Self-love is the greatest of all flatterers.
— La Rochefoucauld , in The Last Word, Louis Kronenberger, p. 18.
Flattery is counterfeit money which, but for vanity, would have no cidculation.
— La Rochefoucauld, in The Last Word, Louis Kronenberger, p. 18.
Weakness, not vice, is virtue's worst enemy.
— La Rochefoucauld, in The Last Word, Louis Kronenberger, p. 20.
By the time men are fit for company, they see the objections to it.
— The Marquis of Halifax (George Savile), in The Last Word, Louis Kronenberger, p. 39.
One must do more, think less, and not watch oneself live.
— Chamfort (Sebastien Roch Nicolas de Chamfort), in The Last Word, Louis Kronenberger, p. 76.
To totally block a given effect requires a force equal to that which it cost. To send it in a different direction, a trifle will often suffice.
— Lichtenberg, in The Last Word, Louis Kronenberger, p. 92.
Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.
....
There is strong shadow where there is much light.
....
Viewed from the summit of reason, all life looks like a malignant disease and the world like a madhouse.
....
There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in The Last Word, Louis Kronenberger, p. 110-112.
There is a pleasure in madness, which none but madmen know.
....
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.
— Hazlitt, in The Last Word, Louis Kronenberger, p. 130-131.
Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal.
....
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
....
A man of genius is priveleged only as far as he is a genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.
....
It is a luxury to be understood
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, in The Last Word, Louis Kronenberger, p. 148-149.
Logic and consistency are luxuries for the gods and the lower animals.
....
A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.
— Samuel Butler, in The Last Word, Louis Kronenberger, p. 165-166.
...."Romanticism," Nietzsche himself remarked, "is only an emergency exit from ill-functioning reality"; and .... "One must pay dearly for immorality: one needs must several times die while still alive." .... "Women understand children better than men do, but men are more childlike than women." .... "A married philosopher belongs to comedy."
— Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Last Word, Louis Kronenberger, p. 181.
The thought of suicide is a great consolation; with the help of it one has got through many a bad night.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Last Word, Louis Kronenberger, p. 184.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Friday, July 9, 2010
Practically Cynical
Lucidity is the only vice which makes us free — free in a desert.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 12.
If disgust for the world conferred sanctity of itself, I fail to see how I could avoid canonization.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 25
He who hates himself is not humble.
For a long time I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madness, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 26.
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
________________
When Mara, the Tempter, tries to supplant the Buddha, the latter says, among other things: "By what right do you claim to rule over men and over the universe? Have you suffered for knowledge?
This is the crucial, perhaps the sole question we should ask ourselves when we scrutinize anything, especially a thinker. There is never too great a distinction made between those who have paid for the tiniest step toward knowledge and those, incomparably more numerous, who have received a convenient, indifferent knowledge, a knowledge without ordeals.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 27.
Explosive force of any mortification. Every vanquished desire affords us power. We have the more hold over this world the further we withdraw from it, the less we adhere to it. Renunciation confers an infinite power.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 33.
All these poems where it is merely the Poem that is in question — a whole poetry with no other substance than itself! What would we say of a prayer whose object was religion?
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 35.
Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 37.
A work is finished when we can no longer improve it, though we know it to be inadequate and incomplete. We are so overtaxed by it that we no longer have the power to add a single comma, however indispensable. What determines the degree to which a work is done is not a requirement of art or of truth, it is exhaustion and, even more, disgust.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 50.
Whereas any sentence one has to write requires a pretense of invention, it takes little enough attention to enter into a text, even a difficult one. To scribble a postcard comes closer to a creative activity than to read The Phenomenology of Mind.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 51.
What a bore, someone who doesn't deign to make an impression. Vain people are almost always annoying, but they make an effort, they take the trouble: they are bores who don't want to be bores, and we are grateful to them for that: we end by enduring them, even by seeking them out. On the other hand, we turn livid with fury in the presence of someone who pays no attention whatever to the effect he makes. What are we to say to him, and what are we to expect from him? Either keep some vestiges of the monkey, or else stay home.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 76.
A free man is one who has discerned the insanity of all points of view; a liberated man is one who has drawn the consequences of such discernment.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 91.
Painful or wounding questions asked by the uncouth distress and anger us, and may have the same effect as certain techniques of Oriental meditation. Who knows if a dense, aggressive stupidity might not provoke illumination? It is certainly worth as much as a rap on the hand with a stick.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 111.
The unusual is not a criterion. Paganini is more surprising and more unpredictable than Bach.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 118.
What makes destruction suspect is its facility: anyone who comes along can excel in it. But if to destroy is easy, to destroy oneself is less so. Superiority of the outcast over the agitator or the anarchist.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 138.
"....the feeling of being everything and the evidence of being nothing." I happened across this phrase in my youth, and was overwhelmed by it.
Everything I felt in those days, and everything I would feel from then on, was summed up in this extraordinary banal formula, the synthesis of expansion and failure, ecstasy and impasse. Most often it is not in a paradox but in a truism that a revelation appears.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 172.
Man has said what he had to say. He should rest now. But refuses, and though he has entered into his "survivor" phase, he figits as if he were on the threshold of an astonishing career.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 176.
That I can still desire proves that I lack an exact perception of reality, that I am distracted, that I am a thousand miles from the Truth. "Man," we read in the Dhammapada, "is prey to desire only because he does not see things as they are."
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 188.
To shake people up, to wake them from their sleep, while knowing you are committing a crime and that it would be a thousand times better to leave them alone, since when they wake, too, you have nothing to offer them....
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 202.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 12.
If disgust for the world conferred sanctity of itself, I fail to see how I could avoid canonization.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 25
He who hates himself is not humble.
For a long time I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madness, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 26.
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
________________
When Mara, the Tempter, tries to supplant the Buddha, the latter says, among other things: "By what right do you claim to rule over men and over the universe? Have you suffered for knowledge?
This is the crucial, perhaps the sole question we should ask ourselves when we scrutinize anything, especially a thinker. There is never too great a distinction made between those who have paid for the tiniest step toward knowledge and those, incomparably more numerous, who have received a convenient, indifferent knowledge, a knowledge without ordeals.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 27.
Explosive force of any mortification. Every vanquished desire affords us power. We have the more hold over this world the further we withdraw from it, the less we adhere to it. Renunciation confers an infinite power.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 33.
All these poems where it is merely the Poem that is in question — a whole poetry with no other substance than itself! What would we say of a prayer whose object was religion?
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 35.
Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 37.
A work is finished when we can no longer improve it, though we know it to be inadequate and incomplete. We are so overtaxed by it that we no longer have the power to add a single comma, however indispensable. What determines the degree to which a work is done is not a requirement of art or of truth, it is exhaustion and, even more, disgust.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 50.
Whereas any sentence one has to write requires a pretense of invention, it takes little enough attention to enter into a text, even a difficult one. To scribble a postcard comes closer to a creative activity than to read The Phenomenology of Mind.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 51.
What a bore, someone who doesn't deign to make an impression. Vain people are almost always annoying, but they make an effort, they take the trouble: they are bores who don't want to be bores, and we are grateful to them for that: we end by enduring them, even by seeking them out. On the other hand, we turn livid with fury in the presence of someone who pays no attention whatever to the effect he makes. What are we to say to him, and what are we to expect from him? Either keep some vestiges of the monkey, or else stay home.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 76.
A free man is one who has discerned the insanity of all points of view; a liberated man is one who has drawn the consequences of such discernment.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 91.
Painful or wounding questions asked by the uncouth distress and anger us, and may have the same effect as certain techniques of Oriental meditation. Who knows if a dense, aggressive stupidity might not provoke illumination? It is certainly worth as much as a rap on the hand with a stick.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 111.
The unusual is not a criterion. Paganini is more surprising and more unpredictable than Bach.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 118.
What makes destruction suspect is its facility: anyone who comes along can excel in it. But if to destroy is easy, to destroy oneself is less so. Superiority of the outcast over the agitator or the anarchist.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 138.
"....the feeling of being everything and the evidence of being nothing." I happened across this phrase in my youth, and was overwhelmed by it.
Everything I felt in those days, and everything I would feel from then on, was summed up in this extraordinary banal formula, the synthesis of expansion and failure, ecstasy and impasse. Most often it is not in a paradox but in a truism that a revelation appears.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 172.
Man has said what he had to say. He should rest now. But refuses, and though he has entered into his "survivor" phase, he figits as if he were on the threshold of an astonishing career.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 176.
That I can still desire proves that I lack an exact perception of reality, that I am distracted, that I am a thousand miles from the Truth. "Man," we read in the Dhammapada, "is prey to desire only because he does not see things as they are."
