Miscellaneous quotation

In speaking and in writing something mad occurs: the true conversation is a pure play of words. What’s amazing, in fact, is that people should make such a ridiculous mistake as to imagine they are speaking of things. Precisely what is most characteristic of language—that it attends only to itself—everybody ignores. As a result it is a wondrous and fruitful mystery—to the point that, if one speaks purely for the sake of speaking, one expresses the most splendid, the most original truths. But if a person wishes to speak of some particular thing, that capricious creature language has him say the most ridiculous and muddle-headed of stuff. Which explains the hatred some serious people have for language. They see its mischievousness, but they don’t see that contemptible chatter is the infinitely serious side of language. If only one could have people understand that what applies to mathematical formulas applies to language too. They form a world apart, they play with each other, expressing only their own prodigious nature, which is precisely why they are so expressive—precisely why the strange play of relationships between things finds its reflection in them. Only by means of their freedom are they members of nature, and only in their free movements does the spirit of the world manifest itself and make itself the delicate measure and pattern of things. The same is true of language: he who has a subtle sense of its fingering, its timing, its musical spirit, he who intuits the delicate operation of its intimate nature, moving tongue or hand to it as he follows, he will be a prophet; conversely, he who knows this, but does not have the ear or the ability to write truths like these, will be mocked by language itself and derided by men, as was Cassandra by the Trojans. If in saying this I believe I have shown, in the clearest way possible, the essence and say it, so that no poetry has come out of it at all. But what if I felt compelled to speak? what if this linguistic impulse to speak were the hallmark of the inspiration of language, of the operation of language, in me? what if my will wanted only what I am compelled to do? might not this, in the end, without my realizing or imagining it, be poetry and make a mystery of language comprehensible? and would I then be a writer by vocation, since a writer can only be someone who is possessed by language?

--Novalis, "Monologue" qtd. in Calasso's Literature and the Gods, p. 191

Miscellaneous quotation

A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images. And in a good novel, the whole of the philosophy has passed into the images. But if once the philosophy overflows the characters and action, and therefore looks like a label stuck on the work, the plot loses its authenticity and the novel its life. Nevertheless, a work that is to last cannot dispense with profound ideas. And this secret fusion between experiences and ideas, between life and reflection on the meaning of life, is what makes the great novelist.

--Albert Camus (tr. and ed. Philip Thody), "Selected Essays and Notebooks"

Heinrich Heine, Excerpt from "On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany"

Do not smile at my advice -- the advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and philosophers of nature. Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible as has taken place in the spiritual. Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder is of true Germanic character; it is not very nimble, but rumbles along ponderously. Yet, it will come and when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then you know that the German thunderbolt has fallen at last. At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in the remotest deserts of Africa will hide in their royal dens. A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll. At present, it is true, everything is tolerably quiet; and though here and there some few men create a little stir, do not imagine these are to be the real actors in the piece. They are only little curs chasing one another round the empty arena, barking and snapping at one another, till the appointed hour when the troop of gladiators appear to fight for life and death.
--Heinrich Heine (tr. John Snodgrass), On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany

Marcel Theroux, Excerpt from 'Strange Bodies'

"Johnson has the best phrase for it. In one of his letters, he writes that ‘in the deaths of those close to us, the continuity of being is lacerated’. The continuity of being. The human personality is not an object, it’s a process, a constant state of becoming, that depends on a web of interdependencies, binding us to one another with invisible filaments, to our time, to memories and possessions, and back to our changing selves. And even that image probably overstates the solidity and integrity of the human personality. Strip a person away from the relationships that constitute their identity, the friends, the loved ones, the familiar sounds, and the outcome is bound to be breakdown and madness."
--Marcel Theroux, Strange Bodies

Julian Young, Excerpt from "Reconsidering Nietzsche"

You treat postmodern readings of Nietzsche with some deference in your book, but you seem cautious about embracing them yourself. You form the conclusion that Nietzsche is a “plural realist.” What do you mean by that and how is it different from the postmodern interpretation?

