de LAMARTINE

'Mais, ô déclin! quel souffle aride
De notre âge a séché les fleurs ?
Eh quoi ! le lourd compas d’Euclide
Etouffe nos arts enchanteurs !
Elans de l’âme et du génie !
Des calculs la froide manie
Chez nos pères vous remplaça
Ils posèrent sur la nature
Le doigt glacé qui la mesure,
Et la nature se glaça !'

weightless thoughts

'The strangest possibility Jung could imagine, or was at least willing to admit in writing, was that the UFO might be a “materialized psychism.” He does not define what exactly one of those might be, but both the term, and his essay more generally, intimate that if the flying saucer were in some sense “material,” its materiality would have to be some kind of psychological projection. Modern secular humanity was perhaps experiencing a longing for belief (-ism) powerful enough to float a mysterious image in the skies?'

particular world

'The Louvre realized a kind of Kantian ideal for art as the object of disinterested contemplation. It had from the start its dissenters, notably the aesthetic and architectural theorist Quatremère de Quincy, who in 1796 led fifty artists in a protest against the removal of Italian masterpieces from their original settings. The battle over the museum as the place where art is stripped from its original context and shown in a new setting has been with us since the first years of the first museum. From the outset, the museum as collected booty had its justifications as well.'

• ... encyclopedic imagination, something that you would ascribe to one of Balzac’s maniacal collectors or one of Maupassant’s fetishists, rather than to...

multiplicative inverse

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Mark Twain

"To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph." – Mark Twain

“unnoticeable”

'When shapes get this third dimension of depth, they become forms.… When given form, circles become spheres, squares become cubes, triangles become cones or pyramids. Form takes up space in either a real or implied way. In paintings or drawings, for instance, form is implied because it’s an illusion of three dimensions. With sculpture, on the other hand, form is real because it takes up three-dimensional space. Visual artists use light and shadow effects to create the illusion of three-dimensional form.'

‘reading’ the texts at all

'But the argument against humanism seems frequently to depend not only on particular inclinations in the implied definition of terms, but also on a confusion of some of the most important terms. This conservation from which forms, manners, traditions and arts emerge, the ‘humanities’ among them as select educational values, is a natural process (in so far as culture is ‘naturally’ developed) over which we have some discriminating control, and which we can value or devalue at will, choosing to have a care for what comes to us, or deciding (not always unwisely, perhaps) that some things are not worth the cost of keeping. By its nature it is not static.'

underpinning

• A parable can be viewed as an allegory miniaturised, just as an allegory can be viewed as a manifold of metaphors extended into narrative.

ALLEGORY IS A hinge that lets us swing from one plane of meaning to another. This, as the image suggests, goes both ways. We can convert the unknown into the known, allegorise it into the recognisable landscape of our own mythology, or we can discover meanings in the text to which our intellectual world made us previously blind. The technique of reading the Old Testament typologically permitted Christians to see in the Hebrew Scripture a series of promises of the coming of Christ. This was an allegorical reading Talmudists found perverse

limitation and opportunity.

....'metaphor started growing ragged and incoherent very quickly; it went from positive analogy to negative analogy. If the model was a planetary one, then how come the electrons were not continually losing energy in their orbits, as one would expect? If the inside of an atom were really functioning according to its metaphoric other half then the electron would soon lose its necessary energy and spin counter-clockwise into the nucleus. And in any case, since the force of the nucleus is positive and that of the electron negative, why don’t the two simply get together as soon as possible? Either way, there would be no atom. The metaphor only works if (however remotely) this can still be said to be that.'

Satyr play

"The interpreter presents the information, but is not the one making any arguments or acting upon the knowledge that is shared. Similarly, the information we perceive in our consciousness is not created by conscious processes, nor is it reacted to by conscious processes. Consciousness is the middle-man, and it doesn't do as much work as you think."

resymbolizing

•   "Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions."

