The archeologist remarked that there was an ancient center of the old city marked by a Roman crossroads, which divided the city and the earth into four quadrants — the fulcrum of medieval geography. The roads had long ago disappeared, but at each corner of the crossroads had stood a Roman column which survives to the present day. As we made our way across the city to the very center of the ancient universe, my friend explained that the Roman columns stood in the interior of a modern building. Entering the building, I immediately saw the four columns. And there, between and around the columns, stood several pinball machines. Here, at the center of the universe, was the only pinball parlor in the old city of Jerusalem. I was amazed. According to the Bible the Lord speaks only to those who are ready for His message. The prophecy was not lost — I had seen a revelation of the God who plays dice.
Major technologies often enter our civilization in an innocent and undemanding way. Some devices, which eventually become important material forces, first appear as toys. Gunpowder was first used for fireworks entertainment. The use of steam power in Hellenic Alexandria around A.D. 100 is another good example. The Greeks saw in Hero’s steam wheel only a toy, a novelty, but centuries later, steam engines would be used as the motive power for the first industrial civilizations. The Alexandrian Greeks were not ready for the idea.
I think pinball machines are modern examples of such entertainment devices — they will eventually take us over. Determinists think of the universe as a huge clockwork; I think it is a pinball machine. Playing pinball requires total concentration, the right combination of skill and chance, a mastery of indeterminacy as the ball moves across the playboard and interacts with bumpers and cushions. The machine keeps score and you can cheat a little by shaking the machine, but not too much lest it tilt. It imitates life’s randomness, rewards skill, and creates an ersatz reality which integrates into the human nervous system in a remarkable way. Someday such machines will be combined with art forms such as films and a completely artificial reality will be created. We are already part of the pinball universe.
It is no accident that pinball machines — the symbol of the indeterminate universe — stand at the center of the world. The quantum theory implies that to know the world we must observe it, and in the act of observation, uncontrolled and random processes are initiated in the world. Also, Bohr’s principle of complementarity implies that knowing everything at one time about the world — a requirement of determinism — is impossible because the conditions for knowing one thing necessarily exclude knowledge of others….
— Heinz R. Pagels, The Cosmic Code, “Randomness,” pp.102-103.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Quoting the Quoter 2
He who has painted a divine picture or written one true poem may enter unbidden the company of the immortal. They ask not how much he has done, but what height he has attained, though but for once and a little while.
— Spalding, quoted in The Love Song, “Beauty 11,” Peter Nivio Zarlenga.
Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.
— Wolfgang Göethe, in Ibid., “Love 14.”
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his own. 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 more good-humored inflexibility than most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow 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, in Ibid., “Vision 4.”
You must close the eyes and waken in yourself that other power of vision, the birthright of all, but which few turn to use.
— Plotinus, in Ibid., “Vision 13.”
A great faith animated me, and although I did not know that I should ever be able to test the truth of my idea, I gave up every other occupation to deepen and broaden its conception. It was almost as if I prepared myself for an unknown mission.
— Marie Montessori, in Ibid., “Vision 13.”
There is nothing on earth which is not in the heavens in a heavenly form, and nothing in the heavens which is not on the earth in an earthly form.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Ibid., “Hero 30.”
The only power is conscience in the service of Justice and the only Glory is Genius in the service of truth.
— Victor Hugo, in Ibid., “Power 7.”
Had I some difficult task before me which was exhausting, I would attack it again and again until it was done. So I practiced day to day from morning till night. At first, it called for a vigorous mental effort directed against my disposition and desire, but as years went by the conflict lessened and finally my will and wish became identical. They are so today, and in this lies the secret of whatever I have achieved.
— Nikola Tesla, in Ibid., “Will 11.”
There are three marks of a superior man: being virtuous, he is free from anxiety; being wise, he is free from perplexity; being brave, he is free from fear.
— Confucius, in Ibid., “Courage 7.”
If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it he is sinking downwards to be a devil. He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Ibid., “Evil 4.”
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
— Blaise Pascal, in Ibid., “Evil 4.”
To how much lying, extravagance, hypocrisy and servility does not fear of ridicule lead? Human respect makes us cowards and slaves. It may deter from evil, but much oftener it drives to baseness. “We are too much afraid,” said Cato, “of death, exile and poverty.”
— Spalding, in Ibid., “Fear 20.”
— Spalding, quoted in The Love Song, “Beauty 11,” Peter Nivio Zarlenga.
Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.
— Wolfgang Göethe, in Ibid., “Love 14.”
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his own. 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 more good-humored inflexibility than most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow 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, in Ibid., “Vision 4.”
You must close the eyes and waken in yourself that other power of vision, the birthright of all, but which few turn to use.
— Plotinus, in Ibid., “Vision 13.”
A great faith animated me, and although I did not know that I should ever be able to test the truth of my idea, I gave up every other occupation to deepen and broaden its conception. It was almost as if I prepared myself for an unknown mission.
— Marie Montessori, in Ibid., “Vision 13.”
There is nothing on earth which is not in the heavens in a heavenly form, and nothing in the heavens which is not on the earth in an earthly form.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Ibid., “Hero 30.”
The only power is conscience in the service of Justice and the only Glory is Genius in the service of truth.
— Victor Hugo, in Ibid., “Power 7.”
Had I some difficult task before me which was exhausting, I would attack it again and again until it was done. So I practiced day to day from morning till night. At first, it called for a vigorous mental effort directed against my disposition and desire, but as years went by the conflict lessened and finally my will and wish became identical. They are so today, and in this lies the secret of whatever I have achieved.
— Nikola Tesla, in Ibid., “Will 11.”
There are three marks of a superior man: being virtuous, he is free from anxiety; being wise, he is free from perplexity; being brave, he is free from fear.
— Confucius, in Ibid., “Courage 7.”
If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it he is sinking downwards to be a devil. He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Ibid., “Evil 4.”
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
— Blaise Pascal, in Ibid., “Evil 4.”