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 188.
To shake people up, to wake them from their sleep, while knowing you are committing a crime and that it would be a thousand times better to leave them alone, since when they wake, too, you have nothing to offer them....
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 202.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Take a Hard Write
The lotus is a very unusual flower, large and beautiful, but grows in very muddy water. When it blossoms there is no dirt, no mud ... only beautiful flowers ... so fragrant! Dirt doesn't cling to the lotus. When we were small we used to throw mud on the flowers just to watch it roll off. Dirty water rolls off in beads, as if the petals are made of wax. We can learn from this.
We go through muddy water in our life. This should not stop us from blossoming. We can have turmoil, conflict, disappointment, whatever dark muddy things, but still we can blossom. A Chinese proverb says, "He who has tasted the bitterest of bitterness can be a man above men." From this we see that our turmoil and conflict and even our pain have their value. They add to our growth, develop our character, and teach us compassion.
— Lily Siou, in Diary of the Way, Ira Lerner, p. 89.
....Why does one not like things if there are other people about? Why cannot one make one's books live except in the night, after hours of straining? and you know they have to be your own books too, and you have to read them more than once. I think they take in something of your personality, and your environment also — you know a second hand book sometimes is so much more flesh and blood than a new one — and it is almost terrible to think that your ideas, yourself in your books, may be giving life to generations of readers after you are forgotten. It is that specially which makes one need good books: books that will be worthy of what you are going to put into them. What would you think of a great sculptor who flung away his gifts on modeling clay or sand? Imagination should be put into the most precious caskets, and that is why one can only live in the future or the past, in Utopia or the Wood beyond the World. Father won't know all this — but if you get the right book at the right time you taste joys — not only bodily, physical, but spiritual also, which pass one out above and beyond one's miserable self, as it were through a huge air, following the light of another man's thought. And you can never be quite the old self again. You have forgotten a little bit: or rather pushed it out with a little of the inspiration of what is immortal in someone who has gone before you.
— T. E. Lawrence, in Letters to Mother, Charles Van Doren (ed.), pp. 66-67.
Ah, dear Mother, is any time left us in which to be happy? I dare not hope so. To be forty, under a conceil judiciaire [a financial trustee], with immense debts, and finally, worse than all, my will gone; ruined! Who can say if the intelligence itself be not dried up? I know nothing. I cannot know anything, since I have lost even the ability to make an effort.
Before all, I want to say something which I do not say often enough to you, and which you no doubt do not know, most of all if you judge me by appearances; it is that my love for you grows without ceasing. I am ashamed to confess that that love does not give me strength enough to raise myself. I look at the past years, the awful years, and spend my time reflecting on the brevity of life; nothing more! and my will rusts more and more. If ever man knew, in youth, bile and hypochondria, that man is myself. Yet I long to live, and would fain taste a little security, glory, and contentment with myself. Some terrible thing says to me: Never, and again something else says, try.
With so many plans and projects, accumulated in the two or three portfolios I dare no longer open, what am I likely to achieve? Perhaps nothing, it may be.
— Charles Baudelaire, Feb. of Mar. 1861, in Ibid., p. 186.
Do you think that deeds of wrong fly up on wings to heaven, and then someone writes them on tablets of Zeus, who looks upon the record and gives judgment upon men? Why, the whole heaven would not suffice for Zeus to write men's sins thereon, nor Zeus himself to consider them and send a punishment for each.. No; Justice is here, close at hand, if you will but see it.
— Euripides, Melanippe, frag. 506, in Greek Religious Thought, F. M. Cornford, p. 154.
We are all dullards in divinity; we know nothing.
— Anaxandrides, Canephorus, in Ibid., p. 248.
We go through muddy water in our life. This should not stop us from blossoming. We can have turmoil, conflict, disappointment, whatever dark muddy things, but still we can blossom. A Chinese proverb says, "He who has tasted the bitterest of bitterness can be a man above men." From this we see that our turmoil and conflict and even our pain have their value. They add to our growth, develop our character, and teach us compassion.
— Lily Siou, in Diary of the Way, Ira Lerner, p. 89.
....Why does one not like things if there are other people about? Why cannot one make one's books live except in the night, after hours of straining? and you know they have to be your own books too, and you have to read them more than once. I think they take in something of your personality, and your environment also — you know a second hand book sometimes is so much more flesh and blood than a new one — and it is almost terrible to think that your ideas, yourself in your books, may be giving life to generations of readers after you are forgotten. It is that specially which makes one need good books: books that will be worthy of what you are going to put into them. What would you think of a great sculptor who flung away his gifts on modeling clay or sand? Imagination should be put into the most precious caskets, and that is why one can only live in the future or the past, in Utopia or the Wood beyond the World. Father won't know all this — but if you get the right book at the right time you taste joys — not only bodily, physical, but spiritual also, which pass one out above and beyond one's miserable self, as it were through a huge air, following the light of another man's thought. And you can never be quite the old self again. You have forgotten a little bit: or rather pushed it out with a little of the inspiration of what is immortal in someone who has gone before you.
— T. E. Lawrence, in Letters to Mother, Charles Van Doren (ed.), pp. 66-67.
Ah, dear Mother, is any time left us in which to be happy? I dare not hope so. To be forty, under a conceil judiciaire [a financial trustee], with immense debts, and finally, worse than all, my will gone; ruined! Who can say if the intelligence itself be not dried up? I know nothing. I cannot know anything, since I have lost even the ability to make an effort.
Before all, I want to say something which I do not say often enough to you, and which you no doubt do not know, most of all if you judge me by appearances; it is that my love for you grows without ceasing. I am ashamed to confess that that love does not give me strength enough to raise myself. I look at the past years, the awful years, and spend my time reflecting on the brevity of life; nothing more! and my will rusts more and more. If ever man knew, in youth, bile and hypochondria, that man is myself. Yet I long to live, and would fain taste a little security, glory, and contentment with myself. Some terrible thing says to me: Never, and again something else says, try.
With so many plans and projects, accumulated in the two or three portfolios I dare no longer open, what am I likely to achieve? Perhaps nothing, it may be.
— Charles Baudelaire, Feb. of Mar. 1861, in Ibid., p. 186.
Do you think that deeds of wrong fly up on wings to heaven, and then someone writes them on tablets of Zeus, who looks upon the record and gives judgment upon men? Why, the whole heaven would not suffice for Zeus to write men's sins thereon, nor Zeus himself to consider them and send a punishment for each.. No; Justice is here, close at hand, if you will but see it.
— Euripides, Melanippe, frag. 506, in Greek Religious Thought, F. M. Cornford, p. 154.
We are all dullards in divinity; we know nothing.
— Anaxandrides, Canephorus, in Ibid., p. 248.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Hear, Hear!
"Formerly, among the Persians, dinner time was at a set hour only for kings: as for all others, their appetite and their belly was their clock; when that chimed, they thought it time to go to dinner. So we find in Plautus a certain parasite making a heavy do, and sadly railing at the inventors of hour-glasses and dials, as being unnecessary things, there being no clock more regular than the belly.
"Diogenes, being asked at what times a man ought to eat, answered, 'The rich when he is hungry, the poor when he has anything to eat.' Physicians more properly say, that the canonical hours are,
"'To rise at five, to dine at nine,
To sup at five, to sleep at nine.'"
— Rabelais
Some Morals from Aesop's Fables:
Some begrudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves.
Appearances often are deceiving.
Honesty is the best policy.
Flatterers are not to be trusted,
Don't bite the hand that feeds you!
Beware of the promises of a desperate man!
There is no arguing a coward into courage.
Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.
It is thrifty to prepare today for the wants of tomorrow.
It is one thing to propose, another to execute.
Any fool can despise what he cannot get.
It is not safe to trust the advice of a man in difficulties.
An old trick may be played once too often.
The smaller the mind the greater the conceit.
He who has many friends has no friends.
Necessity is our strongest weapon.
Lean freedom is better than fat slavery.
The greedy who want more lose all.
A needy thief steals more than one who enjoys plenty.
Liberty is too high a price to pay for revenge.
United we stand; divided we fall.
They who neglect old friends for the sake of new ones
are rightly served when they lose both.
Gratitude is a quality not limited to man.
Slow and steady wins the race.
One good turn deserves another.
Trouble comes from the direction we least expect it.
He that finds discontentment in one place is not likely to
find happiness in another.
In choosing allies look to their power as well as their
will to help you.
Too many disagreements have naught but a shadow for a basis.
One man's meat may be anothers poison.
They who voluntarily put themselves under the power of a
tyrant deserve whatever fate they receive.