I would actually describe myself as treating postmodernist readings with “restraint” rather than “deference.” Postmodernism has its origins in Kant’s observation that all experience is interpretation, that all experience is filtered through the particular structures of the human mind. To this, taking its lead from both Hegel and Nietzsche, postmodernism adds that the filters in question vary from language to language, culture to culture, angle of interest to angle of interest. And so, it concludes, since there are many equally good interpretations of the world, no single one can be picked as the uniquely correct interpretation. From this it follows, so it is claimed, that there can be no particular character that reality has, since to assign it any such character would be arbitrarily to privilege one interpretation over all the others. And if there is no particular character that reality has, then the very idea of “reality” makes no sense. The concept must be abandoned; there is nothing but interpretations.

We “plural realists”–Nietzsche, Hubert Dreyfus (who coined the term), and myself–agree that there are many equally valid interpretations of reality, that there is no uniquely correct interpretation. But from this it does not follow that there is no way reality is, since an equally possible inference is that there are many ways it is. And in fact it is pretty obvious that there indeed are many ways that reality is. Consider a rolling, Provençal landscape. To the property developer it shows up as “valuable real estate,” to the wine grower as a “unique terroir,” to the mining engineer as a “bauxite deposit,” to the cyclist as an “impediment and challenge,” and to the fundamental physicist as “quanta of energy.” We do not have to choose between these interpretations because, quite evidently, they are all true. Each interpretation truly describes reality from, in Nietzsche’s word, the “perspective” of a particular interest. Some interpretations of course we will want to reject as false. That we do, as it were, democratically. If someone claims that the landscape is a papier mâché construction on an alien film-set we will reject that on the grounds of its discordance with the coherent picture built up by all the interpretations we accept as true.

--Julian Young, Harper's Magazine Interview "Reconsidering Nietzsche"

http://harpers.org/blog/2010/09/reconsidering-nietzsche-six-questions-for-julian-young/

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Excerpt from "The Black Swan"

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight read-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
--Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Excerpt quoted in "Nietzsche and Antiquity"

Historical consciousness fails to understand its own nature if, in order to understand, it seeks to exclude that which alone makes understanding possible. To think historically [Historisch denken] means, in fact, to perform the transposition that the concepts of the past undergo when we try to think in them [die Umsetzung vollziehen, die den Begriffen der Vergangenheit geschieht, wenn wir in ihnen zu denken suchen]. To think historically always involves establishing a connection between those ideas and one’s own thinking.
--Hans-Georg Gadamer (qtd. in Nietzsche and Antiquity)

Albert Camus, "La Vie d’Artiste" (tr. Ryan Bloom)

"THE LIFE OF THE ARTIST: A MIMODRAMA IN TWO PARTS"

PART ONE

A.

A small painter’s studio. Three walls, one of which is, perhaps, made of glass. These panels must be mobile. The studio is shabby but contains some attractive objects: an antique, a beautiful pitcher, some drawings, an old copper vase, two or three pieces of old furniture with dirty, but handsomely made, wood. Above all, the light.

As the curtain rises, the painter and his wife. He paints, she poses. They are shabbily, but tastefully, dressed. She shivers. He looks at her. He stops painting, goes to load up the stove. While he’s doing this, she gets up and goes over to hug him. He keeps her against him a moment, then takes her back to the pedestal on which she poses. She makes angry faces. They laugh. She returns to posing. He works.

Behind the painter, a friend enters. He waves to the wife, showing her the bottle of wine and the pâté he brings. She stands and hurries over to him. The painter gets angry, but notices his friend and laughs. The friend lays the food out on the table and the three of them surround it. Clearly, they are hungry and they laugh. But as they are about to sit the painter stops them, runs to grab a piece of heavy paper, and begins to sketch still-lifes of the food. The others protest and grab the pâté. They clink glasses and begin to eat. The painter, glass in hand, goes off to gaze at the picture in progress and to mull it over. The others look at him, smiling. He puts down his glass and returns to the painting, no longer concerned with them. Quietly, the painter’s wife settles back onto the pedestal without him even noticing. When he raises his eyes and sees her, he stares at her in silence, then, suddenly, goes to hug her.

