund, der sich mit mir ergötzt,
     Die haben leider mir gefehlt.
His work is, as it were, a sacred object and the true fruit of his life, and his aim in storing it away for a more discerning posterity will be to make it the property of mankind. An aim like this far surpasses all others, and for it he wears the crown of thorns which is one day to bloom into a wreath of laurel. All his powers are concentrated in the effort to complete and secure his work; just as the insect, in the last stage of its development, uses its whole strength on behalf of a brood it will never see; it puts its eggs in some place of safety where, as it well knows, the young will one day find life and nourishment, and then dies in confidence.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, last paragraph of "On Genius."

     "— I shall soon be leaving this part of the world, where I could never bear to live. I find no one here who likes what I like, who works at my work, or is amazed at what amazes me. Thrown back on myself, I eat my heart out in misery. My long and patient study of Society here has brought me to melancholy conclusions, in which doubt predominates.
     "Here, money is the mainspring of everything. Money is indispensable, even for going without money. But though that dross is necessary to any one who wishes to think in peace, I have not courage enough to make it the sole motive power of my thoughts. To make a fortune, I must take up a profession; in two words, I must by acquiring some privilege of position or self-advertisement, either legal or ingeniously contrived, purchase the right of taking day by day out of somebody else's purse a certain sum which, by the end of the year, would amount to a small capital; and this, in twenty years, would hardly secure an income of four or five thousand francs to a man who deals honestly. An advocate, a notary, a merchant, any recognizable professional, has earned a living for his later days in the course of fifteen or sixteen years after ending his apprenticeship.
     "But I have never felt fit for work of this kind. I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity. I am absolutely devoid of the  constant attention indispensable to the making of a fortune. Any mercantile venture, any need for using other people's money would bring me to grief, and I should be ruined. Though I have nothing, at least at the moment, I owe nothing. The man who gives his life to the achievement of great things in the sphere of intellect, needs very little; still, though twenty sous a day would be enough, I do not possess that small income for my laborious idleness. When I wish to cogitate, want drives me out of the sanctuary where my mind has its being. What is to become of me?
     "I am not frightened at poverty. If it were not that beggars are imprisoned, branded, scorned, I would beg, to enable me to solve at my leisure the problems that haunt me. Still, this sublime resignation, by which I might emancipate my mind, through abstracting it from the body, would not serve my end. I should still need money to devote myself to certain experiments. But for that, I would accept the outward indigence of a sage possessed of both heaven and earth. A man need only never stoop, to remain lofty in poverty. He who struggles and endures, while marching on to a glorious end, presents a noble spectacle; but who can have the strength to fight here? We can climb cliffs, but it is unendurable to remain for ever trampling the mud. Everything here checks the flight of a spirit that strives toward the future.
     "I should not be afraid of myself in a desert cave; I am afraid of myself here. In the desert I should be alone with myself, undisturbed; here a man has a thousand wants which drag him down. You go out walking, absorbed in dreams; the voice of the beggar asking for an alms brings you back to this world of hunger and thirst. You need money only to take a walk. Your organs of sense, perpetually wearied by triffles, never get any rest. The poet's sensitive nerves are perpetually shocked, and what ought to be his glory becomes his torment; his imagination is his cruelest enemy. The injured workman, the poor mother in childbed, the prostitute who has fallen ill, the foundling, the infirm and aged — even vice and crime here find a refuge and charity; but the world is merciless to the inventor, to the man who thinks. Here everything must show an immediate and practical result. Fruitless attempts are mocked at, though they may lead to the greatest discoveries; the deep and untiring study that demands long concentration of every faculty is not valued here. The State might pay talent as it pays the bayonet; but it is afraid of being taken in by mere cleverness, as if genius could be counterfeited for any length of time.
— Honoré de Balzac, from a letter to his uncle written by the character Louis Lambert in the novel Louis Lambert, pp. 207-209.