As in the body, so in the state, each member in his proper
sphere must work for the common good.
Let well enough alone!
He who is once deceived is doubly cautious.
Try to please all and you end by pleasing none.
False confidence is the forerunner of misfortune.
Beware of the insincere friend!
It is better to drink second at the spring than to furnish
food for the vultures.
Familiarity breeds contempt.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
He who does a thing well does not need to boast.
Gossips are to be seen and not heard.
Even a fool is wise — when it is too late!
He laughs best that laughs last.
Many go out for wool and come home shorn.
A bird in the cage is worth two on a branch.
To be satisfied with one's lot is better than to desire
something which one is not fitted to receive.
The ignorant despise what is precious only because they
cannot understand it.
He who prays hard against his neighbor brings a
curse upon himself.
A man may smile, yet be a villian.
Men often mistake notoriety for fame.
The child is father to the man.
There is always someone worse off than yourself.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
The best liars often get caught in their own lies.
A bad temper carries with it its own punishment.
The true value of money is not in its possession but in its use.
If you must revile your neighbors, make certain first
that he cannot reach you.
It is safer to know one's guest before offering him hospitality.
Treachery is the basest crime of all.
He who cries loudest is often the least hurt.
It is time to criticize the works of others when you have
done some good thing yourself.
Even the wildest can be tamed by love.
A level path is pleasing to the laden beast.
Misery loves company.
A change of scene does not change one's character.
The gods help them that help themselves.
Some men can blow hot and cold with the same breath.
If you want a task well done, then do it yourself.
Half a loaf is better than no bread.
We learn by the misfortunes of others.
Self-conceit leads to self-destruction.
Only fools fight to exhaustion while a rogue runs off with the dinner.
One good plan that works is better than a hundred doubtful ones.
Clothes may disguise a fool, but his words will give him away.
Stretch your arm no farther than your sleeve will reach.
Hypocrisy is the cloak of villainy.
Quality is more important than quantity.
He who seeks a compliment sometimes discovers the truth.
Industry sometimes pays unexpected dividends.
In union there is strength.
It requires more than wings to be an eagle.
Too often we despise the very things that are most useful to us.
Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
Those who take temporary advantage of their neighbors
difficulties may live to repent of their insolence.
Persuasion is better than force.
Liars are not believed even when they tell the truth.
Uninvited guests are often most welcome when they are gone.
Beware of a friend with an ulterior motive.
Know thy place and keep it.
No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
Do boldly what you do at all.
Spare the rod and spoil the child.
The laws of hospitality are not to be broken with impunity.
Those who live on expectations are sure to be disappointed.
A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.
Avoid too powerful neighbors.
There is no profit in blaming you foolish mistakes
on foolish advisors.
You are judjed by the company you keep.
We are but sorry witnesses in our own cause.
In dangerous times wise men say nothing.
There is no eye like the master's.
There is as much malice in a wink as in a word.
Many may share in the labors but not in the spoils.
Don't believe all that you hear.
Every truth has two sides.
Enemies' promises are made to be broken.
Don't trust a friend who is liable to desert you
when trouble comes.
You can't please everyone.
Vanity carries its own punishment.
They who enter by the back stairs may expect to be
shown out at the window.
Do not denounce the genuine, only to applaud an imitation.
Grasp at the shadow and lose the substance.
He who compasses the destruction of his neighbor often
is caught in his own snare.
It is better to bend than to break.
How sorry we would be if many of our wishes were granted.
Unless the seed of evil is destroyed it will grow up to destroy us.
He who plays a trick must be prepared to take a joke.
He who tries to outsmart his neighbor winds up by
outsmarting himself.
The humble are secure from many dangers to which the
proud are subject.
Happiness is not to be found in borrowed finery.
Example is the best precept.
Magnificent promises often end in paltry performance.
To do the right thing at the right season is a great art.
Yield to the caprices of all and you soon will have
nothing to yield at all.
Too much cunning overreaches itself.
Those who pretend to be what they are not, sooner or later,
find themselves in deep water.
It is too late to whet the sword when the trumpet sounds.
They are foolish who give their enemy the means of
destroying them.
Don't covet more than you can carry.
Braggarts usually get themselves laughed at in the end.
The best laid-out scheme often has a kickback.
Think twice before you leap.
He who will not allow his friend to share the prize must
not expect him to share the danger.
Pride goeth before a fall.
He winds up friendless who plays both sides against the middle.
No gratitude is to be expected from the wicked.
A bribe in hand betrays mischief at heart.
He who incites strife is worse than he who takes part in it.
It is difficult to see beyond one's own nose.
Trust not in him that seems a saint.
When our neighbor's house is on fire, it is time
to look at our own.
Physician, heal thyself!
Thy pride is but the prologue of thy shame.
A willful beast must go his own way.
What is bred in the bone will never be
absent in the flesh.
Men are too apt to condemn in others the very things
they do themselves.
They also serve who only stand and wait.
Figures don't lie, but they won't make a hen lay.
Throw no stones into the well that
quenched your thirst.
There is a time and place for everything.
— Morals from Aesop's Fables
"Diogenes, being asked at what times a man ought to eat, answered, 'The rich when he is hungry, the poor when he has anything to eat.' Physicians more properly say, that the canonical hours are,
"'To rise at five, to dine at nine,
To sup at five, to sleep at nine.'"
— Rabelais
Some Morals from Aesop's Fables:
Some begrudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves.
Appearances often are deceiving.
Honesty is the best policy.
Flatterers are not to be trusted,
Don't bite the hand that feeds you!
Beware of the promises of a desperate man!
There is no arguing a coward into courage.
Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.
It is thrifty to prepare today for the wants of tomorrow.
It is one thing to propose, another to execute.
Any fool can despise what he cannot get.
It is not safe to trust the advice of a man in difficulties.
An old trick may be played once too often.
The smaller the mind the greater the conceit.
He who has many friends has no friends.
Necessity is our strongest weapon.
Lean freedom is better than fat slavery.
The greedy who want more lose all.
A needy thief steals more than one who enjoys plenty.
Liberty is too high a price to pay for revenge.
United we stand; divided we fall.
They who neglect old friends for the sake of new ones
are rightly served when they lose both.
Gratitude is a quality not limited to man.
Slow and steady wins the race.
One good turn deserves another.
Trouble comes from the direction we least expect it.
He that finds discontentment in one place is not likely to
find happiness in another.
In choosing allies look to their power as well as their
will to help you.
Too many disagreements have naught but a shadow for a basis.
One man's meat may be anothers poison.
They who voluntarily put themselves under the power of a
tyrant deserve whatever fate they receive.
As in the body, so in the state, each member in his proper
sphere must work for the common good.
Let well enough alone!
He who is once deceived is doubly cautious.
Try to please all and you end by pleasing none.
False confidence is the forerunner of misfortune.
Beware of the insincere friend!
It is better to drink second at the spring than to furnish
food for the vultures.
Familiarity breeds contempt.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
He who does a thing well does not need to boast.
Gossips are to be seen and not heard.
Even a fool is wise — when it is too late!
He laughs best that laughs last.
Many go out for wool and come home shorn.
A bird in the cage is worth two on a branch.
To be satisfied with one's lot is better than to desire
something which one is not fitted to receive.
The ignorant despise what is precious only because they
cannot understand it.
He who prays hard against his neighbor brings a
curse upon himself.
A man may smile, yet be a villian.
Men often mistake notoriety for fame.
The child is father to the man.
There is always someone worse off than yourself.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
The best liars often get caught in their own lies.
A bad temper carries with it its own punishment.
The true value of money is not in its possession but in its use.
If you must revile your neighbors, make certain first
that he cannot reach you.
It is safer to know one's guest before offering him hospitality.
Treachery is the basest crime of all.
He who cries loudest is often the least hurt.
It is time to criticize the works of others when you have
done some good thing yourself.
Even the wildest can be tamed by love.
A level path is pleasing to the laden beast.
Misery loves company.
A change of scene does not change one's character.
The gods help them that help themselves.
Some men can blow hot and cold with the same breath.
If you want a task well done, then do it yourself.
Half a loaf is better than no bread.
We learn by the misfortunes of others.
Self-conceit leads to self-destruction.
Only fools fight to exhaustion while a rogue runs off with the dinner.
One good plan that works is better than a hundred doubtful ones.
Clothes may disguise a fool, but his words will give him away.
Stretch your arm no farther than your sleeve will reach.
Hypocrisy is the cloak of villainy.
Quality is more important than quantity.
He who seeks a compliment sometimes discovers the truth.
Industry sometimes pays unexpected dividends.
In union there is strength.
It requires more than wings to be an eagle.
