In Depths

 

"Creativity -- like human life itself -- begins in darkness. We need to acknowledge this. All too often, we think only in terms of light: "And then the lightbulb went on and I got it!" It is true that insights may come to us as flashes. It is true that some of these flashes may be blinding. It is, however, also true that such bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary."

in The Artist's Way (1992), by Julia Cameron, artist, author, teacher, filmmaker, composer, and journalist (1948-)

 

At the spectrum's ends

 

"A maxim for the twenty-first century might well be to start not by fighting evil in the name of good, but by attacking the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found. We should struggle not against the devil himself but what allows the devil to live — Manichaean thinking itself."

in Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (2003), by Tzvetan Todorov (1939-2017), Bulgarian-French historian, philosopher, structuralist literary critic, sociologist, essayist and geologist.

Incidentally, I met the man when he came to my town for a lecture and to introduce this book which was just out. Fascinating person(ality) and thinking process (you could almost see the cogs spinning in his brain).

 

Fuel to the fire

 
"You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper. The fire isn't thinking 'Oh, this is Kant,' or 'Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,' or 'Nice tits,' while it burns. To the fire, they're nothing but scraps of paper. It's the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there's no distinction--they're all just fuel."

Haruki Murakami, After Dark (2004)

 

La agudeza para recordarse

 
“When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see.”

Baltasar Gracián, Spanish Jesuit and Baroque prose writer and philosopher, (1601-1658), Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia (The Art of Worldly Wisdom) (1647)

 

De la dignité dans l'indignation

 
"La vie garde un prix tant qu'on en accorde à celle des autres, à travers l'amour, l'amitié, l'indignation, la compassion."

"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, and compassion."

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), La vieillesse (1970)

 

Morally unethical

 

"In its original literal sense, "moral relativism" is simply moral complexity. That is, anyone who agrees that stealing a loaf of bread to feed one's children is not the moral equivalent of, say, shoplifting a dress for the fun of it, is a relativist of sorts. But in recent years, conservatives bent on reinstating an essentially religious vocabulary of absolute good and evil as the only legitimate framework for discussing social values have redefined "relative" as "arbitrary"."

Ellen Jane Willis, writer (1941-2006)


Very interesting read (source)

 

Lights and shadows

"I don't believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn't treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should. Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality."

in the essay "Deeds Rather Than Words" (1963), by Walt Disney, entrepreneur and animator (1901-1966)

From the Pierian spring

 
"A polymath is someone who is interested in everything, and nothing else."

Susan Sontag, writer, critic, polymath (1933-2004)

 

Where are we?

 

An invisible bird flies over,

but casts a quick shadow.

What is the body? That shadow of a shadow

of your love, that somehow contains
the entire universe.

A man sleeps heavily,
though something blazes in him like the sun,

like a magnificent fringe sewn up under the hem.

He turns under the covers.

Any image is a lie:

    A clear red stone tastes sweet.

    You kiss a beautiful mouth, and a key

    turns in the lock of your fear.

    A spoken sentence sharpens to a fine edge.
    

    A mother dove looks for her nest,

    asking where, ku? Where, ku?

Where the lion lies down.
Where any man or woman goes to cry.
Where the sick go when they hope to get well.

Where a wind lifts that helps with winnowing,

and, the same moment, sends a ship on its way.

Where anyone says Only God Is Real.

Ya Hu! Where beyond where.

A bright weaver's shuttle flashes back and forth,

east-west, Where-are-we? Ma ku? Maku.
like the sun saying Where are we?
as it weaves with the asking.

 

Rumi (1207-1273), in The Essential Rumi.

 

I am wrong.

 
"In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion."

Carl Sagan (1934-1996), in his keynote address at CSICOP conference (1987).

 

Steady flow

"Inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness."

Brenda Ueland, journalist, writer (1891-1985)

 

Mirror, mirror

“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

in On the concept of History, aka Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

Here Are My Black Clothes

 

I think now it is better to love no one
than to love you. Here are my black clothes,
the tired nightgowns and robes fraying
in many places. Why should they hang useless
as though I were going naked? You liked me well enough
in black; I make you a gift of these objects.
You will want to touch them with your mouth, run
your fingers through the thin
tender underthings and I
will not need them in my new life.

in The House on Marshland (1975), by Louise Glück, American poet and Nobel prize in literature (April 22, 1943 - October 13, 2023)

 

The unlost and the unfound

 
“. . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

O waste of lost, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this weary, unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.”

in Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life (1929) by Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938).

Never discard the words of anyone whom you cannot say for certain if they are a genius or a mad person.

 

A measurement of discovery

 

"There are two possible outcomes: If the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery."

Enrico Fermi, physicist and Nobel laureate (1901-1954)

Apparently this is what these people have found out. They were scientists in their own rights, showing us that what we thought was obvious was indeed...a discovery several orders of magnitude less tantalisingly promising than they initially thought (Darwin Award for the win).

Coherence

 

"The modern masses do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience… What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part."

in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

 

Through time, time (un)conquered

 

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”

The Sound and the Fury (1929), William Faulkner (1897-1962)

 

Spurned on

"Spurned pity can turn into cruelty just as spurned love turns into hate."


in Aphorisms (1880/1893), by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, writer (1830-1916)

Grafted to grow

"In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul."


The Mask of Apollo (1966), by Mary Renault, novelist (1905-1983)


I don't really fancy the genre, but the two novels I read were certainly interesting. I recommend reading about her life first, the novels will make much more sense.

Hic Sunt Monstris

 
"Let me state for the record that I am second to none in decrying, loathing, and desiring to defeat those who wish to replace freedom with religious tyranny of the most brutal kind--and who have murdered countless innocent civilians in cold blood. Their acts are monstrous and barbaric. But I differ from Krauthammer by believing that monsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder--just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit.

And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be treated in an inhuman fashion. You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value."

Extract from the article "The Abolition of Slavery" in The New Republic (Dec. 19, 2005), by Andrew Sullivan (British-American author, editor, blogger).

Source for the quote