To how much lying, extravagance, hypocrisy and servility does not fear of ridicule lead? Human respect makes us cowards and slaves. It may deter from evil, but much oftener it drives to baseness. “We are too much afraid,” said Cato, “of death, exile and poverty.”
— Spalding, in Ibid., “Fear 20.”
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Quoting the Quoter 1
It came into him life; it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions; it went out from him immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is his quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it is issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in The Love Song, “Poet 6,” Peter Nivio Zarlenga.
When we build let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone, let it be such work as our descendents will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone upon stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, “See! This our fathers did for us.”
— John Ruskin, in Ibid., “Humanity 7.”
Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh, and the greatness which does not bow before children.
— Kahlil Gibran, in Ibid., “Humanity 8.”
Yesterday is but a dream. Tomorrow is only a vision. But today lived for truth makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well therefore to this day! Such is the salutation to the dawn.
— James W. Henderson translation from the Sanskrit, in Ibid., “Truth 5-6.”
Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectations of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, “O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friends, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no laws less than the eternal law . . . I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Ibid., “Truth 7.”
Truth is truth whether uttered by the learned or the ignorant, by millions or by a solitary speaking in the midst of a desert.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, in Ibid., “Truth 8.”
Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.
— Leonardo da Vinci, in Ibid., “Truth 16.”
Whoever tells the truth is chased out of nine villages.
— Turkish Proverb, in Ibid., “Truth 16.”
I am only one, but still I am one; I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.
— Edward E. Hale, in Ibid., “Action 6.”
For those who approve but do not carry out, who are stirred, but do not change, I can do nothing at all.
— Confucius, in Ibid., “Action 7.”
Tough decisions never get easier to make; indecision is the quickest killer of ideas — and man.
— Willi Unsoeld, in Ibid., “Action 8.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in The Love Song, “Poet 6,” Peter Nivio Zarlenga.
When we build let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone, let it be such work as our descendents will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone upon stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, “See! This our fathers did for us.”
— John Ruskin, in Ibid., “Humanity 7.”
Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh, and the greatness which does not bow before children.
— Kahlil Gibran, in Ibid., “Humanity 8.”
Yesterday is but a dream. Tomorrow is only a vision. But today lived for truth makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well therefore to this day! Such is the salutation to the dawn.
— James W. Henderson translation from the Sanskrit, in Ibid., “Truth 5-6.”
Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectations of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, “O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friends, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no laws less than the eternal law . . . I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Ibid., “Truth 7.”
Truth is truth whether uttered by the learned or the ignorant, by millions or by a solitary speaking in the midst of a desert.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, in Ibid., “Truth 8.”
Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.
— Leonardo da Vinci, in Ibid., “Truth 16.”
Whoever tells the truth is chased out of nine villages.
— Turkish Proverb, in Ibid., “Truth 16.”
I am only one, but still I am one; I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.
— Edward E. Hale, in Ibid., “Action 6.”
For those who approve but do not carry out, who are stirred, but do not change, I can do nothing at all.
— Confucius, in Ibid., “Action 7.”
Tough decisions never get easier to make; indecision is the quickest killer of ideas — and man.
— Willi Unsoeld, in Ibid., “Action 8.”
Friday, January 28, 2011
Sing Singers
Democracy
the problem, of course, isn’t the Democratic System,
it’s the
living parts which make up the Democratic System.
the next person you pass on the street,
multiply
him or
her by
3 or 4 or 30 or 40 million
and you will know immediately
why things remain non-functional
for most of
us.
I wish I had a cure for the chess pieces
we call humanity . . .
we’ve undergone any number of political
cures
and we all remain
foolish enough to hope
that the one on the way
NOW
will cure almost
everything.
fellow citizens,
the problem never was the Democratic
system, the problem is
you.
— Charles Bukowski, The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993, p. 216.
the great escape
listen, he said, you ever seen a bunch of crabs in a
bucket?
no, I told him.
well, what happens is that then one crab
will climb up on top of the others
and begin to climb toward the top of the bucket,
then, just as he’s about to escape
another crab grabs him and pulls him back
down.
really? I asked.
really, he said, and this job is just like that, none
of the others want anybody to get out of
here. That’s just the way it is
in the postal service!
I believe you, I said.
just then the supervisor walked up and said,
you fellows were talking.
there is no talking allowed on this
job.
I had been there eleven and one-half
years.
I got off my stool and climbed right up the
supervisor
and then I reached up and pulled myself right
out of there.
it was so easy it was unbelievable.
but none of the others followed me.
and after that, whenever I had crab legs
I thought about that place.
I must have thought about that place
maybe 5 or 6 times
before I switched to lobster.
— Charles Bukowski, Ibid., pp. 302-303.
BLESS THE LORD, O MY SOUL,
who made you a singer in his holy house forever, who has given you a tongue like the wind, and a heart like the sea, who has journeyed you from generation to generation to this impeccable moment of sweet bewilderment. Bless the Lord who has surrounded the traffic of human interest with the majesty of his law, who has given a direction to the falling leaf, and a goal to the green shoot. Tremble, my soul, before the one who creates good and evil, that a man may choose among worlds; and tremble before the furnace of light in which you are formed and to which you return, until the time when he suspends his light and withdraws into himself, and there is no world, and there is no soul anywhere. Bless the one who judges you with his strap and his mercy, who covers with a million years of dust those who say, I have not sinned….— Leonard Cohen, Book of Mercy, p. 61.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Storied Stories
Five hundred years went by, and mankind devised another version of the infinite dialogue, this time not in India, but in China. An emperor of the Han Dynasty dreamed that a man of gold flew into his room, and his ministers explained that he could only be the Buddha, who had achieved the Tao in Western lands. An emperor of the Liang Dynasty had protected that barbarian and his faith, and had founded temples and monasteries. The Brahmin Boddhidharma, twenty-eighth patriarch of Indian Buddhism, had arrived (they say after three years of wandering) at his palace in Nanking, in the south. The Emperor enumerated all the pious works he had performed. Boddhidharma listened attentively, and then told him that all those monasteries and temples and copies of the sacred books were things of the world of appearances, which is a long dream, and thus were of no consequence. Good works, he said, can lead to good retributions, but never to nirvana, which is the absolute extinction of the will, not the consequence of an act. There is no sacred doctrine, because nothing is sacred or fundamental in an illusory world. Events and beings are momentary, and we can neither say whether they are or are not.