Too often we despise the very things that are most useful to us.
Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
Those who take temporary advantage of their neighbors
difficulties may live to repent of their insolence.
Persuasion is better than force.
Liars are not believed even when they tell the truth.
Uninvited guests are often most welcome when they are gone.
Beware of a friend with an ulterior motive.
Know thy place and keep it.
No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
Do boldly what you do at all.
Spare the rod and spoil the child.
The laws of hospitality are not to be broken with impunity.
Those who live on expectations are sure to be disappointed.
A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.
Avoid too powerful neighbors.
There is no profit in blaming you foolish mistakes
on foolish advisors.
You are judjed by the company you keep.
We are but sorry witnesses in our own cause.
In dangerous times wise men say nothing.
There is no eye like the master's.
There is as much malice in a wink as in a word.
Many may share in the labors but not in the spoils.
Don't believe all that you hear.
Every truth has two sides.
Enemies' promises are made to be broken.
Don't trust a friend who is liable to desert you
when trouble comes.
You can't please everyone.
Vanity carries its own punishment.
They who enter by the back stairs may expect to be
shown out at the window.
Do not denounce the genuine, only to applaud an imitation.
Grasp at the shadow and lose the substance.
He who compasses the destruction of his neighbor often
is caught in his own snare.
It is better to bend than to break.
How sorry we would be if many of our wishes were granted.
Unless the seed of evil is destroyed it will grow up to destroy us.
He who plays a trick must be prepared to take a joke.
He who tries to outsmart his neighbor winds up by
outsmarting himself.
The humble are secure from many dangers to which the
proud are subject.
Happiness is not to be found in borrowed finery.
Example is the best precept.
Magnificent promises often end in paltry performance.
To do the right thing at the right season is a great art.
Yield to the caprices of all and you soon will have
nothing to yield at all.
Too much cunning overreaches itself.
Those who pretend to be what they are not, sooner or later,
find themselves in deep water.
It is too late to whet the sword when the trumpet sounds.
They are foolish who give their enemy the means of
destroying them.
Don't covet more than you can carry.
Braggarts usually get themselves laughed at in the end.
The best laid-out scheme often has a kickback.
Think twice before you leap.
He who will not allow his friend to share the prize must
not expect him to share the danger.
Pride goeth before a fall.
He winds up friendless who plays both sides against the middle.
No gratitude is to be expected from the wicked.
A bribe in hand betrays mischief at heart.
He who incites strife is worse than he who takes part in it.
It is difficult to see beyond one's own nose.
Trust not in him that seems a saint.
When our neighbor's house is on fire, it is time
to look at our own.
Physician, heal thyself!
Thy pride is but the prologue of thy shame.
A willful beast must go his own way.
What is bred in the bone will never be
absent in the flesh.
Men are too apt to condemn in others the very things
they do themselves.
They also serve who only stand and wait.
Figures don't lie, but they won't make a hen lay.
Throw no stones into the well that
quenched your thirst.
There is a time and place for everything.
— Morals from Aesop's Fables
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
The Quiet Explosion
"What is to give light must endure burning."
— Victor Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul
Even wordly people, rather than study many things at once without really becoming accomplished in any of them, should just do one thing well and study enough to be able to do it even in the presence of others.
How much the more is this true of the supramundane Buddha Dharma: it is a way which since beginningless past has not been cultivated or practiced; and therefore, it is now still far from us. Our natures too are dull. In this exalted and free-reaching Buddha Dharma, if one takes on too many things at once, it will be impossible to perfect even one thing. Even concentrating solely on one thing, those whose faculties and capacity are dull by nature will have difficulty in thoroughly mastering it. Strive, students, to concentrate on one thing alone.
Eja asked, "If so, then what thing, what practice in the Buddha Dharma, should we be solely devoted to cultivating?"
Dogen replied, "Although it should be in accord with potentiality and conform to capability, that which is now transmitted and solely practiced in the school of the Patriarchs is sitting meditation. This practice takes all potentials and is a method which can be practiced by those of superior, muddling, and inferior faculties alike.
— Dogen, Record of Things Heard (Shobogenzo-zumnoki), Thomas Cleary (tr.), pp. 12-13.
"One ought not depend upon the instruction of others, the words of the Sagely Teaching, or the inner principle of witnessing the Way. Born in the morning, dead at night; the fact that people we saw yesterday do not exist today is something that meets the eye everywhere and is close about the ears. This is something one sees and hears in respect to others: as one applies it to his own bodily self and considers what is true, even if one may expect a life of seventy or eighty years, in accordance with the truth that one must eventually die, one does die.
— Dogen, Ibid., pp. 40-41.
When we look at the record of that master's deeds [Zen Master T'an Hsia T'ien Jan], when he sat it was always with dignity, when he stood it was always with proper bearing; he was always as though facing an honored guest. Even when sitting down for a little while he always crossed his legs and folded his hands; he took care of the community property as one would take care of his eyes. Whenever there were any diligent in practice, he would not fail to praise them; even a little bit of good he deemed important. His ordinary mode of action was exceptionally excellent; his record is set down as a mirror and guide for the monasteries.
— Dogen, Ibid., p. 63.
Pourvou Que Ca Doure
Life grows, life is not made; you can make
death. Neither were the sun nor the stars created,
But grew from what grew before. Without the corruption
of plants and corpses life could not grow.
Look around you at civilization decaying and sick:
look at science, corrupted
To be death's bawd; and art — painting and sculpture,
that had some dignity —
Corrupted into the show-off antics of an imbecile
child; and statecraft
Into the democratic gestures of a gin-muddled
butcher-boy: look all around you,
And praise the solitary hawk-flights of God, and
say, what a stinking of famous corpses
To fertilize the fields of the human
future ... if man's back holds.
— Robinson Jeffers, in In This Wild Water: The Suppressed Poems of Robinson Jeffers, James Shebl, pp. 73-74.
— Victor Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul
Even wordly people, rather than study many things at once without really becoming accomplished in any of them, should just do one thing well and study enough to be able to do it even in the presence of others.
How much the more is this true of the supramundane Buddha Dharma: it is a way which since beginningless past has not been cultivated or practiced; and therefore, it is now still far from us. Our natures too are dull. In this exalted and free-reaching Buddha Dharma, if one takes on too many things at once, it will be impossible to perfect even one thing. Even concentrating solely on one thing, those whose faculties and capacity are dull by nature will have difficulty in thoroughly mastering it. Strive, students, to concentrate on one thing alone.
Eja asked, "If so, then what thing, what practice in the Buddha Dharma, should we be solely devoted to cultivating?"
Dogen replied, "Although it should be in accord with potentiality and conform to capability, that which is now transmitted and solely practiced in the school of the Patriarchs is sitting meditation. This practice takes all potentials and is a method which can be practiced by those of superior, muddling, and inferior faculties alike.
— Dogen, Record of Things Heard (Shobogenzo-zumnoki), Thomas Cleary (tr.), pp. 12-13.
"One ought not depend upon the instruction of others, the words of the Sagely Teaching, or the inner principle of witnessing the Way. Born in the morning, dead at night; the fact that people we saw yesterday do not exist today is something that meets the eye everywhere and is close about the ears. This is something one sees and hears in respect to others: as one applies it to his own bodily self and considers what is true, even if one may expect a life of seventy or eighty years, in accordance with the truth that one must eventually die, one does die.
— Dogen, Ibid., pp. 40-41.
When we look at the record of that master's deeds [Zen Master T'an Hsia T'ien Jan], when he sat it was always with dignity, when he stood it was always with proper bearing; he was always as though facing an honored guest. Even when sitting down for a little while he always crossed his legs and folded his hands; he took care of the community property as one would take care of his eyes. Whenever there were any diligent in practice, he would not fail to praise them; even a little bit of good he deemed important. His ordinary mode of action was exceptionally excellent; his record is set down as a mirror and guide for the monasteries.
— Dogen, Ibid., p. 63.
Pourvou Que Ca Doure
Life grows, life is not made; you can make
death. Neither were the sun nor the stars created,
But grew from what grew before. Without the corruption
of plants and corpses life could not grow.
Look around you at civilization decaying and sick:
look at science, corrupted
To be death's bawd; and art — painting and sculpture,
that had some dignity —
Corrupted into the show-off antics of an imbecile
child; and statecraft
Into the democratic gestures of a gin-muddled
butcher-boy: look all around you,
And praise the solitary hawk-flights of God, and
say, what a stinking of famous corpses
To fertilize the fields of the human
future ... if man's back holds.