Blackout.

B.

There are a lot more canvases in the studio, another piece of furniture, and a small rug. The wife folds laundry in a corner of the studio. A crib can be seen. The painter works. The friend enters with a dealer, who has an air of contemptuous self-importance about him. He looks at a canvas, turns it in all directions, ruminates, blows his nose, and offers two coins. The painter is about to accept when the friend signals to him. He refuses and then receives three coins. The dealer is led out. The door closed, the painter does a few jubilant somersaults and turns on the rug, while the friend juggles the coins, and the wife sings without being heard.

Blackout.

C.

Sequence of blackouts punctuated by a spotlight on the painter working, each time on a new canvas. Light. He is surrounded by canvases. Two or three dealers are discussing. Some gaze at the canvases on the other side of the easel. On the table, a variety of food has been brought: fine fruit, elegant flasks. Slowly, the wall panels begin to move. The studio gets larger. Furniture is brought in. Dealers empty their pockets into some sort of purse near the easel and begin to gather up the canvases. One discusses the price of a picture with the painter, pays him, immediately sells it to a second dealer, who resells it, for a nice profit, to a third. The painter stretches, sits down, and laughs. His wife hurries over with a little boy, who is already getting big, and places a clearly opulent bathrobe over her husband’s shoulders.

Blackout.

D.

Blackouts and lights on the painter at work. Light. The studio has gotten even bigger. Furniture, rugs, crystals, and other refined provisions continue to be brought. He works but his canvas already has a frame. His wife is in a corner with a young man and a little girl. Some benefactors enter, one an aesthete with two Afghan hounds. They look at the paintings with a lorgnette. Some colleagues come to talk to the painter, interrupting him. They bring him art books, prints, etc., which he leafs through with one hand while he paints with the other. An elegant woman enters and asks to have her portrait done. He interrupts his work, poses her, and begins to paint her. Another woman, exactly the same as the first, enters. Same game. He paints her. Then a third, and he is working on three pictures at the same time.

Some students and disciples arrive, set up their easels as in a workshop, and, from time to time, come over to place their sketches between the painter and his painting. He advises them, having to hold one of his students’ hands while he erases part of his own picture. His wife brings him a third child, who sits between his legs.

Enter suppliers, some men and women, academics, military personnel, boxers, actors. Tea is served. The painter is constantly bothered. A fashionable designer also enters. She adorns the wife and daughter with yards of fabric, which the painter tangles his feet in while the dogs get mixed up in everything. A jeweller brings jewelry boxes. As the painter is about to make a brushstroke, someone hands him a cup of tea. A woman slips her hand between the painting and him so that he may kiss it. He kisses, drinks his tea, paints, speaks to the models, to the students, praises his wife, waves, from afar, to his friend, who is kept away by the masses, and who remains alone, in a corner, pushed more and more toward the door through which he eventually disappears. Two characters come by, calmly prattling in the painter’s ears.¹

He smiles, smiles again; the studio, which has been enlarged as much as possible, is nonetheless more and more crowded. He paints only here and there, around the people. He wobbles.

Blackout.

E.

Light quickly illuminates the same scene with the same characters. Music. Two officials enter in a display of pageantry. Ceremonial greetings. One presents him with a small medal to wear around his neck. Music. The other presents him a bigger medal, so on and so forth, until he is covered in decorations. At that moment, someone adorns his head with a laurel wreath. Then someone gives him some paintbrushes. Encumbered, he cannot move and is stuck in this pose. Then an official painter, who paints his portrait, arrives, then a second painter, who paints a portrait of the first painter painting the hero, then a third, and so on. Everyone chatters in the light, the ribbons, the dogs, the easels. With great pageantry, somebody brings the painter a mirror so that he may gaze at himself.