The Emperor then asked who was the man who had spoken in this manner, and Boddhidharma, loyal to his nihilism, replied:
“Nor do I know who I am.”
These words resonated for a long time in Chinese memory. Written in the middle of the eighteenth century, the novel The Dream of the Red Chamber has the curious passage:
“He had been dreaming and then he woke up. He found himself in the ruins of a temple. On one side there was a beggar dressed in the robe of a Taoist monk. He was lame and killing fleas. Hsing-Lien asked him who he was and what place they were in. The monk answered:
'I don’t know who I am, nor where we are. I only know that the road is long.’
Hsing-Lien understood. He cut off his hair with his sword and followed the stranger.”
In the stories I have mentioned, the ascetic and the king symbolize nothing and plenitude, zero and infinity. More extreme symbols of that contrast would be a god and a dead man, and their fusion would be more economical: a god that dies. Adonis wounded by the boar of the moon goddess, Osiris thrown by Set into the waters of the Nile, Tammuz carried off to the land from which he cannot return, are all famous examples of this fusion….
— Jorge Luis Borges, “The Dialogues of Ascetic and King,” 1953, in Selected Non-Fictions, Weinberger (ed.), pp 384-385.
Taller than the rest, the distant
Man would walk among men, faintly
Calling out to angels, speaking
Their secret names. What earthly eyes
Cannot see he saw: the burning
Geometries, the crystalline
Labyrinth of God, the sordid
Whirling of infernal delights.
He knew that Glory and Hades
And all their myths are in your soul;
He knew, like the Greeks, that each day’s
The mirror of Eternity.
In flat Latin he catalogued
Whenless whyless ultimate things.
— Jorge Luis Borges, “Prologues,” 1975, in Ibid., p. 457.
The Emperor then asked who was the man who had spoken in this manner, and Boddhidharma, loyal to his nihilism, replied:
“Nor do I know who I am.”
These words resonated for a long time in Chinese memory. Written in the middle of the eighteenth century, the novel The Dream of the Red Chamber has the curious passage:
“He had been dreaming and then he woke up. He found himself in the ruins of a temple. On one side there was a beggar dressed in the robe of a Taoist monk. He was lame and killing fleas. Hsing-Lien asked him who he was and what place they were in. The monk answered:
'I don’t know who I am, nor where we are. I only know that the road is long.’
Hsing-Lien understood. He cut off his hair with his sword and followed the stranger.”
In the stories I have mentioned, the ascetic and the king symbolize nothing and plenitude, zero and infinity. More extreme symbols of that contrast would be a god and a dead man, and their fusion would be more economical: a god that dies. Adonis wounded by the boar of the moon goddess, Osiris thrown by Set into the waters of the Nile, Tammuz carried off to the land from which he cannot return, are all famous examples of this fusion….
— Jorge Luis Borges, “The Dialogues of Ascetic and King,” 1953, in Selected Non-Fictions, Weinberger (ed.), pp 384-385.
Emanuel Swedenborg
Taller than the rest, the distant
Man would walk among men, faintly
Calling out to angels, speaking
Their secret names. What earthly eyes
Cannot see he saw: the burning
Geometries, the crystalline
Labyrinth of God, the sordid
Whirling of infernal delights.
He knew that Glory and Hades
And all their myths are in your soul;
He knew, like the Greeks, that each day’s
The mirror of Eternity.
In flat Latin he catalogued
Whenless whyless ultimate things.
— Jorge Luis Borges, “Prologues,” 1975, in Ibid., p. 457.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Running in Circles?
Perhaps universal history is the history of a few metaphors. To outline a chapter of that history is the purpose of this one.
Six centuries before the Christian era, the rhapsodist Xenophanes of Colophon, tired of the Homeric verses he recited from city to city, denounced the poets for giving the gods anthropomorphic traits and proposed to the Greeks a single God who was an eternal sphere. In Plato’s Timaeus we read that the sphere is the most perfect and most uniform shape, because all points on its surface are equidistant from the center; Olof Gigon (Ursprung der griechischen Philosophie, 183) understands Xenophanes as speaking analogically; God is spherical, because that form is the best, or the least bad, for representing divinity. Parmenides, forty years later, repeated the image: “Being is like the mass of a well-rounded sphere, whose force is constant from the center in any direction.” Caloero and Mondolfo argue that he envisioned an infinite, or infinitely growing sphere, and that those words have a dynamic meaning (Albertelli, Gli Eleati, 148). Parmenides taught in Italy; a few years after he died, the Sicilian Empedocles of Agrigento devised a laborious cosmogony; there is one stage in which the particles of earth, air, fire, and water form an endless sphere, “the round Sphairos, which rejoices in its circular solitude.”
Universal history followed its course, the too-human gods that Xenophanes attacked were reduced to poetic fictions or to demons, but it was said that one of them, Hermes Trimegistus, had dictated a variable number of books (42, according to Clement of Alexandria; 20,000, according to Iamblichus; 36,525, according to the priests of Thoth, who is also Hermes) on whose pages all things were written. Fragments of that illusory library, compiled or forged since the third century, form what is called the Corpus Hermeticum; in one of the books, or in one part of the Asclepius, which was also attributed to Trimegistus, the French theologian Alain de Lille — Alanus de Insulis — discovered, at the end of the twelfth century, this formula which the ages to come would not forget: “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” The Pre-Socratics spoke of an endless sphere; Albertelli (like Aristotle before him) thinks that such a statement is a contradictio in adjecto, for the subject and predicate negate each other; this may be so, but the formula in the Hermetic books enables us, almost, to envision that sphere. In the thirteenth century, the image reappeared in the symbolic Roman de la Rose, which attributed it to Plato, and in the encyclopedia Speculum Triplex; in the sixteenth, the last chapter of the last book of Pantagruel referred to “that intellectual sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere, which we call God.” For the medieval mind, the meaning was clear: God is in each one of his creatures, but is not limited by any one of them. “Behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee,” said Solomon (I Kings 8:27); the geometrical metaphor of the sphere must have seemed like a gloss on those words.
