'By the time she had caught the flamingo and brought it back,
the fight was over, and both the hedgehogs were out of sight:
`but it doesn't matter much,' thought Alice, `as all the arches
are gone from this side of the ground.' So she tucked it away
under her arm, that it might not escape again, and went back for
a little more conversation with her friend.'
'We have undoubtedly shifted the nature of the correspondences, and their
alignments one to another. With the demise of alchemy, we have looked
increasingly to experiment and measurable results to dictate the nature
of our science. Alchemy is the last moment when the magical is still
permitted as a licit element of the genuinely scientific enterprise, and
it is a moment that has a sort of afterlife in Newton, who would appear
to have regarded force at a distance as an occult power, and who never
gave up his alchemical experiments to the end of his life.'
«les mouvements autonomistes avaient pensé pouvoir trouver une
légitimité à leurs discours grâce à la construction européenne. C'est à
dire qu'on serait passé d'une Europe des nations à une Europe
supranationale reconnaissant d'autres modes d'organisations...»
'Out of the stories of Greek myth modern poets and painters have
constructed new “classical” worlds, not, however, really classical, but
transmuted in their crucibles and tempered into romanticism. In spirit,
if not in letter, the legends told and painted by the new artists are as
unlike the old, as the Arcadia of the Renaissance is unlike the Arcadia
of geography. But it is from the new vessels that we drink in our early
childhood. By the time we can read Greek literature for ourselves, our
imaginations are dyed with romantic colours; the poetry of Homer and
Euripides is laden with imported qualities; the light of antiquity comes
to us through painted panes. If we do not take good heed, the
impression produced by Tennyson’s Lotos Eaters, a poem trembling with modern emotion, will imperceptibly adulterate the nature of our pleasure in the passage of Homer’s Lotophagoi with the melancholy languor of the afternoon.'
Quand vous me montrezl’hirondelle
Qui part jusqu’au prochain avril,
Pourquoi mon âme se meurt-elle ?
Quand vous me montrez l’hirondelle,
C’est que je pense à mon exil.
'..the doubt of onewho would rather walk in mystery than in false lights,
who awaits that he may win, and who prefers the broken fragments of
truth to the imposing completeness of a delusion.'
'Life seen throughout as a countless
show of the finest works of Art; Life shaped, and
purged of the irrelevant, the gross, and the extravagant;
Life, as it were, spiritually selected that
is Truth; a thing as multiple, and changing, as subtle,
and strange, as Life itself, and as little to be bound
by dogma. Truth admits but the one rule:
No deficiency, and no excess! Disobedient to
that rule nothing attains full vitality.
And secretly fettered by that rule is Art, whose
business is the creation of vital things.That aesthete, to be sure, was right,
when he said: “It is Style that makes one
believe in a thing; nothing but Style.”
For, what is Style in its true and broadest sense
save fidelity to idea and mood, and perfect balance
in the clothing of them? '
'... L’emploi des équivalents français devient alors obligatoire au sein
des administrations et des services publics, en remplacement des termes
étrangers.La loi Toubon a aussi rendu obligatoire l’utilisation du français
dans la publicité. Ainsi, les supports publicitaires sur lesquels
apparaissent des slogans ou des textes utilisant des mots en anglais
doivent «impérativement» en donner la traduction (qui apparaît
généralement en petits caractères et précédée d’un astérisque).'
'When you think of something abstract
you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a
conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do
the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning.
Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's
meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can
choose - not simply accept - the phrases that will best cover the
meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely
to mak on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or
mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and
vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or
a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails.'
"Dacă sistemele vechi s-au golit de conţinut, nu înseamnă că nu mai pot
fi create altele noi. Dar, dacă sistemele şi stilurile sînt greu de
înlocuit, fiind dificilă construcţia altora noi, dacă nu chiar
imposibilă, jocul nesfîrşit al nuanţelor oferă spiritului creator al
popoarelor şi oamenilor posibilităţi nelimitate. (Petre Ţuţea, Filozofia nuanţelor, 1969)
.. 'Tout, la cendre latine et la poussière grecque,
Se mêlaient. J’étais haut comme un in-folio.
Deux voix me parlaient. L’une, insidieuse et ferme,
Disait : » La Terre est un gâteau plein de douceur ; Je puis (et ton plaisir serait alors sans terme !)
Te faire un appétit d’une égale grosseur. »
Et l’autre : » Viens ! oh ! viens voyager dans les rêves,
Au delà du possible, au delà du connu ! »
Et celle-là chantait comme le vent des grèves,..'
The phrase‘in reality’ had pointed us, of course, to the dimensions of
reality which are available within the book, its planar perspectives.
And in terms of the ‘slight digression’, all fiction is a digression
from the serious business of acting. All writing that analyses human
motivation or describes the psychological condition of its characters is
to some degree recapitulating the fable of Achilles and the tortoise:
to the extent that every distance is infinitely divisible into more and
more minute units of description, writing is a series of parentheses
within parentheses. Its very nature is to be digressive. We are in one sense getting nowhere...