....This terrible melancholy is perhaps a result of my isolation, one of the torments of a lonely soul which pays for its hidden treasures with groans and unknown suffering. Those who enjoy little shall suffer little; immense happiness entails unutterable anguish!
— Honoré de Balzac, Ibid., p. 231.

Twice Thoughts

— William Blake — The following are from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" in Selected Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Northrop Frye (ed.):

p. 134. One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression.

p. 135.      Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn no longer, in deadly black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy. Nor his accepted brethren — whom, tyrant, he calls free — lay the bound or build the roof. Nor pale religious lechery call that virginity that wishes but acts not!

For every thing that lives is Holy.


— William Blake, from "A Vision of the Last Judgment," in Ibid., p. 399:
....I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action; it is as the dirt upon my feet, No part of Me. "What," it will be Questioned, "When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?" O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty." I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro' it & not with it.

— William Blake, from his "Marginalia" (various), in Ibid.:
p. 441. Man can have no idea of any thing greater than Man, as a cup cannot contain more than its capaciousness. But God is a man, not because he is so perceiv'd by man, but because he is the creator of man.

p. 444. Prophets, in the modern sense of the word, have never existed. Jonah was no prophet in the modern sense, for his prophecy of Ninevah failed. Every honest man is a Prophet; he utters his opinion both of private & public matters. Thus: if you go on So, the result is So. He never says, such a thing shall happen let you do what you will. A Prophet is a Seer, not an Arbitrary Dictator. It is man's fault if God is not able to do him good, for he gives to the just & to the unjust, but the unjust reject his gift.

p. 452. "The errors of genius ... are pardonable ..." — J. Reynolds Discourses
Genius has no Error; it is Ignorance that is Error.

p. 453. If Art was Progressive We should have had Mich. Angelos & Raphaels to succeed & to Improve upon each other. But it is not so. Genius dies with its Possessor & comes not again till Another is Born with It.

Sage Sayings

— William Blake — All the following are from "Proverbs of Hell" of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in Selected Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Northrop Frye (ed.):

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.
Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by incapacity.
He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
....
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.
....
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
....
The most sublime act is to set another before you.
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
....
Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
....
Excess of sorrow laughs, Excess of joy weeps.
....
The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.
....
What is now proved was once only imagined.
....
Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
....
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
Listen to the fool's reproach! it is a kingly title!
....The weak in courage is strong in cunning.
....
If others had not been foolish, we should be so.
....
As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible.
....
Exuberance is Beauty.
....
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.
....
Enough! or Too Much.

What Would Confucius Say?

1:1. Confucius said, "Is it not a pleasure to learn and to repeat or practice from time to time what has been learned? Is it not delightful to have friends coming from afar? Is one not a superior man if he does not feel hurt even though he is not recognized?"
— Confucius, from "Humanism of Confucius" (551-479 B.C.), The Analects, in A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy, Wing-Tsit Chan (1963), p. 18.

1:14. Confucius said, "The superior man does not seek fulfillment of his appetite nor comfort in his lodging. He is diligent in his duties and careful in his speech. He associates with men of moral principles and thereby realizes himself. Such a person may be said to love learning."
— Confucius, Ibid., p. 21.

2:11. Confucius said, "A man who reviews the old so as to find the new is qualified to teach others."
— Confucius, Ibid., p. 23.

8:13. Confucius said, "Have sincere faith and love learning. Be not afraid to die for pursuing the good way. Do not enter a tottering state nor stay in a chaotic one. When the Way prevails in the empire, then show yourself; when it does not prevail, then hide. When the Way prevails in your own state and you are poor and in a humble position, be ashamed of yourself. When the Way does not prevail in your state and you are wealthy and in an honorable position, be ashamed of yourself."
— Confucius, Ibid., p. 34.

11:11. Chi-lu (Tzu-lu) asked about serving the spiritual beings. Confucius said, "If we are not yet able to serve man, how can we serve spiritual beings?"
     "I venture to ask about death."
     Confucius said, "If we do not yet know about life, how can we know about death?"
— Confucius, Ibid., p. 36.