Sudden and total silence.

He looks at himself and sees what he’s become.

Silence.

Suddenly, he overturns the mirror, tears off his medals, chases out the dogs, the women, the painters, and, with his paintbrushes, makes a furious fencing motion toward the students, half strangles an official with the cord of his medal and drags him out. Returning to the empty stage, his wife and children cowering in a corner, he takes all of the paintings and tears them up, gashes them, tramples them, overturns furniture, runs toward his wife to strip her of her fashionable glory, and then, returning to center stage like a crazy man, alone in the middle of disaster, he weeps bitterly.

PART TWO

Blackout.

A.

The center of the stage is naked. The furniture is pushed to the walls. As the curtain rises, the painter is trying, aided by his wife and kids, to drag in a gigantic canvas, which takes up the entire height of the room and a large part of the width. Once the painting is in place, very little free space is left. In that area, the painter’s family is wedged, anxiously watching the painter, who places ladders and stools in front of the canvas. In his shirtsleeves, he climbs all the way up one of the ladders so that he may work while his wife distributes to the children the remains of the food.

Blackout.

B.

The painter is still working from his ladder. The dealer enters and calls out to him. He doesn’t answer. The wife arrives. She shakes her head and shows the canvas. The dealer takes a ruler from his pocket and attempts to measure the canvas. He shakes his head and leaves. Two other dealers enter. They resell a painting for a clear loss, the reverse of what happened in Part One. They call out to the painter. He doesn’t respond. They shake the ladder. The painter throws at their heads whatever he has on hand. The dealers flee. The wife gets on her knees to beg, but the painter remains deaf.

Blackout.

C.

Series of blackouts and lights on the painter, still, always, working on the same picture. Lights. A creditor with a bill. He doesn’t respond. The wife shakes her head. A succession of creditors. The same game. The bailiff arrives, reads his official statement. One by one, the pieces of furniture are removed. The wall panels come back together, the studio becomes much smaller, the canvas more and more inconvenient. He paints. The fashionable designer arrives, stripping the wife of whatever remains. The jeweller returns to take back the wife and daughter’s jewelry. The girl looks up at her mother and father. She looks at the painting, at her father’s back. She flees behind the jeweller. The wife calls out to the father. He paints.

Blackout.

D.

Series of blackouts and lights on the painter, who is always working. Only the ladder has moved. Light. The room is now emptied of furniture, impoverished. Some colleagues come, look at the canvas, shake their heads, and walk off. The eldest son, given his portion of bread by his mother, refuses it, gives it to his brother, places a bag on his back, hugs his mother, and heads off. The mother calls out to the painter. He paints.

Blackout.

E.

Same effects. Lights. The child is sick. The doctor leaves, returns with some nurses, who take the child. The painter watches him go, looks at his wife without descending the ladder, and shakes his head. He returns to painting. His wife staggers and falls.

Blackout.

F.

The wife is in bed, sick and exhausted. She is delirious. He is always painting. Just then, the friend enters. He hesitates, looks at his comrade, and then goes over to the bed and sits in silence. The painter turns, looks at him without expression, and returns to painting.

Blackout.

G.

He is still, always painting. The friend is standing beside the bed with the doctor. The wife is dying. Just as the painter puts the finishing touch, she dies. The doctor leaves. The painter turns, sees her dead, descends, walks slowly toward her, and with a great, silent cry, suddenly throws himself by the bedside.

At this moment, the neighbors begin to enter and, little by little, fill the studio, moving toward the bed. But suddenly the spotlights flash on over the completed work, the lights dripping in a stream of music. Abruptly, all turn to the work and stand visibly stupefied, while he, oblivious to his work and their shock, cries.

Then he raises his head, notices the others, goes over to them, and gently pushes them toward the exit. He goes to a corner looking for a piece of heavy paper and an easel, and installs himself in front of the bed. The friend looks at him, hesitates, then leaves. The painter kisses his wife, returns to the easel, looks at her again, and, while the curtain slowly falls, begins to paint the dead face.