— Robinson Jeffers, in In This Wild Water: The Suppressed Poems of Robinson Jeffers, James Shebl, pp. 73-74.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Negative Affirmation
I read the other day some verse written by an eminent painter which were original not conventional. Always the soul hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmost — amd our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Self-Reliance," in Masterworks of Prose, Parkinson (ed.), p. 213.
We cannot grant that a god, or even a man, proceeds from a gymnastic climaxed by a moan. It is curious that at the end of such a long period of time, "evolution" has not managed to perfect another formula. Why should it take the trouble, moreover, when the one in force functions so well and suits everybody? Let there be no mistake: life in itself is not in question, life is as mysterious and enervating as could be wished. What is not so is the exercise in question, of an inadmissible facility, given the consequences. When we know what fate permits each man, we remain stunned by the disproportion between a moment's oblivion and the prodigious quantity of disgraces which result from it. The more one finds that the only men who have understood anything about it are those who have opted for orgy or for asceticism, the debauched or the castrated.
— E. M. Cioran, The New Gods, pp. 11-12.
....Now, as experience teaches, there exists no being more odious than our neighbor. The fact of knowing him to be so close in space keeps us from breathing and makes our days and our nights equally unfeasible. Try as we will to brood upon his ruin, he is there, hideously present. To suppress him is the impulse of every thought; when we finally determine to do so, a spasm of cowardice grips us, just before the act. Thus, we are the potential murderers of those who live beside us, and from incapacity to be the actual ones comes our torment, our bitterness, dilettantes and eunuchs of bloodshed that we are.
— E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 14.
Blessed was that age when solitaries could plumb their depths without seeming obsessed, deranged. Their imbalance was not assigned a negative coeffecient, as is the case for us. They would sacrifice ten, twenty years, a whole life, for a foreboding, for a flash of the absolute. The word "depth" has a meaning only in connection with epochs when the monk was considered as the noblest human exemplar. No one will gainsay the fact that he is in the process of disappearing. For centuries, he has done no more than survive himself. To whom would he address himself, in a universe which calls him a "parasite"? In Tibet, the last country where monks still matter, they have been ruled out. Yet it was a rare consolation to think that thousands and thousands of hermits could be meditating there, today, on the themes of the prajñaparamita. Even if it had only odious aspects, monasticism would still be worth more than any other ideal. Now more than ever, we should build monasteries ... for those who believe in nothing. Where to escape? There no longer exists a single place where we can professionally execrate this world.
— E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 38.
Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.
— E. M. Cioran, from "Strangled Thoughts," in Ibid., p. 85.
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 87.
What they ask you for is actions, proofs, works, and all you can produce are transformed tears.
E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 88
Chatter: any conversation with someone who has not suffered.
E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 101.
The mediocrity of my grief at funerals. Impossible to feel sorry for the deceased; conversely, every birth casts me into consternation. It is incomprehensible, it is insane that people can show a baby, that they can exhibit this potential disaster and rejoice over it.
E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 102.
What place do we occupy in the "universe"? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.
E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 113.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Self-Reliance," in Masterworks of Prose, Parkinson (ed.), p. 213.
We cannot grant that a god, or even a man, proceeds from a gymnastic climaxed by a moan. It is curious that at the end of such a long period of time, "evolution" has not managed to perfect another formula. Why should it take the trouble, moreover, when the one in force functions so well and suits everybody? Let there be no mistake: life in itself is not in question, life is as mysterious and enervating as could be wished. What is not so is the exercise in question, of an inadmissible facility, given the consequences. When we know what fate permits each man, we remain stunned by the disproportion between a moment's oblivion and the prodigious quantity of disgraces which result from it. The more one finds that the only men who have understood anything about it are those who have opted for orgy or for asceticism, the debauched or the castrated.
— E. M. Cioran, The New Gods, pp. 11-12.
....Now, as experience teaches, there exists no being more odious than our neighbor. The fact of knowing him to be so close in space keeps us from breathing and makes our days and our nights equally unfeasible. Try as we will to brood upon his ruin, he is there, hideously present. To suppress him is the impulse of every thought; when we finally determine to do so, a spasm of cowardice grips us, just before the act. Thus, we are the potential murderers of those who live beside us, and from incapacity to be the actual ones comes our torment, our bitterness, dilettantes and eunuchs of bloodshed that we are.
— E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 14.
Blessed was that age when solitaries could plumb their depths without seeming obsessed, deranged. Their imbalance was not assigned a negative coeffecient, as is the case for us. They would sacrifice ten, twenty years, a whole life, for a foreboding, for a flash of the absolute. The word "depth" has a meaning only in connection with epochs when the monk was considered as the noblest human exemplar. No one will gainsay the fact that he is in the process of disappearing. For centuries, he has done no more than survive himself. To whom would he address himself, in a universe which calls him a "parasite"? In Tibet, the last country where monks still matter, they have been ruled out. Yet it was a rare consolation to think that thousands and thousands of hermits could be meditating there, today, on the themes of the prajñaparamita. Even if it had only odious aspects, monasticism would still be worth more than any other ideal. Now more than ever, we should build monasteries ... for those who believe in nothing. Where to escape? There no longer exists a single place where we can professionally execrate this world.
— E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 38.
Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.
— E. M. Cioran, from "Strangled Thoughts," in Ibid., p. 85.
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 87.
What they ask you for is actions, proofs, works, and all you can produce are transformed tears.
E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 88
Chatter: any conversation with someone who has not suffered.
E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 101.
The mediocrity of my grief at funerals. Impossible to feel sorry for the deceased; conversely, every birth casts me into consternation. It is incomprehensible, it is insane that people can show a baby, that they can exhibit this potential disaster and rejoice over it.
E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 102.
What place do we occupy in the "universe"? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.
E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 113.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
An Honest Game
Sir, — I am sensible that I need even your talents to apologize for the freedom I now take; but I have a plea which, however simply urged, will, with a mind like yours, Sir, procure me pardon: I am one of those outcasts on the world who are without a friend, without employment, and without bread.
Pardon me a short preface. I had a partial father who gave me a better education than his broken fortune would have allowed; and a better than was necessary, as he could give me that only. I was designed for the profession of physics; but not having wherewithal to complete the requisite studies, the design but served to convince me of a parent's affection, and the error it had occasioned. In April last, I came to London, with three pounds, and flattered myself this would be sufficient to supply me with the common necessaries of life, till my abilities should procure me more; of these I had the highest opinion, and a poetical vanity contributed to my delusion. I knew little of the world, and had read books only: I wrote, and fancied perfection in my compositions; when I wanted bread they promised me affluence, and soothed me with dreams of reputation, whilst my appearance subjected me to contempt.
Time, reflection, and want, have shown me my mistake. I see my trifles in that which I think the true light; and whilst I deem them such, have yet the opinion that holds them superior to the common run of poetical publication....
Can you, Sir, in any degree, aid me with propriety? Will you ask any demonstrations of my veracity? I have imposed upon myself, but I have been guilty of no other imposition. Let me, if possible, interest your compassion. I know those of rank and fortune are teased with frequent petitions, and are compelled to refuse the requests even of those whom they know to be in distress; it is, therefore, with a distant hope I ventured to solicit such favour; but you will forgive me, Sir, if you do not think proper to relieve. It is impossible that sentiments like yours can proceed from any but a humane and generous heart.
I will call upon you, Sir, to-morrow, and if I have not the happiness to obtain credit with you, I must submit to my fate. My existence is a pain to myself, and every one near and dear to me are distressed in my distress.
G. Crabbe
— George Crabbe, "A Letter to Burke," 1781, in The Oxford Book of English Prose, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (sel. & ed.), pp. 508-509.
I passed some time in Poet's Corner, which occupies an end of one of the transepts or cross aisles of the abbey. The monuments are generally simple; for the lives of literary men afford no striking themes for the sculptor. Shakespeare and Addison have statues erected to their memories; but the greater part have busts, medallions, and sometimes mere inscriptions. Notwithstanding the simplicity of these memorials, I have always observed that the visitors to the abbey remained longest about them. A kinder and fonder feeling takes place of that cold curiosity or vague admiration with which they gaze on the splendid monuments of the great and heroic. They linger about these as about the tombs of friends and companions; for indeed there is something of companionship between the author and the reader. Other men are known to posterity only through the medium of history, which is continually growing faint and obscure; but the intercourse between the author and his fellow men is ever new, active, and immediate. He has lived for them more than for himself; he has sacrificed surrounding enjoyments, and shut himself up from the delights of social life, that he might the more intimately commune with distant minds and distant ages. Well may the world cherish his renown; for it has been purchased, not by deeds of violence and blood, but by the diligent dispensation of pleasure. Well may posterity be grateful to his memory; for he has left it an inheritance, not of empty names and sounding actions, but whole treasures of wisdom, bright gems of thought, and golden veins of language.