Dante’s poem has preserved Ptolemaic astronomy, which ruled mankind’s imagination for fourteen hundred years. The earth is the center of the universe. It is an immobile sphere; around it nine concentric spheres revolve. The first seven are the planetary heavens (the heavens of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn); the eighth, the heaven of fixed stars; the ninth, the Crystalline Heaven, also called the Primum Mobile. This in turn is surrounded by the empyrean, which is made of light. This whole laborious apparatus of hollow, transparent, and revolving spheres (one system required fifty-five) had come to be a mental necessity; De hypothesibus motuum coelestium commentariolus [Commentary on the Hypothesis of Heavenly Motions] was the timid title that Copernicus, the disputer of Aristotle, gave to the manuscript that transformed our vision of the cosmos. For one man, Giordano Bruno, the breaking of the stellar vaults was a liberation. In La cena de la ceneri [The Feast of the Ashes] he proclaimed that the world is the infinite effect of an infinite cause and that the divinity is near, “because it is in us even more than we are in ourselves.” He searched for the words that would explain Copernican space to mankind, and on one famous page he wrote: “We can state with certainty that the universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere” (De la causa, principio e urco, V).
That was written exultantly in 1584, still in the light of the Renaissance; seventy years later not even a glimmer of that fervor remained, and men felt lost in time and space. In time, because if the future and the past are infinite, there cannot really be a when; in space, because every being is equidistant from the infinite and the infinitesimal, there cannot be a where. No one exists on a certain day, in a certain place; no one knows the size of his own face. In the Renaissance, humanity thought it had reached adulthood, and it said as much through the mouths of Bruno, Campanella, and Bacon. In the seventeenth century, humanity was discouraged by a feeling of old age; to justify itself, it exhumed the belief in a slow and fatal degeneration of all creatures because of Adam’s sin. (In the fifth chapter of Genesis, we read that “all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years”; in the sixth, that “there were giants in the earth in those days.”) The first Anniversary of John Donne’s elegy “Anatomy of the World” lamented the brief life and small stature of contemporary men, who were like fairies and dwarfs. Milton, according to Johnson’s biography, feared that the genre of the epic had become impossible on earth; Glanvill thought that Adam, “the medallion of god,” enjoyed both a telescopic and microscopic vision; Robert South notably wrote: “An Aristotle was but the fragment of an Adam, and Athens, the rudiments of Paradise.” In that dejected century, the absolute space that inspired the hexameters of Lucretius, the absolute space that had been a liberation for Bruno was a labyrinth and an abyss for Pascal. He hated the universe and yearned to adore god, but God was less real to him than the hated universe. He lamented that the firmament did not speak; he compared our lives to the shipwrecked on a desert island. He felt the incessant weight of the physical world; he felt confusion, fear, and solitude; and he expressed it in other words: “Nature is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.” That is the text of the Brunschvieg edition, but the critical edition of Tourneur (Paris, 1941), reveals that Pascal started to write the word effroyable: “a frightful sphere, the center of which is everywhere, and the circumference nowhere.”
Perhaps universal history is the history of the various intonations of a few metaphors.
— Jorge Luis Borges, “Pascal’s Sphere,” 1951, in Selected Non-Fictions, Weinberger (ed.), pp. 351-353.
Six centuries before the Christian era, the rhapsodist Xenophanes of Colophon, tired of the Homeric verses he recited from city to city, denounced the poets for giving the gods anthropomorphic traits and proposed to the Greeks a single God who was an eternal sphere. In Plato’s Timaeus we read that the sphere is the most perfect and most uniform shape, because all points on its surface are equidistant from the center; Olof Gigon (Ursprung der griechischen Philosophie, 183) understands Xenophanes as speaking analogically; God is spherical, because that form is the best, or the least bad, for representing divinity. Parmenides, forty years later, repeated the image: “Being is like the mass of a well-rounded sphere, whose force is constant from the center in any direction.” Caloero and Mondolfo argue that he envisioned an infinite, or infinitely growing sphere, and that those words have a dynamic meaning (Albertelli, Gli Eleati, 148). Parmenides taught in Italy; a few years after he died, the Sicilian Empedocles of Agrigento devised a laborious cosmogony; there is one stage in which the particles of earth, air, fire, and water form an endless sphere, “the round Sphairos, which rejoices in its circular solitude.”
Universal history followed its course, the too-human gods that Xenophanes attacked were reduced to poetic fictions or to demons, but it was said that one of them, Hermes Trimegistus, had dictated a variable number of books (42, according to Clement of Alexandria; 20,000, according to Iamblichus; 36,525, according to the priests of Thoth, who is also Hermes) on whose pages all things were written. Fragments of that illusory library, compiled or forged since the third century, form what is called the Corpus Hermeticum; in one of the books, or in one part of the Asclepius, which was also attributed to Trimegistus, the French theologian Alain de Lille — Alanus de Insulis — discovered, at the end of the twelfth century, this formula which the ages to come would not forget: “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” The Pre-Socratics spoke of an endless sphere; Albertelli (like Aristotle before him) thinks that such a statement is a contradictio in adjecto, for the subject and predicate negate each other; this may be so, but the formula in the Hermetic books enables us, almost, to envision that sphere. In the thirteenth century, the image reappeared in the symbolic Roman de la Rose, which attributed it to Plato, and in the encyclopedia Speculum Triplex; in the sixteenth, the last chapter of the last book of Pantagruel referred to “that intellectual sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere, which we call God.” For the medieval mind, the meaning was clear: God is in each one of his creatures, but is not limited by any one of them. “Behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee,” said Solomon (I Kings 8:27); the geometrical metaphor of the sphere must have seemed like a gloss on those words.