     Mencius said, "If you let people follow their feelings (original nature), they will be able to do good. This is what is meant by saying that human nature is good. If man does evil, it is not the fault of his natural endowment. The feeling of commiseration is found in all men; the feeling of shame and dislike is found  in all men; the feeling of respect and reverence is found in all men; and the feeling of right and wrong is found in all men. The feeling of commiseration is what we call humanity; the feeling of shame and dislike is what we called righteousness; the feeling of respect and reverence is what we called propriety (li); and the feeling of right and wrong is what we called wisdom. Humanity, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom are not drilled into us from outside. We originally have them with us. Only we do not think [to find them]. Therefore, it is said, 'seek and you will find it, neglect and you will lose it.'"
— Mencius (371-289 B.C.) (Meng Tzu), "Idealistic Confucianism," in A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy, Wing-Tsit Chan (1963), p. 54.

....Therefore Lung Tzu said, 'If a man makes shoes without knowing the size of people's feet, I know that he will at least not make them to be like baskets.' Shoes are alike because people's feet are alike....
— Mencius, Ibid., p. 56.

4. Confucius said, "I know why the Way is not pursued. The intelligent go beyond it and the stupid do not come up to it. I know why the Way is not understood. The worthy go beyond it and the unworthy do not come up to it. There is no one who does not eat and drink, but there are few who can really know flavor."
— Confucius, The Doctrine of the Mean (Chung-Yung), in A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy, Wing-Tsit Chan (1963), in Ibid., p. 99.

11. There are men who seek for the abstruse, and practice wonders. Future generations may mention them. But that is what I will not do. There are superior men who act in accordance with the Way, but give up when they have gone half way. But I never give up. There are superior men who are in accord with the Mean, retire from the world and are unknown to their age, but do not regret. It is only a sage who can do this."
— Confucius, Ibid., p. 100.

62. In one's words there should be something to teach others. In one's activities there should be something to serve as model for others. In the morning something should be done. In the evening something should be realized. At every moment something should be nourished. And in every instant something should be preserved.
— Chang Tsai (1020-1077), in Ibid., p. 512.

Begin to Begin

     Many young people have confessed to me after a long time, that they came to see me, either as the result of a wager, or because they had read my name on a placard, or in order to disobey their families.
     Their silence demoralized me. I embroidered it with a thousand reasons. It was merely due to their fear of talking nonsense.
     This does not prevent me from falling into the trap again. The youth intimidates us because we imagine it to be secretive. This is the strength of its silence. We furnish it out of our own pocket. It soon realizes this, and uses it as a weapon. Its silence becomes systematic. Its aim is to put us out of countenance.
     It is important to be on one's guard. When the young people have gone, this deathly silence sinks deep into us and works havoc. We, its victims, find in it a criticism of what we are doing. We weigh it up. We agree. We are disgusted. We grow paralysed. We fall from the tree, open-beaked.
     I see some artists who are exposed to this adventure losing their footing, incapable of regaining their balance and unable to do without their tormentors.
— Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being, Sprigge (tr.), pp. 123-124.

     "But," you will say, "how can you reconstruct the truth as of that time and express it after so many years?"
     Ah, my indiscreet and grossly ignorant beloved, it is this very capacity that makes us masters of the earth, this capacity to restore the past and thus to prove the instability of our impressions and the vanity of our affections. Let Pascal say that man is a thinking reed. He is wrong; man is a thinking erratum. Each period in life is a new edition that corrects the preceding one and that in turn will be corrected by the next, until publication of the definitive edition, which the publisher donates to the worms.
— Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Epitaph of a Small Winner (1880), Grossman (tr.), p. 77.

     I do not believe that a violent imitation of the horrors of our times is the concern of poetry. Horrors are taken for granted. Disorder is ordinary. People in general take more and more 'in their stride' — hides grow thicker. I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.
— Denise Levertov, from her Statement in The New American Poetry, Donald M. Allen, pp. 411-412.