— Washington Irving, "Poet's Corner," from The Sketch Book, in Ibid., pp. 596-597.
Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or losing a game of chess.
Don't you think that we should all consider it to be a primary duty to learn at least the names and the moves of the pieces; to have a notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for all the means of giving and taking out of check? Do you not think that we should look with disapprobation amounting to scorn, upon the father who allowed his son, or the state which allowed its members, to grow up without knowing a pawn from a knight?
Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth, that the life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the world, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature.
The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmateted — without haste, but without remorse.
My metaphor will remind some of you of the famous picture in which Retzsch has depicted Satan playing chess with man for his soul. Substitute for the mocking fiend in that picture, a calm, strong angel who is playing for love, as we say, and would rather lose than win — and I should accept it as an image of human life.
— Thomas Henry Huxley, "A Game of Chess," Lay Sermons, in Ibid., pp. 822-823.
I confess that I do not see why the very existence of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity. For my part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will — as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulness, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is adapted. The deepest thing in our nature is ... this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears. As though the cracks and crannies of caverns those waters exude from the earth's bosom which then form the fountainheads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all abstract statements and scientific arguments — the veto, for example, which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith — sound to us like mere chatterings of the teeth....
These then are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. The 'scientific proof' that you are right may not be clear before the day of judgment (or some stage of being which that expression may serve to symbolize) is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and there will represent them, may then turn to the faint-hearted, who here decline to go on, with words like those with which Henry IV greeted the tardy Crillon after a great victory had been gained: 'Hang yourself, brave Crillon! we fought at Arques, and you were not there.'
— William James, The Will to Believe, in Ibid., pp. 893-894.
Pardon me a short preface. I had a partial father who gave me a better education than his broken fortune would have allowed; and a better than was necessary, as he could give me that only. I was designed for the profession of physics; but not having wherewithal to complete the requisite studies, the design but served to convince me of a parent's affection, and the error it had occasioned. In April last, I came to London, with three pounds, and flattered myself this would be sufficient to supply me with the common necessaries of life, till my abilities should procure me more; of these I had the highest opinion, and a poetical vanity contributed to my delusion. I knew little of the world, and had read books only: I wrote, and fancied perfection in my compositions; when I wanted bread they promised me affluence, and soothed me with dreams of reputation, whilst my appearance subjected me to contempt.
Time, reflection, and want, have shown me my mistake. I see my trifles in that which I think the true light; and whilst I deem them such, have yet the opinion that holds them superior to the common run of poetical publication....
Can you, Sir, in any degree, aid me with propriety? Will you ask any demonstrations of my veracity? I have imposed upon myself, but I have been guilty of no other imposition. Let me, if possible, interest your compassion. I know those of rank and fortune are teased with frequent petitions, and are compelled to refuse the requests even of those whom they know to be in distress; it is, therefore, with a distant hope I ventured to solicit such favour; but you will forgive me, Sir, if you do not think proper to relieve. It is impossible that sentiments like yours can proceed from any but a humane and generous heart.
I will call upon you, Sir, to-morrow, and if I have not the happiness to obtain credit with you, I must submit to my fate. My existence is a pain to myself, and every one near and dear to me are distressed in my distress.
G. Crabbe
— George Crabbe, "A Letter to Burke," 1781, in The Oxford Book of English Prose, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (sel. & ed.), pp. 508-509.
I passed some time in Poet's Corner, which occupies an end of one of the transepts or cross aisles of the abbey. The monuments are generally simple; for the lives of literary men afford no striking themes for the sculptor. Shakespeare and Addison have statues erected to their memories; but the greater part have busts, medallions, and sometimes mere inscriptions. Notwithstanding the simplicity of these memorials, I have always observed that the visitors to the abbey remained longest about them. A kinder and fonder feeling takes place of that cold curiosity or vague admiration with which they gaze on the splendid monuments of the great and heroic. They linger about these as about the tombs of friends and companions; for indeed there is something of companionship between the author and the reader. Other men are known to posterity only through the medium of history, which is continually growing faint and obscure; but the intercourse between the author and his fellow men is ever new, active, and immediate. He has lived for them more than for himself; he has sacrificed surrounding enjoyments, and shut himself up from the delights of social life, that he might the more intimately commune with distant minds and distant ages. Well may the world cherish his renown; for it has been purchased, not by deeds of violence and blood, but by the diligent dispensation of pleasure. Well may posterity be grateful to his memory; for he has left it an inheritance, not of empty names and sounding actions, but whole treasures of wisdom, bright gems of thought, and golden veins of language.
— Washington Irving, "Poet's Corner," from The Sketch Book, in Ibid., pp. 596-597.
Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or losing a game of chess.
Don't you think that we should all consider it to be a primary duty to learn at least the names and the moves of the pieces; to have a notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for all the means of giving and taking out of check? Do you not think that we should look with disapprobation amounting to scorn, upon the father who allowed his son, or the state which allowed its members, to grow up without knowing a pawn from a knight?
Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth, that the life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the world, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature.
The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmateted — without haste, but without remorse.
My metaphor will remind some of you of the famous picture in which Retzsch has depicted Satan playing chess with man for his soul. Substitute for the mocking fiend in that picture, a calm, strong angel who is playing for love, as we say, and would rather lose than win — and I should accept it as an image of human life.
— Thomas Henry Huxley, "A Game of Chess," Lay Sermons, in Ibid., pp. 822-823.
I confess that I do not see why the very existence of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity. For my part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will — as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulness, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is adapted. The deepest thing in our nature is ... this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears. As though the cracks and crannies of caverns those waters exude from the earth's bosom which then form the fountainheads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all abstract statements and scientific arguments — the veto, for example, which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith — sound to us like mere chatterings of the teeth....
These then are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. The 'scientific proof' that you are right may not be clear before the day of judgment (or some stage of being which that expression may serve to symbolize) is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and there will represent them, may then turn to the faint-hearted, who here decline to go on, with words like those with which Henry IV greeted the tardy Crillon after a great victory had been gained: 'Hang yourself, brave Crillon! we fought at Arques, and you were not there.'
— William James, The Will to Believe, in Ibid., pp. 893-894.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Competent Conduct
The truth of the matter is, that neither he who is a Fop in the world, is a fit man to be alone; nor he who has set his heart much upon the world, though he have never so much understanding; so that Solitude can be well fitted and set right but upon a very few persons. They must have enough knowledge of the World to see the vanity of it, and enough Virtue to despise all vanity; if the Mind be possessed with any Lust or Passions a man had better be in a Fair than in a wood alone. They may, like petty Thieves, cheat us perhaps, and pick our pockets in the midst of company, but like Robbers they use to strip and bind, or murder us when they catch us alone. This is but to retreat from Men, and fall into the hands of Devils. 'Tis like the punishment of Parricides among the Romans, to be sowed into a Bag with an Ape, a Dog, and a Serpent. The first work therefore that a man must do to make himself capable of the good of Solitude is the very Eradication of all Lusts, for how is it possible for a Man to enjoy himself while his Affections are tied to things without Himself? In the second place, he must learn the Art and get the Habit of Thinking; for this, too, no less than well speaking, depends upon much practice, and Cogitation is the thing which distinguishes the Solitude of a God from a wild Beast. Now because the soul of Man is not by its own Nature or observation furnished with sufficient Materials to work upon, it is necessary for it to have continual recourse to Learning and Books for fresh supplies, so that the solitary Life will grow indigent, and be ready to starve without them; but if once we be throughly engaged in the Love of Letters, instead of being wearied with the length of any day we shall only complain of the shortness of our whole life.
O vita, stulto longa, sapienti brevis!
O Life, long to the Fool, short to the Wise!
The first Minister of State has not so much business in public as a wise man has in private; if the one have little liesure to be in company; the one has but part of the affairs of one Nation, the other all the works of God and Nature under his consideration. There is no saying shocks me so much as that which I hear very often, That a man does not know how to pass his Time. 'Twould have been but ill-spoken by Methusalem in the Nine hundred sixty-ninth year of his Life; so far it is from us, who have not time enough to attain to the utmost perfection of any part of any science, to have cause to complain that we are forced to be idle for want of work. But this, you'll say, is work only for the Learned; others are not capable either of the employments or divertisements that arrive from Letters. I know they are not, and therefore cannot much recommend Solitude to a man totally illiterate.
— Abraham Cowley, from "Of Solitude," in Essays, in The Oxford Book of English Prose, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (sel. & ed.), pp. 250-252.