Dante’s poem has preserved Ptolemaic astronomy, which ruled mankind’s imagination for fourteen hundred years. The earth is the center of the universe. It is an immobile sphere; around it nine concentric spheres revolve. The first seven are the planetary heavens (the heavens of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn); the eighth, the heaven of fixed stars; the ninth, the Crystalline Heaven, also called the Primum Mobile. This in turn is surrounded by the empyrean, which is made of light. This whole laborious apparatus of hollow, transparent, and revolving spheres (one system required fifty-five) had come to be a mental necessity; De hypothesibus motuum coelestium commentariolus [Commentary on the Hypothesis of Heavenly Motions] was the timid title that Copernicus, the disputer of Aristotle, gave to the manuscript that transformed our vision of the cosmos. For one man, Giordano Bruno, the breaking of the stellar vaults was a liberation. In La cena de la ceneri [The Feast of the Ashes] he proclaimed that the world is the infinite effect of an infinite cause and that the divinity is near, “because it is in us even more than we are in ourselves.” He searched for the words that would explain Copernican space to mankind, and on one famous page he wrote: “We can state with certainty that the universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere” (De la causa, principio e urco, V).
That was written exultantly in 1584, still in the light of the Renaissance; seventy years later not even a glimmer of that fervor remained, and men felt lost in time and space. In time, because if the future and the past are infinite, there cannot really be a when; in space, because every being is equidistant from the infinite and the infinitesimal, there cannot be a where. No one exists on a certain day, in a certain place; no one knows the size of his own face. In the Renaissance, humanity thought it had reached adulthood, and it said as much through the mouths of Bruno, Campanella, and Bacon. In the seventeenth century, humanity was discouraged by a feeling of old age; to justify itself, it exhumed the belief in a slow and fatal degeneration of all creatures because of Adam’s sin. (In the fifth chapter of Genesis, we read that “all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years”; in the sixth, that “there were giants in the earth in those days.”) The first Anniversary of John Donne’s elegy “Anatomy of the World” lamented the brief life and small stature of contemporary men, who were like fairies and dwarfs. Milton, according to Johnson’s biography, feared that the genre of the epic had become impossible on earth; Glanvill thought that Adam, “the medallion of god,” enjoyed both a telescopic and microscopic vision; Robert South notably wrote: “An Aristotle was but the fragment of an Adam, and Athens, the rudiments of Paradise.” In that dejected century, the absolute space that inspired the hexameters of Lucretius, the absolute space that had been a liberation for Bruno was a labyrinth and an abyss for Pascal. He hated the universe and yearned to adore god, but God was less real to him than the hated universe. He lamented that the firmament did not speak; he compared our lives to the shipwrecked on a desert island. He felt the incessant weight of the physical world; he felt confusion, fear, and solitude; and he expressed it in other words: “Nature is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.” That is the text of the Brunschvieg edition, but the critical edition of Tourneur (Paris, 1941), reveals that Pascal started to write the word effroyable: “a frightful sphere, the center of which is everywhere, and the circumference nowhere.”
Perhaps universal history is the history of the various intonations of a few metaphors.
— Jorge Luis Borges, “Pascal’s Sphere,” 1951, in Selected Non-Fictions, Weinberger (ed.), pp. 351-353.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Poetic Spirit
Allegro
By Tomas Transtromer
After a black day, I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.
The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spiritual, green, and full of silence.
The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no taxes to Caesar.
I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
and act like a man who is calm about it all.
I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
“We do not surrender. But want peace.”
The music is a home of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.
The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.
— Tomas Transtromer, “Allegro,” in The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations, Robert Bly, p. 5.
Why Mira Can’t Come Back to Her Old House
By Mirabai
The colors of the Dark One have penetrated Mira’s body; all other colors washed out.
Making love with the Dark One and eating little, those are my pearl and my carnelians.
Meditation beads and the forehead streak, those are my scarves and my rings.
That’s enough feminine wiles for me. My teachers taught me this.
Approve me or disapprove me: I praise the Mountain Energy night and day.
I take the path that ecstatic human beings have taken for centuries.
I don’t steal money, I don’t hit anyone. What will you charge me with?
I have felt the swaying of the elephant’s shoulders; and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious.
— Mirabai, in Ibid., p. 36.
Think While You are Alive
By Kabir
Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think . . . and think . . . while you are alive.
What you call “salvation” belongs to the time before death.
If you don’t break your ropes while you are alive,
Do you think
Ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten —
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire.
So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is, believe in the Great Sound!
Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.
— Kabir, in Ibid., p. 48.
My Spiritual State
By Ghalib
When I look out, I see no hope for change.
I don’t see how anything in my life can end well.
Their funeral date is already decided, but still
People complain that they can’t sleep.
When I was young, my love disasters made me burst out laughing.
Now even funny things seem sober to me.
I know the answer — that’s what keeps me quiet.
Beyond that it’s clear I know how to speak.
Why shouldn’t I scream? I can’t stop. Perhaps
The Great One notices Ghalib only when he stops screaming.
This is the spiritual state I am in:
About myself, there isn’t any news.
I do die; the longing for death is so strong it’s killing me.
Such a death comes, but the other death doesn’t come.
What face will you wear when you visit the Kaaba?
Ghalib, you are shameless even to think of that.
— Ghalib, in Ibid., p. 373.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Inner Thought
Change yourself, rather than working to change others.
Place the inner man in control of the outer.
Abandon the false before seeking the true.
Be loving and you will be loved.
Attend to the reason why you felt hurt, not to those who hurt you.
Set inner integrity before good works.
Place thinking before speaking.
Be a real person, then a social person.
Understand yourself, then try to know others
set self-awareness before self-gratification.
Destroy negative attitudes, not negative conditions.
Place small efforts before great determinations.
— Vernon Howard, Mystic Path to Cosmic Power, p. 127.
All we need is a decision to seek the light. When that is done, all else is done for us.