        FRANKLIN JONES
If I could have lived another year
I could have finished my flying machine,
And become rich and famous.
Hence it is fitting the workman
Who tried to chisel a dove for me
Made it look more like a chicken.
For what is it all but being hatched,
And running about the yard,
To the day of the block?
Save that a man has an angel's brain,
And sees the ax from the first!
— Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology, p. 104.

A Writer's Stand

     But do not imagine I am suffering disappointments here — quite the contrary. I marvel sometimes how readily I give up everything I expected for the reality, even when the reality is bad.
     My God, if any of it could be shared! But would it be then, would it be? No, it is only at the price of solitude.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggs, M. D. Herter Norton (tr.), p. 68.

....I was disquieted also, as I recollect, lest, since nothing had been provided for any fixed time, one might miss many things altogether. And so when I returned to Ulsgaard and saw all the books, I set to; in great haste, almost with a bad conscience. Of what I so often felt later, I now somewhat had a premonition: that one had no right to open a book at all, unless one pledged oneself to read them all. With every line one broke off a bit of the world. Before books it was intact and perhaps it would be again after them. But how could I, who was unable to read, cope with them all? There they stood, even in that modest library, in such hopeless abundance and solidarity. I flung myself stubborn and despairing from book to book and battled through their pages, like one who has to perform a disproportionate task.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Ibid., pp.171-172.

     I know that if I am destined for the worst it will avail me nothing to disguise myself in my better clothes.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Ibid., p. 181.

     For glory is but an instant, and we have never seen anything more lasting than misery.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Ibid., p. 182

Outside much has changed. I don't know how. But inside and before you, O my God, inside before you, spectator, are we not without action? We discover, indeed, that we do not know our part, we look for a mirror, we want to rub off the make-up and remove the counterfeit and be real. But somewhere a bit of mummery still sticks to us that we forget. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows, we do not notice that the corners of our lips are twisted. And thus we go about, a laughing-stock, a mere half-thing: neither existing, nor actors.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Ibid., p. 194.

....he notices a plate with fruit on the window-seat. Involuntarily he takes an apple from it, and lays it before him on the table. How my life stands round about this fruit, he thinks. Around all that is finished that which has still to be done rises and takes increase.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Ibid., p. 202.

     (To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.)
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Ibid., p. 209.

Lightly Touched?

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence. For Beauty's nothing but the beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Each single angel is terrible. And so I keep down my heart, and swallow the call-note of depth-dark sobbing. Alas, who is there we can make use of? Not angels, not men; and already the knowing brutes are aware that we don't feel very securely at home within our interpreted world. There remains, perhaps, some tree on a slope, to be looked at day after day, there remains for us yesterday's walk and the cupboard-love loyalty of a habit that liked us and stayed and never gave notice. Oh, and there's Night, there's Night, when wind full of cosmic space feeds on our faces: for whom would she not remain, longed for, mild enchantress, painfully there for the lonely heart to achieve? Is she lighter for lovers? Alas, with each other they only conceal their lot! Don't you know yet? — Fling the emptiness of your arms into the spaces we breathe — maybe that the birds will feel the extended air in more intimate flight.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, from "The First Elegy," Leischman/Spender (trs.), pp. 21-23.

     In reply to his 'young poet,' who had complained of his loneliness, Rilke wrote, in 1903, that loneliness was not to be regarded as an unfortunate accident, but as a real and necessary task:
     What's needed is just this: Loneliness, vast inner loneliness. To walk in oneself and to meet no one for hours on end, — that's what one must be able to attain. To be lonely in the way one was lonely as a child, when the grownups moved about involved in things that appeared important and big because the big ones looked so busy and because one understood nothing of what they were doing.
     And if, one day, one comes to perceive that their occupations are miserable, their professions moribund and no longer related to life, why not go on regarding them, like a child, as something alien, looking out from the depths of one's own world, from the expanse of one's own loneliness, which is itself work and rank and profession? Why want to exchange a child's wise not-understanding for defensiveness and contempt, when not-understanding means being alone, while defensiveness and contempt mean participation in that from which one is trying, by their means, to separate oneself? (Briefe an einer Dichter, 31-32.)
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Ibid., from Commentary on "Fourth Elegy," pp. 99-100.

