Change is a constant

“We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.” in The Summing Up (1938), p. 306.

William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

Resilience

 
"Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

Extract from Ulysses (written 1833, published 1842), by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892)

 

A farewell to her

I just finished reading Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms again, because even though it's described as a war novel, it's mainly a novel about love. And let's face it, I'm looking for solace. Yet I was looking for a particular passage (no, not that overhyped, overtattoed, decontextualised Instagram trope), but when the page finally came, I was confused, it winded me. The words struck me more personally than ever before. It was my second time reading it, and a decade earlier...I was less experienced. But now I realise how much less experienced I was. The sentiments Hemingway expressed, here and now they were mine...up until just a few weeks ago. There is no denying this experience greatly enriched me, and to paraphrase Woolf: I welcomed the wild horse in me. Here's the passage in question, halfway down Chapter 34. I sure hope you can relate...as even though these things have passed, they have been, and they were good. Probably the best.


“That night at the hotel, in our room with the long empty hall outside and our shoes outside the door, a thick carpet on the floor of the room, outside the windows the rain falling and in the room light and pleasant and cheerful, then the light out and it exciting with smooth sheets and the bed comfortable, feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal.

We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once.

I have been alone while I was with many girls and that is the way you can be most lonely. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.

But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time. If people bring so much courage to the world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

 

Solitary spaces

 

« Et tous les espaces de nos solitudes passées, les espaces où nous avons souffert de la solitude, désiré la solitude, joui de la solitude, compromis la solitude sont en nous ineffaçables. Et très précisément, l’être ne veut pas les effacer. Il sait d’instinct que ces espaces de sa solitude sont constitutifs. Même lorsque ces espaces sont à jamais rayés du présent, étrangers désormais à toutes les promesses d’avenir, même lorsqu’on n’a plus de grenier, même lorsqu’on a perdu la mansarde, il restera toujours qu’on a aimé un grenier, qu’on a vécu dans une mansarde. »

Gaston Bachelard (French philosopher, 1884-1962), Poétique de l'espace.

 

Intelligibility

 
”In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in the case of poetry, it's the exact opposite.”

Paul Dirac, theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate (1902-1984)
 

Knowable

"It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them."


J. Robert Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist, speech in McMaster university, Canada, 1962.


Found in City of the End of Things: Lectures on Civilization and Empire, by Pr. Jonathan Hart (2009)

Alter echo

 
"The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidates who reminded them most of themselves. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn't understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go."

Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye, 1982

 

No certainty.

"Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines."


Richard Buckminster Fuller, architect, systems theorist, engineer, designer (1895-1983)

∑=λ

 
“Personne ne se rend compte que certaines personnes dépensent beaucoup d’énergie simplement pour être normales.”

"Nobody realises that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."

Albert Camus, writer (1916-1960), Carnets II (1942-1951).

 

Fragment #21

 

"Let's swap roles,

You wait, and I don't come back."

"Let's swap characters,

You ponder, and I squander time."

"Let's swap lives,

You die inside, and I wield the knife."

* The first couplet is by Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian poet, apart from the comma I've added after "wait".

 

The rest is not silence

"Je rêve d'un jour où l'égoïsme ne régnera plus dans les sciences, où on s'associera pour étudier, au lieu d'envoyer aux académiciens des plis cachetés, on s'empressera de publier ses moindres observations pour peu qu'elles soient nouvelles, et on ajoutera "je ne sais pas le reste"."

Évariste Galois (1811-1832)

Together is a space

 

"Oh, the comfort – the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts, nor measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them – keep what is worth keeping – and with the breath of kindness blow the rest away."

 
Dinah Mulock Craik (1826–87) A Life for a Life (1859)

 

Made wholesome

 

“Wherever I am, wherever I go, I always have such need to merely talk to you. Even when I have nothing to talk about – with you I just seem to go right ahead and sort of invent it. I invent it for you. Because I never seem to run out of tenderness for you and because I need to feel you near. Excuse the bad writing and excuse the emotional overflow. What I mean to say, perhaps, is that, in a way, I am never empty of you; not for a moment, an instant, a single second.”

Virginia Woolf, a letter to Vita Sackville-West 

PS: I couldn't trace the letter in any edition of the Letters, perhaps someone tracked it down?

 

I as another

"How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people -- first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.

I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude..." Mein Weltbild, 1934 (Trans. The World As I See It, 1935)

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Nunquam said this

"Religions are not revealed: they are evolved. If a religion were revealed by God, that religion would be perfect in whole and in part, and would be as perfect at the first moment of its revelation as after ten thousand years of practice. There has never been a religion that fulfills those conditions." God and My Neighbour (1903)

Robert Blatchford, journalist and author (1851-1943)

We who work in vision

"A scientist is in a sense a learned small boy. There is something of the scientist in every small boy. Others must outgrow it. Scientists can stay that way all their lives."

Speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, December 10, 1967.

George Wald, American scientist and Nobel laureate (1906-1997)

Etched in crumbling stone

  

"'Writing' is the Latin of our times. The modern language of the people is video and sound."

Lawrence Lessing, attorney and political activist (Wikimania conference, August 2006)

Fields of knowledge

“There is a beauty in discovery. There is mathematics in music, a kinship of science and poetry in the description of nature, and exquisite form in a molecule. Attempts to place different disciplines in different camps are revealed as artificial in the face of the unity of knowledge. All literate men are sustained by the philosopher, the historian, the political analyst, the economist, the scientist, the poet, the artisan and the musician.”

Glenn T. Seaborg, chemist, Nobel laureate (1912-1999)

Wisdom

 

“When I have ceased to break my wings 
Against the faultiness of things, 
And learned that compromises wait 
Behind each hardly opened gate, 
When I can look Life in the eyes, 
Grown calm and very coldly wise, 
Life will have given me the Truth, 
And taken in exchange -- my youth.”

Sara Teasdale, American poet (1884-1933)

 

The battles within

“Kind words, kind looks, kind acts, and warm hand-shakes, - these are means of grace when men in trouble are fighting their unseen battles.”

John Hall, pastor (1829-1898)