A sign of deepening insight: When you see how one psychological principle connects with another. You might, for example, see how “Resist not evil” connects with the law of not worshiping false gods. How? When we resist something, perhaps an unkind remark, the very resistance implies a belief that that remark can harm us. We are, therefore, worshiping a false and powerless god — the unkind remark. Non-resistance calls the bluff and destroys the falsity.
The first step toward harmonizing with universal laws is to hear of them. Let me present four simple and basic steps which readers found helpful in my previous book, Psycho-Pictography. Called “Your Four Golden Keys to New Freedom and Happiness,” they are:
1. A sincere desire for inner change: Self-transformation begins from the moment we earnestly wish to be a different kind of person.
2. Contact with workable principles: We must connect ourselves with a source of genuine help, perhaps a book, or an enlightened teacher, or with our own inner light.
3. Self-honesty: We must heroically face the facts about ourselves, even if disturbing, in order to break the chains.
4. Persistence: With endurance, happiness comes gradually but definitely, like a blinking light that finally glows permanently.
As we read and work with mystic principles found in a book, we experience a mysterious change within. What we formerly took as attractive words and phrases now turns into a very definite feeling. This means that we have seen beyond the words; the intuitive self has broken through to transform an intellectual idea into a living experience.
— Vernon Howard, Ibid., pp. 130-131.
Unfortunately, models and images of wisdom, goodness, love, and beauty aren’t easy to come by in popular culture and the mass media. Imagine watching the news and following the stream at the bottom of your screen as it moves along. “Leonardo’s lost notebooks recovered . . . but first, more on the latest celebrity scandal.” As a society, our priorities for the investment of attention are frequently out of alignment with our highest ideals.
There’s actually a neurological explanation for this. One of the paradoxes and challenges of the human mind is that we are conditioned by the brain’s reticular formation (a structure in the midbrain) to pay special attention to anything that seems new, different, or “sensational,” while allowing more timeless, less topical material — such as universal spiritual wisdom — to be forgotten. But matters of the spirit always eventually resurface precisely because they are timeless and universal, as we can see from the fact that all of the diverse societies of the globe, at some point in their development, have arrived at fundamental insights that are remarkably similar. Author Aldous Huxley called it “the perennial philosophy.” One research group found that at least eight of the ten commandments are common to all the world’s cultures, constituting the equivalent of a global statement of human values. As my secretary, the venerable Mary Hogan, put it: “We may root for different teams, but we all love baseball.”
— Michael J. Gelb, Da Vinci Decoded, “Introduction,” pp. xvi-xvii.
Place the inner man in control of the outer.
Abandon the false before seeking the true.
Be loving and you will be loved.
Attend to the reason why you felt hurt, not to those who hurt you.
Set inner integrity before good works.
Place thinking before speaking.
Be a real person, then a social person.
Understand yourself, then try to know others
set self-awareness before self-gratification.
Destroy negative attitudes, not negative conditions.
Place small efforts before great determinations.
— Vernon Howard, Mystic Path to Cosmic Power, p. 127.
All we need is a decision to seek the light. When that is done, all else is done for us.
A sign of deepening insight: When you see how one psychological principle connects with another. You might, for example, see how “Resist not evil” connects with the law of not worshiping false gods. How? When we resist something, perhaps an unkind remark, the very resistance implies a belief that that remark can harm us. We are, therefore, worshiping a false and powerless god — the unkind remark. Non-resistance calls the bluff and destroys the falsity.
The first step toward harmonizing with universal laws is to hear of them. Let me present four simple and basic steps which readers found helpful in my previous book, Psycho-Pictography. Called “Your Four Golden Keys to New Freedom and Happiness,” they are:
1. A sincere desire for inner change: Self-transformation begins from the moment we earnestly wish to be a different kind of person.
2. Contact with workable principles: We must connect ourselves with a source of genuine help, perhaps a book, or an enlightened teacher, or with our own inner light.
3. Self-honesty: We must heroically face the facts about ourselves, even if disturbing, in order to break the chains.
4. Persistence: With endurance, happiness comes gradually but definitely, like a blinking light that finally glows permanently.
As we read and work with mystic principles found in a book, we experience a mysterious change within. What we formerly took as attractive words and phrases now turns into a very definite feeling. This means that we have seen beyond the words; the intuitive self has broken through to transform an intellectual idea into a living experience.
— Vernon Howard, Ibid., pp. 130-131.
Unfortunately, models and images of wisdom, goodness, love, and beauty aren’t easy to come by in popular culture and the mass media. Imagine watching the news and following the stream at the bottom of your screen as it moves along. “Leonardo’s lost notebooks recovered . . . but first, more on the latest celebrity scandal.” As a society, our priorities for the investment of attention are frequently out of alignment with our highest ideals.
There’s actually a neurological explanation for this. One of the paradoxes and challenges of the human mind is that we are conditioned by the brain’s reticular formation (a structure in the midbrain) to pay special attention to anything that seems new, different, or “sensational,” while allowing more timeless, less topical material — such as universal spiritual wisdom — to be forgotten. But matters of the spirit always eventually resurface precisely because they are timeless and universal, as we can see from the fact that all of the diverse societies of the globe, at some point in their development, have arrived at fundamental insights that are remarkably similar. Author Aldous Huxley called it “the perennial philosophy.” One research group found that at least eight of the ten commandments are common to all the world’s cultures, constituting the equivalent of a global statement of human values. As my secretary, the venerable Mary Hogan, put it: “We may root for different teams, but we all love baseball.”