....Do not be bewildered by the surfaces; in the depths all becomes law. And those who live the secret wrong and badly (and they are very many), lose it only for themselves and still hand it on, like a sealed letter, without knowing it. And do not be confused by the multiplicity of names and the complexity of cases. Perhaps over all these is a great motherhood, as common as longing....
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Letters on Love," in Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties, John J. L. Mood (ed. and tr.), p. 35.

     To speak of solitude again, it becomes always clearer that this is at bottom not something that one can take or leave. We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. That is all. But how much better it is to realize that we are so, yes, even to begin by assuming it. We shall indeed turn dizzy then; for all points upon which our eye has been accustomed to rest are taken from us, there is nothing near any more and everything far is infinitely far. A person removed from his own room, almost without preparation and transition, and set upon the height of a great mountain range, would feel something of the sort: ....
     So for him who becomes solitary all distances, all measures change; of these changes many take place suddenly, and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, extraordinary imaginings and singular sensations arise that seem to grow out beyond all bearing. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called "visions," the whole so-called "spirit-world," death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.
     ....For it is not enertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed; it is shyness before any sort of new unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence....
     ....And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the  beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter Mood calls "The Dragon Princess," in Ibid., pp. 97-99.

Internal Compass

     "It doesn't matter what one reveals or what one keeps to oneself," he said. "Everything we do, everything we are, rests on our personal power. If we have enough of it, one word uttered to us might be sufficient to change the course of our lives. But if we don't have enough personal power, the most magnificant piece of wisdom can be revealed to us and that revelation won't make a damn bit of difference."
— Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power, pp. 16-17.

...."There are two kinds of bad habits which we use over and over when confronted with unusual life situations. First, we may disregard what's happening or has happened and feel as if it had never occurred. That one is the bigot's way. Second, we may accept everything at its face value and feel as if we know what's going on. That's the pious man's way. Third, we may become obsessed with an event because either we cannot disregard it or we cannot accept it wholeheartedly. That's the fool's way. Your way? There is a fourth, the correct one, the warrior's way. A warrior acts as if nothing had ever happened, because he doesn't believe in anything, yet he accepts everything at its face value. He accepts without accepting and disregards without disregarding. He never feels as if he knows, neither does he feel as if nothing had ever happened. He acts as if he is in control, even though he might be shaking in his boots. To act in such a manner dissapates obsession."
— Carlos Castaneda, Ibid., pp. 58-59.

Thoughtful Thought

     In the case of writing, however, the author feels himself to be at once the source of energy, the engineer, and the restraints. One part of him is impulsion; another foresees, organizes, moderates, suppresses; a third part (logic and memory) maintains the conditions, preserves the connections, and assures some fixity to the calculated design. To write should mean to construct, as precisely and solidly as possible, a machine of language in which the released energy of the mind is used in overcoming real obstacles, hence the writer must be divided against himself. That is the only respect in which, strictly speaking, the whole man acts as author. Everything else is not his, but belongs to a part of him that has escaped. Between the emotion or initial intention and its natural ending, which is disorder, vagueness, and forgetting — the destiny of all thinking — it is his task to introduce obstacles created by himself, so that, being interposed, they may struggle with the purely transitory nature of psychic phenomena to win a measure of renewable action, a share of independent existence.
— Paul Valery, from "Note and Digression" (1919), in Leonardo Poe Mallarmé, p. 72.

     Once it is agreed that our greatest insights are closely intermingled with our greatest chances of error, and that our average thoughts are of no great significance, then it is the part of us that chooses, the part that organizes, which must be exercised at every moment. The rest depends on no one, and we invoke it as vainly as we pray for rain. We may give it a name, torment it, make a god of it, but the only result will be a greater amount of pretense and fraud — things so naturally allied with intellectual ambition that one hardly knows whether they are its cause or its effect. The practice of taking a hypallage for a discovery, a simile for a demonstration, a vomit of words for a torrent of capital information, and oneself for an oracle — that is our infirmity from birth.
— Paul Valery, Ibid., pp. 76-77.