In hope of giving longevity to that which its own nature forbids to be immortal, I have devoted this book, the labour of years, to the honour of my country, that we may no longer yield the palm of philology, without a contest, to the nations of the continent. The chief glory of every people arises from its authors: whether I shall add any thing by my own writings to the reputation of English literature, must be left to time: much of my life has been lost under the pressures of disease; much has been trifled away; and much has always been spent in provision for the day that was passing over me; but I shall not think my employment useless or ignoble, if by my assistance foreign nations, and distant ages, gain access to the propagators of knowledge, and understand the teachers of truth; if my labours afford light to the repositories of science, and add celebrity to Bacon, to Hooker, to Milton, and to Boyle.
— Samuel Johnson, "On His Dictionary," from the Preface to the English Dictionary, in Ibid., p. 409.
To the Right Honourable the Earl of Chesterfield
February 7, 1755.
My Lord,
I have been lately informed, by the proprietor of the World, that two papers, in which my Dictionary is recommended to the publick, were written by your Lordship. To be so distinguished, is an honour, which, being very little accustomed to favours from the great, I know not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge.
When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your Lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by the enchantment of your address; and could not forbear to wish that I might boast myself Le vainqueur du vainqueur de la terre; — that I might obtain that regard for which I saw the world contending; but I found my attendence so little encouraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffice me to continue it. When I had once addressed your Lordship in publick, I had exhausted all the art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly scholar can possess. I had done all that I could; and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little.
Seven years, my Lord, have now past, since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a Patron before.
The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks.
Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the publick should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.
Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have been long wakened from the dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much exultation.
My Lord,
Your Lordship's most humble,
Most obedient servant,
Sam. Johnson.
— Samuel Johnson, Letter to Lord Chesterfield, in Ibid., pp. 411-413.
O vita, stulto longa, sapienti brevis!
O Life, long to the Fool, short to the Wise!
The first Minister of State has not so much business in public as a wise man has in private; if the one have little liesure to be in company; the one has but part of the affairs of one Nation, the other all the works of God and Nature under his consideration. There is no saying shocks me so much as that which I hear very often, That a man does not know how to pass his Time. 'Twould have been but ill-spoken by Methusalem in the Nine hundred sixty-ninth year of his Life; so far it is from us, who have not time enough to attain to the utmost perfection of any part of any science, to have cause to complain that we are forced to be idle for want of work. But this, you'll say, is work only for the Learned; others are not capable either of the employments or divertisements that arrive from Letters. I know they are not, and therefore cannot much recommend Solitude to a man totally illiterate.
— Abraham Cowley, from "Of Solitude," in Essays, in The Oxford Book of English Prose, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (sel. & ed.), pp. 250-252.
In hope of giving longevity to that which its own nature forbids to be immortal, I have devoted this book, the labour of years, to the honour of my country, that we may no longer yield the palm of philology, without a contest, to the nations of the continent. The chief glory of every people arises from its authors: whether I shall add any thing by my own writings to the reputation of English literature, must be left to time: much of my life has been lost under the pressures of disease; much has been trifled away; and much has always been spent in provision for the day that was passing over me; but I shall not think my employment useless or ignoble, if by my assistance foreign nations, and distant ages, gain access to the propagators of knowledge, and understand the teachers of truth; if my labours afford light to the repositories of science, and add celebrity to Bacon, to Hooker, to Milton, and to Boyle.
— Samuel Johnson, "On His Dictionary," from the Preface to the English Dictionary, in Ibid., p. 409.
To the Right Honourable the Earl of Chesterfield
February 7, 1755.
My Lord,
I have been lately informed, by the proprietor of the World, that two papers, in which my Dictionary is recommended to the publick, were written by your Lordship. To be so distinguished, is an honour, which, being very little accustomed to favours from the great, I know not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge.
When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your Lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by the enchantment of your address; and could not forbear to wish that I might boast myself Le vainqueur du vainqueur de la terre; — that I might obtain that regard for which I saw the world contending; but I found my attendence so little encouraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffice me to continue it. When I had once addressed your Lordship in publick, I had exhausted all the art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly scholar can possess. I had done all that I could; and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little.
Seven years, my Lord, have now past, since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a Patron before.
The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks.
Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the publick should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.
Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have been long wakened from the dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much exultation.
My Lord,
Your Lordship's most humble,
Most obedient servant,
Sam. Johnson.
— Samuel Johnson, Letter to Lord Chesterfield, in Ibid., pp. 411-413.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Just Consideration
Though I speake with the tongues of men & of Angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brasse or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophesie, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge: and though I have all faith, so that I could remooue mountaines, and have no charitie, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poore, and though I give my body to bee burned, and have not charitie, it profiteth me nothing. Charitie suffereth long, and is kinde: charitie enuieth not: charitie vaunteth not it selfe, is not puffed up, Doeth not behave it selfe unseemly, seeketh not her owne, is not easily prouoked, thinketh no euill, Reioyceth not in iniqitie, but reioyceth in the trueth: Beareth all things, beleeueth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charitie neuer faileth: but whether there be prophesies, they shall faile; whether there bee tongues, they shall cease; whether there bee knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesie in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is part, shall be done away. When I was a childe, I spake as a childe, I undersrood as a childe, I thought as a childe: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glasse, darkely: but then face to face: now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am knowen. And now abideth faith, hope, charitie, these three, but the greatest of these is charitie.
— St. Paul, from I Corinthians, xiii, 1-13, The Holy Bible, Authorized Version, 1611 A.D., p. 83, in The Oxford Book of English Prose, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (sel. & ed.), p. 126.
I have of late, — but wherefore I know not, — lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the Earth, seems to me a sterile Promontory; this most excellent Canopy, the Air, look you, this brave o'erhanging Firmament, this Majestical Roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How Noble in Reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in Action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a God! the beauty of the world! the Paragon of Animals! And yet, to me, what is this Quintessence of Dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither, though, by your smiling, you seem to say so.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet, II, ii, in Ibid., p. 150.
God made Sun and Moon to distinguish seasons, and day, and night, and we cannot have the fruits of the earth but in their seasons: But God hath made no decree to distinguish the seasons of his mercies; In paradise, the fruits were ripe, the first minute, and in heaven it is alwaies Autumne, his mercies are ever in their maturity. We ask panem quotidianum, our daily bread, and God never sayes you should have come yesterday, he never sayes you must againe to morrow, but to day if you will heare his voice, to day he will heare you. If some King of the earth have so large an extent of Dominion, in North, and South, as that he hath Winter and Summer together in his Dominions, so large an extent East and West, as that he hath day and night together in his Dominions, much more hath God mercy and judjement together: He brought light out of darknesse, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy Summer out of Winter, though thou have no Spring; though in the wayes of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintred and frozen, clouded and eclypsed, damped and benumbed, smothered and stupefied till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the Sun at noon to illustrate all shadows, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.
— John Donne, LXXX Sermons: Sermon II, "All Times are God's Seasons," in Ibid., pp. 168-169.
Good and evil we know in the field of this World grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were inposed on Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out and sort asunder were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the World. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil. As therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbeare, without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.
— John Milton, "Against Fugitive and Cloistered Virtue," from Areopagitica, in Ibid., pp. 241-242.
— St. Paul, from I Corinthians, xiii, 1-13, The Holy Bible, Authorized Version, 1611 A.D., p. 83, in The Oxford Book of English Prose, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (sel. & ed.), p. 126.
I have of late, — but wherefore I know not, — lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the Earth, seems to me a sterile Promontory; this most excellent Canopy, the Air, look you, this brave o'erhanging Firmament, this Majestical Roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How Noble in Reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in Action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a God! the beauty of the world! the Paragon of Animals! And yet, to me, what is this Quintessence of Dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither, though, by your smiling, you seem to say so.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet, II, ii, in Ibid., p. 150.
God made Sun and Moon to distinguish seasons, and day, and night, and we cannot have the fruits of the earth but in their seasons: But God hath made no decree to distinguish the seasons of his mercies; In paradise, the fruits were ripe, the first minute, and in heaven it is alwaies Autumne, his mercies are ever in their maturity. We ask panem quotidianum, our daily bread, and God never sayes you should have come yesterday, he never sayes you must againe to morrow, but to day if you will heare his voice, to day he will heare you. If some King of the earth have so large an extent of Dominion, in North, and South, as that he hath Winter and Summer together in his Dominions, so large an extent East and West, as that he hath day and night together in his Dominions, much more hath God mercy and judjement together: He brought light out of darknesse, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy Summer out of Winter, though thou have no Spring; though in the wayes of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintred and frozen, clouded and eclypsed, damped and benumbed, smothered and stupefied till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the Sun at noon to illustrate all shadows, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.