— Michael J. Gelb, Da Vinci Decoded, “Introduction,” pp. xvi-xvii.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Works of Rework
Perhaps I am not so very misguided, then, in deliberately making a lumber-room of my head with the present study, so long as that room is, as Gaye contends, coextensive with the world itself. No decomposing quotation is so vile that it can’t be taken in hand and turned to good account. Still, if I’m going to quote from long and illustrious line of lumber-into-treasure commonplace-holders, if I’m going to cite Horace and Wordsworth and Emerson and W. E. Henley and Saki and A. R. Ammons, there is no excuse for my having left out of this series the most adept and amazing commonplace-transfigurer there ever was, or will be. “He unfortunately worked up the rubbish as well as the gems,” Leslie Stephen writes, in an essay called “Pope as a Moralist,” but in another passage Stephen grants, as we all must, that Alexander Pope has “a probably unequalled power of coining aphorism out of common-place.” Of Pope’s Essay on Criticism the harsh Reverend Elwin says that all the classical doctrines of criticism in it “might have been picked up from his French manuals in a single morning,” and he concurs with De Quincey’s dismissal of it as “mere versification, like a metrical multiplication table, of common-places the most mouldy with which criticism has baited its rat-traps.” And yet what an extraordinary multiplication table it is, and what lucky sewer rats we readers are! Tiny known quantities of sense, operated upon in accordance with known metrical law, yield in Pope’s arithmetic hands infinitely long and unrepeating decimals of truth:
True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest
What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest.
Not much has been more oft thought over the centuries than the notion that the writer writes what oft was thought, has exprest it with such politely imploded conviction as Pope exhibits here.1 At twenty-five, Pope possessed (this is Leslie Stephen again) “the rare art of composing proverbs in verse, which have become part of the intellectual furniture of all decently educated men.” Even De Quincey, in spite of the ornate scorn he reserves for the Essay, seems to have come into a few Queen Anne tea-tables from Pope’s estate. In the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, he denounces certain works of political economy as being “the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect.” Compare Pope:
Still run on Poets in a raging Vein,
Ev’n to the Dregs and Squeezings of the Brain.
Not that Pope’s “dregs and squeezing” isn’t itself a second pressing: a footnote in the Twickenham edition calls our attention to a line in Oldham’s Satyrs upon the Jesuits that goes, “With all the dregs, and squeesings of his rage.” Mark Pattison writes that Pope was
“very industrious, and had read a vast number of books, yet he was very ignorant, — ignorant, that is, of everything but the one thing which he labored with all his might to acquire, the art of happy expression. He read books to find ready-made images, and to feel for the best collocations of words. His memory was a magazine of epithets and synonymes, and pretty turns of language. Whenever he found anything to his purpose, he booked it for use, and some time or other, often more than once, it made its appearance in his verse.”1 [1. “Pope and His Editors,” in Mark Pattison, Essays, vol. II, 1889].
We pardon Pope, most of the time, because he rehabilitates nearly every second-hand phrase that comes through his shop. He unscrews a line he likes, sorts and cleans its pieces, stores them, finds matches, does some seemingly casual beveling, drills a narrow caesural ventilation-hole, squirts the KrazyGlue of genius into several chinks, gives the prototypical whole a sudden uniting twist, and hands the world a tiny two-cylinder perpetual-motion machine — a heroic couplet. Even when we know his sources phrase by phrase, we must still remain in awe (following a week in a darkened room devoted to adjusting to the horrifying extent and specificity of the thefts) of his divine clockmaker’s gift. Dryden (in his “Preface to the Fables”) explains that “the genius of our countrymen in general [is] rather to improve an invention, than to invent themselves; as is evident not only in our poetry, but in many of our manufactures.” And Samuel Wesley (a poet too minor to receive an entry of his own in Drabble’s Oxford Companion, though Swift gives him the honor of being the fourth fatality in The Battle of the Books),1 [1. Aristotle shoots Descartes with an arrow in the right eye; Homer’s horse tramples D’Avenant; then Homer gets John Denham with a long spear, and Samuel Wesley is slain by a kick of Homer’s horse’s heel.] in a passage from his Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) defends Dryden’s own frequent raids on the already articulated:
“If from the modern or the ancient Store
He borrows ought, he always pays ‘em more:
So much improv’d, each Thought, so fine appears,
Waller or Ovid scarce durst own ‘em theirs.
The Learned Goth has scowr’d all Europe’s Plains,
France, Spain, and fruitful Italy he drains,
From every Realm and every Language gains:
His Gains a Conquest are, and not a Theft;
He wishes still new Worlds of Wit were left . . .”
This is a sort of versification of Dryden’s own praise of Boileau, in the essay “On the Origin and Progress of Satire”:
“What he [Boileau] borrows from the ancients he repays with usury of his own, in coin as good and almost as universally valuable.”
Samuel Butler, a few decades earlier, came up with one of the tripier casings for this old trope:
“Our modern Authors write Playes as they feed hogs in Westphalia, where but one eate’s peas, or akornes, and all the rest are feed upon his and one anothers excrement.”
I happened on Wesley’s Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry in the English Poetry Database simply because it mentions the “lumber-thoughts” of a poetical first draft. (Some you should keep, and some “the sponge should strike.”) But I liked the poem and paused over it, for it looked to be something Pope had read carefully:
“Draw the Main Strokes at first, ‘twill shew your Skill,
Life-Touches you may add whene’er you will.
Ev’n Chance will sometimes all our Art excel,
The angry Foam we ne’er can hit so well.
A sudden Thought, all beautiful and bright
Shoots in and stuns us with amazing Light;
Secure the Happy Moment e’er ‘tis past,
Not Time more swift, or Lightning flies so fast."
Any self-respecting source-seeker who reads Wesley’s Epistle just after a fresh run-through of Pope’s Essay on Criticism will notice that some of its phrases and ideas were reset a decade later in Pope’s precocious assemblage. Indeed, Pope’s use of Wesley extends beyond phrasing, to the metaphorical structure of whole sections….
— Nickolson Baker, The Size of Thought, pp. 322-327.
True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest
What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest.
Not much has been more oft thought over the centuries than the notion that the writer writes what oft was thought, has exprest it with such politely imploded conviction as Pope exhibits here.1 At twenty-five, Pope possessed (this is Leslie Stephen again) “the rare art of composing proverbs in verse, which have become part of the intellectual furniture of all decently educated men.” Even De Quincey, in spite of the ornate scorn he reserves for the Essay, seems to have come into a few Queen Anne tea-tables from Pope’s estate. In the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, he denounces certain works of political economy as being “the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect.” Compare Pope:
Still run on Poets in a raging Vein,
Ev’n to the Dregs and Squeezings of the Brain.