....But it followed that  the cult and contemplation of the principles that govern every work of art made it more and more difficult for him to exercise his own art, while giving him fewer and fewer occasions for employing his prodigious resources of execution. In truth we need two lives: one of total preparation, the other of total development.
— Paul Valery, from "I Would Sometimes Say to Mallarmé...", Ibid.,
p. 292.

....This dazzling line by Leonardo: "Le soleil jamais n'a vu d'ombre" (The sun has never seen shade). Nothing as good as that (the naïveté) in Pascal.
                                                                       23:175
— Paul Valery, Ibid., p. 349.

Alas! what can they teach, and not mislead;
Ignorant of themselves, of God much more,
And how the world began, and how man fell
Degraded by himself, on grace depending?
Much of the Soul they talk, but all awry,
And in themselves seek virtue, and to themselves
All glory arrogate, to God give none,
Rather accuse him under usual names,
Fortune and Fate, as one regardless quite
Of mortal things. Who therefore seeks in these
True wisdom, finds her not, or by delusion
Far worse, her false resemblance only meets,
An empty cloud. However, many books
Wise men have said are wearisome; who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior
(And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek)
Uncertain and unsettl'd still remains,
Deep verst in books and shallow in himself.
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys,
And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge;
As Children gathering pebbles on the shore.
....
— John Milton, from Paradise Regained, Book IV, ll. 309-330.

Words vs. Meaning

....But when I look into myself to the bottom, I must agree with what is said by so many distinguished persons. It is true, my friend, I am composed of an unfortunate mind which is never quite sure that it has understood what it has understood without realizing it. I find it very hard to distinguish what is clear without reflection from what is positively obscure.... This weakness is no doubt the source of my darkness. I am suspicious of all words, for even the slightest reflection shows the absurdity of trusting them. I have come to the point, alas, of comparing words by which we traverse so lightly the space of a thought to thin planks thrown across an abyss, which allow crossing but no stopping. A man in swift movement uses them safely, but let him pause for the slightest moment, and that bit of time breaks them down and all together fall into the abyss. The man who goes quickly has learned he must not dwell; it would soon be found that the clearest text is a tisssue of obscure terms.
— Paul Valery, Monsieur Teste, p. 55.

"....Simply remember that between men there are two relations only: logic or war. Always demand proof, proof is the elementary courtesy that is anyone's due. If that is withheld, remember that you are being attacked and that every means will be played to make you obey. You will be trapped by the pleasures or the charm of no matter what, you will be impassioned by someone else's passion; you will be made to think what you have neither thought about nor understood; you will be touched, delighted, dazzled; you will draw conclusions from premises that someone else has fabricated for you, and you will discover, with a certain genius, ... all that you know by heart."
     "The most difficult thing is to see what is," I sighed.
     "Yes," said Monsieur Teste, "that is, not to be confused by words. You must feel that you can arrange them as you will, and for every combination that can be put together there is not necessarily some corresponding thing...."
— Paul Valery, Ibid., p. 65.

Teste in chains.

     I know so many things, surmise so many connections, that I no longer talk. Nor even think, knowing already as the idea dawns that a whole system is coming into play, that enormous labor is required, that I shall not go as far as I know I ought to go. This tires me at the start. I won't have the courage to look into this flash, in detail — it illuminates many years in a second.
— Paul Valery, Ibid., p. 90.