— John Donne, LXXX Sermons: Sermon II, "All Times are God's Seasons," in Ibid., pp. 168-169.
Good and evil we know in the field of this World grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were inposed on Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out and sort asunder were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the World. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil. As therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbeare, without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.
— John Milton, "Against Fugitive and Cloistered Virtue," from Areopagitica, in Ibid., pp. 241-242.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Be Still, and Be Still, Part 2
Unknowable, what a man must lose to have the courage to confront the conventions — unknowable what Diogenes lost to become the man who permitted himself everything, who translated his innermost thoughts into actions with a supernatural insolence, like some libidinous yet pure god of knowledge. No one was so frank; a limit case of sincerity and lucidity as well as an example of what we could be if education and hypocrisy did not rein in our desires and our gestures.
"One day a man invited him into a richly furnished house, saying 'be careful not to spit on the floor.' Diogenes, who needed to spit, spat in his face, exclaiming that it was the only dirty place he could find where spitting was permitted.' — Diogenes Laërtius.
Who, after being received by a rich man has not longed for oceans of saliva to expectorate on all the owners of the earth? And who has not swallowed his own spittle for fear of casting it in the face of some stout and respected thief?
We are all absurdly prudent and timid: cynicism is not something we are taught in school. Nor is pride.
"Menippus, in his work entitled The Virtue of Diogenes, tells how he was captured and sold as a slave, and that he was asked what he knew how to do. Diogenes answered: 'Command!' and shouted to the herald: 'Ask who wants to buy a master?'"
The man who affronted Alexander and Plato, who masterbated ("If only heaven let us rub our bellies too, and that be enough to stave off hunger!"), the man of famous cask and the famous lantern, and who in his youth was a counterfeiter (what higher dignity for a cynic?), what must his experience have been of his neighbors? Certainly our own, yet with this difference: that man was the sole substance of his reflection and his contempt. Without suffering the falsifications of any ethic and any metaphysic, he strove to strip man in order to show him to us nakeder and more abominable than any comedy, any apocalypse has done.
"Socrates gone mad," Plato called him — Socrates turned sincere is what he should have said, Socrates renouncing the Good, abjuring formulas and the City, Socrates turning, finally, into a psychologist and nothing more. But Socrates — even sublime — remains conventional; he remains a master, an edifying model. Only Diogenes proposes nothing; the basis of his attitude — and of cynacism in its essence — is determined by a testicular horror of the absurdity of being man.
....Again, according to Diogenes Laërtius: "At the Olympic games, when the herald proclaimed: 'Dioxippus has vanquished men!' Diogenes answered: 'He has vanquished only slaves — men are my business.'"
— E. M. Cioran, from "The 'Celestial Dog'," in A Short History of Decay, "PART I: Directions for Decomposition," pp. 63-64.
(Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun. Lonelier than You, I want my hands pure, the contrary of Yours which were forever corrupted by kneading the earth and busying themselves with the world's affairs. I ask Your stupid omnipotence for nothing bur respect of my solitude and my torments. What have I to do with Your words? And I fear the madness which would make me hear them. Grant me the miracle gathered before the first moment, the peace which You could not tolerate and which incited You to breach the nothingness in order to make way for this carnival of time, and thereby to condemn me to the universe — to humiliation and the shame of Being.)
— E. M. Cioran, from "The Arrogance of Prayer," in Ibid., pp. 86-87.
Alexandrianism is a period of skillful negations, a style of inutility and refusal, a display of erudition and sarcasm above the confusion of values and beliefs. Its ideal space would be at the intersection of Hellas and bygone Paris, the meeting place of the agora and the salon. A civilization evolves from agriculture to paradox. Between thease two extremes unfolds the combat of barbarism and neurosis; from it results the unstable equilibrium of creative epochs. This combat is approaching its close: all horizons are opening without any being able to excite an exhausted and disabused curiosity. It is then up to the enlightened individual to flourish in the void — up to the intellectual vampire to slake his thirst on the vitiated blood of civilizations.
Must we take history seriously, or stand on the sidelines as a spectator? Are we to see it as a struggle toward a goal or the celebration of a light which intensifies and fades with neither necessity nor reason? The answer depends on our degree of illusion about man, on our curiosity to divine the way in which will be resolved that mixture of waltz and slaughterhouse which composes and stimulates his becoming.
— E. M. Cioran, from "Faces of Decadence," in A Short History of Decay, "PART II: The Second-Hand Thinker," p. 116.
Having passed through so many lungs, the air no longer renews itself. Every day vomits up its tomorrow, and I vainly try to imagine the image of a single desire. Everything is an ordeal: broken down like a beast of burden harnessed to Matter, I drag the planets.
Give me another universe — or I succumb.
— E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 122.
"One day a man invited him into a richly furnished house, saying 'be careful not to spit on the floor.' Diogenes, who needed to spit, spat in his face, exclaiming that it was the only dirty place he could find where spitting was permitted.' — Diogenes Laërtius.
Who, after being received by a rich man has not longed for oceans of saliva to expectorate on all the owners of the earth? And who has not swallowed his own spittle for fear of casting it in the face of some stout and respected thief?
We are all absurdly prudent and timid: cynicism is not something we are taught in school. Nor is pride.
"Menippus, in his work entitled The Virtue of Diogenes, tells how he was captured and sold as a slave, and that he was asked what he knew how to do. Diogenes answered: 'Command!' and shouted to the herald: 'Ask who wants to buy a master?'"
The man who affronted Alexander and Plato, who masterbated ("If only heaven let us rub our bellies too, and that be enough to stave off hunger!"), the man of famous cask and the famous lantern, and who in his youth was a counterfeiter (what higher dignity for a cynic?), what must his experience have been of his neighbors? Certainly our own, yet with this difference: that man was the sole substance of his reflection and his contempt. Without suffering the falsifications of any ethic and any metaphysic, he strove to strip man in order to show him to us nakeder and more abominable than any comedy, any apocalypse has done.
"Socrates gone mad," Plato called him — Socrates turned sincere is what he should have said, Socrates renouncing the Good, abjuring formulas and the City, Socrates turning, finally, into a psychologist and nothing more. But Socrates — even sublime — remains conventional; he remains a master, an edifying model. Only Diogenes proposes nothing; the basis of his attitude — and of cynacism in its essence — is determined by a testicular horror of the absurdity of being man.
....Again, according to Diogenes Laërtius: "At the Olympic games, when the herald proclaimed: 'Dioxippus has vanquished men!' Diogenes answered: 'He has vanquished only slaves — men are my business.'"
— E. M. Cioran, from "The 'Celestial Dog'," in A Short History of Decay, "PART I: Directions for Decomposition," pp. 63-64.
(Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun. Lonelier than You, I want my hands pure, the contrary of Yours which were forever corrupted by kneading the earth and busying themselves with the world's affairs. I ask Your stupid omnipotence for nothing bur respect of my solitude and my torments. What have I to do with Your words? And I fear the madness which would make me hear them. Grant me the miracle gathered before the first moment, the peace which You could not tolerate and which incited You to breach the nothingness in order to make way for this carnival of time, and thereby to condemn me to the universe — to humiliation and the shame of Being.)
— E. M. Cioran, from "The Arrogance of Prayer," in Ibid., pp. 86-87.
Alexandrianism is a period of skillful negations, a style of inutility and refusal, a display of erudition and sarcasm above the confusion of values and beliefs. Its ideal space would be at the intersection of Hellas and bygone Paris, the meeting place of the agora and the salon. A civilization evolves from agriculture to paradox. Between thease two extremes unfolds the combat of barbarism and neurosis; from it results the unstable equilibrium of creative epochs. This combat is approaching its close: all horizons are opening without any being able to excite an exhausted and disabused curiosity. It is then up to the enlightened individual to flourish in the void — up to the intellectual vampire to slake his thirst on the vitiated blood of civilizations.
Must we take history seriously, or stand on the sidelines as a spectator? Are we to see it as a struggle toward a goal or the celebration of a light which intensifies and fades with neither necessity nor reason? The answer depends on our degree of illusion about man, on our curiosity to divine the way in which will be resolved that mixture of waltz and slaughterhouse which composes and stimulates his becoming.
— E. M. Cioran, from "Faces of Decadence," in A Short History of Decay, "PART II: The Second-Hand Thinker," p. 116.
Having passed through so many lungs, the air no longer renews itself. Every day vomits up its tomorrow, and I vainly try to imagine the image of a single desire. Everything is an ordeal: broken down like a beast of burden harnessed to Matter, I drag the planets.
Give me another universe — or I succumb.
— E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 122.
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