“culture” was often opposed to “civilization.” Civilization, the thinking went, was a homogenizing system of efficient, rational rules, designed to encourage discipline and “progress.” Culture was the opposite: an unpredictable expression of human potential for its own sake. (It’s for this reason that a term like “the culture industry” has an oxymoronic ring.) Today, we don’t often use the word “civilization”— we prefer to talk, more democratically, in terms of culture—but we’re still conflicted. We can’t help but notice how “civilized” life seems both to facilitate culture and to deaden it. Museums make it easy to see art, but they also weigh it down.'

turnesól

'orice cui e un semn
ascuţit şi solemn
al strigării de lemn,
al chemării de lemn
la noi fapte de lemn, –
un fierbinte îndemn
adresat de un lemn
unor oameni de lemn
într-o lume de lemn
care are consemn'

dilatory raven

'Because the English language has Germanic roots but is heavily influenced by Latin and by French, even non-specialist users of the language—that vast majority of people who are not writers—have luxurious linguistic resources to draw upon. Essentially, English gives two ways of saying almost anything—it offers binary modes of expressing a virtual entirety. For centuries, Latin was the language of the learned, and a principal influence on the literate. In English-speaking cultures, and in both written and spoken English, shifting between a more formal Latinate lexicon and the more down-to-earth Old English words can be immensely effective, if in a way that is largely undetectable

‘canonicity’

'the pilgrim does all that might be expected of him in a single lifetime. He gets himself to the door where the Law might be encountered. He waits there dutifully until his death. Only when he is finally dying is the door at last closed, for this entrance had been constructed solely for him. He even sees the light of revelation on the far side of that door, glimmering away, but he can never pass over the threshold, so as to encounter it. Like Moses on Mount Pisgah, he can see the promised end, but there is no means to achieve it.'

Textuality

 The only truth any text can generate is one that arises out of its form, function, and historical placement.

See, infra.

“Like Prometheus, whose ravaged liver was daily reconstituted so it could be daily ravaged, [Ted] Hughes has had to watch his young self being picked over by biographers, scholars, critics, article writers, and newspaper journalists.” 'Thus are the eagles of the Fourth Estate reduced to mere vultures.

Aesop was right. The hare did lose his race with the tortoise. Here lies his carcass, miles from the finish line.

The prestige of the haruspex was already in decline in Roman times. According to Cicero, Cato the Elder wondered how one haruspex could look at another without laughing.'

wandering lighted

'If we treated the great church as a public promenade, or rather as a splendid international salon, the fault was not wholly our own, and indeed practically there was little profanity in such an attitude. One’s attitude was insignificant, and the bright immensity of the place protected conversation and even gossip. It struck one not as a particular temple, but as formed by the very walls of the faith that has no small pruderies to enforce.'

truth-priority

'The problem with strategic irony is that it avoids responsibility; it is ‘defensive’, ‘pusillanimous’, ‘craven’—a mere ‘manipulation of tone’, little more than ‘attitudinizing’. It puts the emphasis on the writer’s relationship with the reader, rather than on the matter of the poem, and so it is both tiresomely ingratiating and contemptibly apologetic.'

• Intelligence with regard to form, which is, or at least should be a basic prerequisite of all poetry, may be the only thing which can, when raised high enough, replace affectation with artfulness, and remove the obligation to irony—for those who wish to avoid it. I mean to suggest that both affectation and artfulness, which are usually taken for bad qualities, are in another sense fundamental elements of poetry (and lyric, perhaps, especially).

Hearsay

• 'Philosophy of mind is more than marketing trick. But it’s hard to prevent hot and trendy topics from blending together, even when they themselves are much weightier: ISIS, political correctness, a dog playing a cowbell, an actress giving a speech at the Oscars, a dress. They are all just content. Any content will do.'

'Aside from the serious risks to an informed citizenry and a functioning democracy associated with treating mere conjecture and opinion as objective reporting, there is the danger of contagion. Unless people are fortunate enough to have studied argumentation or are otherwise capable of separating at least reasonable objectivity from fiction, they’re likely to be easily led. A functional democracy is underpinned by — indeed impossible without — informed citizens.  Aristotle argued for teaching the techniques of persuasion so that people might protect themselves from distraction and dishonesty. Without such awareness, each of us risks becoming the easy victim of modern day sophistry.'

magical realm

 'Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.'

' Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.' 

• The secret of good old-age is none other than an honest pact with solitude.

Les dieux ont toujours soif

Mourir pour des idées,
C'est bien beau mais lesquelles?
Et comme toutes sont entre elles
Ressemblantes

It Don't Mean

' Besides, I had ideas of many sensible and corporeal things; for although I might suppose that I was dreaming, and that all which I saw or imagined was false, I could not, nevertheless, deny that the ideas were in reality in my thoughts. But, because I had already very clearly recognized in myself that the intelligent nature is distinct from the corporeal, and as I observed that all composition is an evidence of dependency, and that a state of dependency is manifestly a state of imperfection,..'