Teste : Notebook.
     To surmount:
     Undo all the traps which all acquired ideas are...
     Words remain ... forms remain ... learn to take them for what they are — i.e., one's potential, drawn out of oneself by unknowns. This is the essence of language. Nothing more. But nothing less. Language is good, it does its job when it's used and forgotten by circumstance and need, like a tool — pliers or a drill — or a kind of currency — sometimes a weapon.
     But never as an oracle, as if it knew more than we, good for philosophers who believe in knowledge, who question the questioner, and make him answer....
     Undo all the snares of the mind's sensibility : the idols of originality and envy.
                                                                         28:233
— Paul Valery, Ibid., p. 144.

     No one could accept himself as he is if some miraculous circumstance offered him a full knowledge of what he was and what he is. Man recognizes HIMSELF only ... in ANOTHER!
                                                                        28:823
— Paul Valery, Ibid., p. 148.

Re-creational Magic

     From this world to the next; from utility to creation. Instead of words as market-place utilities, brand names to advertise established items, the creative words which make it new. Words made new again, as on the first day of creation; eternity's sunrise. Words used not to interpret the world but to change it; not to advertise this world but to find another. To pass from this world to the next; from ordinary to extraordinary language.
— Norman O. Brown, Love's Body, p. 234.

     We stumble on the truth. The truth always scandalous, a stumbling block; truth is where we stumble or fall down; in the rough ground, the anomalies; not in the explanations. Search the scripture till you find a stumbling block; look for the slips of the tongue; the lapsus linguae, the fortunate falls. The truth is in the error. We slip out from under the reality-principle, into the truth; when the control breaks down. By great good fortune, gratis, by grace; and not by our own work or will.
— Norman O. Brown, Ibid., p. 243-244.

     Meaning is not in things but in between; in the iridescence, the interplay; in interconnections; at the intersections, at the crossroads. Meaning is transitional as it is transitory; in the puns or bridges, the correspondence.
— Norman O. Brown, Ibid., p. 247.

     Psychoanalysis began as a further advance of civilized (scientific) objectivity; to expose remnants of primitive participation, to eliminate them; studying the world of dreams, of primitive magic, of madness, but not participating in dreams or magic, or madness. But the outcome of psychoanalysis is the discovery that magic and madness are everywhere, and dreams is what we are made of. The goal cannot be the elimination of magical thinking; or madness; the goal can only be conscious magic, or conscious madness; conscious mastery of these fires. And dreaming while awake.
— Norman O. Brown, Ibid., p. 254.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any — lifted from the no
of all nothing — human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
— E. E. Cummings, 100 Selected Poems, Grove Press, #95, p. 114.

Focus Pocus

....One need not espouse pragmatism in order to appreciate Kant's saying: 'To yield to every whim of curiosity, and to allow our passion for inquiry to be restrained by nothing but the limits of our ability, this shows an eagerness of mind not unbecoming to scholarship. But it is wisdom that has the merit of selecting, from among the innumerable problems which present themselves, those whose solution is important to mankind.' [Emanuel Kant, Dreams of a Ghost Seer, II, chapter III.]
— Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, p. 56.

....As applied to the history of human society — and it is with this that we are mainly concerned here — our argument has been formulated by H. A. L. Fisher in these words: 'Men ... have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern ... I can see only one emergency following upon another ..., only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations...'
[w/ footnote #2, p. 110: ....Fisher, who says in the continuation of the passage quoted: '...The fact of progress is written plain and large on the page of history; but progress is not a law of nature. The ground gained by one generation may be lost by the next.' [Fisher, History of Europe, vol. I, p. vii.]
— Karl Popper, Ibid., p. 109 w/ footnote p. 110.