Not that Pope’s “dregs and squeezing” isn’t itself a second pressing: a footnote in the Twickenham edition calls our attention to a line in Oldham’s Satyrs upon the Jesuits that goes, “With all the dregs, and squeesings of his rage.” Mark Pattison writes that Pope was
“very industrious, and had read a vast number of books, yet he was very ignorant, — ignorant, that is, of everything but the one thing which he labored with all his might to acquire, the art of happy expression. He read books to find ready-made images, and to feel for the best collocations of words. His memory was a magazine of epithets and synonymes, and pretty turns of language. Whenever he found anything to his purpose, he booked it for use, and some time or other, often more than once, it made its appearance in his verse.”1 [1. “Pope and His Editors,” in Mark Pattison, Essays, vol. II, 1889].
We pardon Pope, most of the time, because he rehabilitates nearly every second-hand phrase that comes through his shop. He unscrews a line he likes, sorts and cleans its pieces, stores them, finds matches, does some seemingly casual beveling, drills a narrow caesural ventilation-hole, squirts the KrazyGlue of genius into several chinks, gives the prototypical whole a sudden uniting twist, and hands the world a tiny two-cylinder perpetual-motion machine — a heroic couplet. Even when we know his sources phrase by phrase, we must still remain in awe (following a week in a darkened room devoted to adjusting to the horrifying extent and specificity of the thefts) of his divine clockmaker’s gift. Dryden (in his “Preface to the Fables”) explains that “the genius of our countrymen in general [is] rather to improve an invention, than to invent themselves; as is evident not only in our poetry, but in many of our manufactures.” And Samuel Wesley (a poet too minor to receive an entry of his own in Drabble’s Oxford Companion, though Swift gives him the honor of being the fourth fatality in The Battle of the Books),1 [1. Aristotle shoots Descartes with an arrow in the right eye; Homer’s horse tramples D’Avenant; then Homer gets John Denham with a long spear, and Samuel Wesley is slain by a kick of Homer’s horse’s heel.] in a passage from his Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) defends Dryden’s own frequent raids on the already articulated:
“If from the modern or the ancient Store
He borrows ought, he always pays ‘em more:
So much improv’d, each Thought, so fine appears,
Waller or Ovid scarce durst own ‘em theirs.
The Learned Goth has scowr’d all Europe’s Plains,
France, Spain, and fruitful Italy he drains,
From every Realm and every Language gains:
His Gains a Conquest are, and not a Theft;
He wishes still new Worlds of Wit were left . . .”
This is a sort of versification of Dryden’s own praise of Boileau, in the essay “On the Origin and Progress of Satire”:
“What he [Boileau] borrows from the ancients he repays with usury of his own, in coin as good and almost as universally valuable.”
Samuel Butler, a few decades earlier, came up with one of the tripier casings for this old trope:
“Our modern Authors write Playes as they feed hogs in Westphalia, where but one eate’s peas, or akornes, and all the rest are feed upon his and one anothers excrement.”
I happened on Wesley’s Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry in the English Poetry Database simply because it mentions the “lumber-thoughts” of a poetical first draft. (Some you should keep, and some “the sponge should strike.”) But I liked the poem and paused over it, for it looked to be something Pope had read carefully:
“Draw the Main Strokes at first, ‘twill shew your Skill,
Life-Touches you may add whene’er you will.
Ev’n Chance will sometimes all our Art excel,
The angry Foam we ne’er can hit so well.
A sudden Thought, all beautiful and bright
Shoots in and stuns us with amazing Light;
Secure the Happy Moment e’er ‘tis past,
Not Time more swift, or Lightning flies so fast."
Any self-respecting source-seeker who reads Wesley’s Epistle just after a fresh run-through of Pope’s Essay on Criticism will notice that some of its phrases and ideas were reset a decade later in Pope’s precocious assemblage. Indeed, Pope’s use of Wesley extends beyond phrasing, to the metaphorical structure of whole sections….
— Nickolson Baker, The Size of Thought, pp. 322-327.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
End Pause
It is our task in the world to believe things no one else takes seriously. To abandon such beliefs completely, the human race would die. This is why we are here. A tiny minority. To embody old things, old beliefs. The devil, the angels, heaven, hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse.
— Don DeLillo, from White Noise, in A Portable Apocalypse, Allan Appel, p. 20.
Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment; in reality it is a constant court in perpetual session.
— Franz Kafka, in Ibid., p. 41.
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in Ibid., p. 60.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work . . . I want to achieve it through not dying.
— Woody Allen, in Ibid., p. 58.
He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt.
— Joseph Heller, from Catch 22, in Ibid., p. 58.
The atom bomb, as the problem of mankind's very existence, is equaled by only one other problem: the threat of totalitarian rule (not simply dictatorship, Marxism, or racial theory), with its terroristic structure that obliterates all liberty and human dignity. By one, we lose life; by the other, a life that is not worth living.
— Karl Jaspers, from The Future of Mankind, in Ibid., p. 207.
— Don DeLillo, from White Noise, in A Portable Apocalypse, Allan Appel, p. 20.
Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment; in reality it is a constant court in perpetual session.
— Franz Kafka, in Ibid., p. 41.
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in Ibid., p. 60.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work . . . I want to achieve it through not dying.
— Woody Allen, in Ibid., p. 58.
He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt.
— Joseph Heller, from Catch 22, in Ibid., p. 58.
The atom bomb, as the problem of mankind's very existence, is equaled by only one other problem: the threat of totalitarian rule (not simply dictatorship, Marxism, or racial theory), with its terroristic structure that obliterates all liberty and human dignity. By one, we lose life; by the other, a life that is not worth living.
— Karl Jaspers, from The Future of Mankind, in Ibid., p. 207.
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