     Historicism mistakes these interpretations for theories. This is one of its cardinal errors. It is possible, for example, to interpret 'history' as the history of class struggle, or of the struggle of races for supremacy, or as the history of religious ideas, or as the history of the struggle between the 'open' and the 'closed' society, or as the history of scientific and industrial progress. All of these are more or less interesting points of view, and as such perfectly unobjectionable. But historicists do not present them as such; they do not see that there is necessarily a plurality of interpretations which are fundamentally on the same level of both, suggestiveness and arbitrariness (even though some of them may be distinguished by their fertility — a point of some importance). Instead they present them as doctrines or theories asserting that 'all history is the history of class struggle', etc. And if they actually find their point of view is fertile and that many facts can be ordered and interpreted in its light, then they mistake this for a confirmation, or even for a proof, of their doctrine.
     On the other hand, the classical historians who rightly oppose this procedure are liable to fall into a different error. Aiming at objectivity, they feel bound to avoid any relative point of view, but since this is impossible they usually adopt points of view without being aware of them. This must defeat their efforts to be objective, for one cannot possibly be critical of one's own point of view, and conscious of its limitations, without being aware of it.
     The way out of this dilemma, of course, is to be clear about the necessity of adopting a point of view; to state this point of view plainly, and always to remain conscious that it is one among many, and that even if it should amount to a theory, it may not be testable.
— Karl Popper, Ibid., pp. 151-152.

     Reality has become a literal chaos. It has escaped our definitions. I'm reading from my notes.
     If reality exists, it doesn't do so a priori, but only to be put together. Thus one might say reality is an actuality, of which literature is part, an important part, but one among many.
     Live as much in the moment as possible, to redress a balance. In the fifties, and for fifty years, we were paralyzed by the past: by history, by psychoanalysis, by myth, by our cultural heritage, by a kind of cultural neurosis — in the sense that neurosis can be considered the preservation of a traumatic past as the source of behavior no longer appropriate to the present. Our old systems of thought and behavior further obscured an almost incomprehensible present — like Bergson's theory of comedy. We must divest ourselves of all mechanical response, get rid of our habits. Quote from Wallace Stevens: "A violent order is disorder."
     We improvise our novels as we improvise our lives.
     The  didactic job of the modern novel is to teach people to invent themselves and their world — Robbe-Grillet.
     In fiction as in life, form arises as an idiosyncrasy, like an original work of art that can never be repeated. In this sense we must all become like artists, but artists of a risky art whose only convention is freedom.
— Ronald Sukenick, The Death of the Novel and Other Stories, p. 47.

Only, Not Alone

X.) Fictions alone cannot change the world, though they are forever infiltrating, if not liberating, the imaginations of those who do and might; and though artists are clearly indebted to popular art, in the end the mass media (and much else) remain far more influenced by great art.
— Richard Kostelanetz, from "Twenty-Five Fictional Hypotheses," in Surfiction, Raymond Federman (ed.), p. 284.

XIII.) The use of imposed constraints, as in traditional poetic forms, forces the creative imagination to resist the easy way, if not cliches as well, and encourages problem-solving and other processes of playfulness, in addition to challenging the reader to discern sense and significance in what at first seems inscrutable.
— Richard Kostelanetz, Ibid., p. 285.

     It is easy, of course, to be skeptical of a belief that is no longer fashionable; but it is not easy at all to be skeptical of one that is. This is why contemporary intellectuals find it so easy to scoff at religion and witchcraft and find it so difficult to scoff at medicine and mental illness. In the Middle Ages, the suggestion to regard heresy as just another way of life would have seemed absurd, or worse. Today the suggestion to regard mental illness as just another way of life seems equally absurd, or worse.
— Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness, p. 198.

     The principal alternative to this dilemma lies, as I have suggested before, in abolishing the categories of ill and healthy behavior, and the prerequisites of mental sickness for so-called psychotherapy. This implies candid recognition that we "treat" people by psychoanalysis or psychotherapy not because they are sick but, first, because they desire this type of assistance; second, because they have problems in living for which they seek mastery through understanding of the kinds of games which they, and those around them, have been in the habit of playing; and third, because, as psychotherapists, we wanted and are able to participate in their "education," this being our professional role.
— Thomas Szasz, Ibid., p. 248.

     — Look here, Cranly — he said. — You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile and cunning. —
— James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, p. 291.

     — You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too. —
— James Joyce, Ibid., p. 292.

April 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
April 27. Old father, old artificer stand me now and ever in good stead.
— James Joyce, Ibid., p. 299.