--Albert Camus (tr. Ryan Bloom, ill. Roman Muradov)

_____

1. Here, the sound effects should imitate the sounds of a barnyard. For example, a tape can be run in reverse. Similarly, the sounds of high society chattering can be symbolized by the clatter of castanets.

© Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1965.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/08/the-life-of-the-artist-a-mimodrama-in-two-parts.html

Louis MacNeice, "The Gloomy Academic"

The Glory that was Greece: put it in a syllabus, grade it 
Page by page 
To train the mind or even to point a moral 
For the present age: 
Models of logic and lucidity, dignity, sanity, 
The golden mean between opposing ills... 
But I can do nothing so useful or so simple; 
These dead are dead 
And when I should remember the paragons of Hellas 
I think instead 
Of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists, 
The careless athletes and the fancy boys, 
The hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled sceptics 
And the Agora and the noise 
Of the demagogues and the quacks; and the women pouring 
Libations over graves 
And the trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta and lastly 
I think of the slaves. 
And how one can imagine oneself among them 
I do not know; 
It was all so unimaginably different 
And all so long ago.

--Louis MacNeice, "The Gloomy Academic"

Miscellaneous quotation

"Every body, every quality of a body, resolves itself into an enormous number of vibrations, movements, changes. . . . Philosophy has long dismissed the notion of substance and modern physics had endorsed the dismissal. . . . How then does the world come to appear to us as a collection of solid, static objects extended in space? Because of the intellect, which presents us with a false view of it."
--Dr. Joad, quoted by Wallace Stevens in "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Miscellaneous quotation

"Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent must function also as a deflection of reality."
--Kenneth Burke

Giacomo Leopardi, "Zibaldone"

"Reason is the enemy of all greatness: reason is the enemy of nature: nature is great, reason is small. I mean that it will be more or less difficult for a man to be great the more he is governed by reason, that few can be great (and in art and poetry perhaps no one) unless they are governed by illusions."

--Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115276/giacomo-leopardis-zibaldone-reviewed-adam-kirsch

cf. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/oct/10/greatest-intellectual-diary-italian-literature/;

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/feb/10/magic-leopardi/

Jorge Luis Borges, Excerpt from "Labryinths"

"Any great and lasting book must be ambiguous, Borges says; it is a mirror that makes the reader's features known, but the author must seem to be unaware of the significance of his work -- which is an excellent description of Borges's own art. 'God must not engage in theology; the writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.'"
--Borges, Labyrinths

Friedrich Nietzsche, Excerpt from "On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense"

"What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms--in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins."

--Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense"

Paul Ricoeur, Excerpt from "Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation"

"Three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud . . . “truth as lying” would be the negative heading under which one might place these three exercises of suspicion."
--Paul Ricoeur, "Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation"

Miscellaneous quotation

“Men are disturbed not by events but by their opinion about events.”
--Epictetus

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/wellbeing/10146546/Anxious-Depressed-Try-Greek-philosophy.html

Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Parable of the Madman"

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" -- As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? -- Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him -- you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us -- for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

--Friedrich Nietzsche, The Parable of the Madman

http://www.historyguide.org/europe/madman.html

Giorgio Agamben, Excerpt from "What Is A Paradigm"

Feuerbach once wrote that the philosophical element in each work is its Entvicklungsfahigkeit, literally, its capability to be developed. If a work, be it a work of science or art or scholarship has some value, it will contain this philosophical element. It is something which remains unsaid within the work but which demands to be unfolded and worked out. By the way I think this is a very good definition of philosophy. Philosophy has no specificity, no proper territory, it is within literature, within art or science or theology or whatever, it is this element which contains a capability to be developed. In a sense philosophy is scattered in every territory. It is always a diaspora, and must be recollected and gathered up.
--Giorgio Agamben, "What Is A Paradigm"

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/what-is-a-paradigm/

Friedrich Nietzsche, Excerpt from "Daybreak"

. . . philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow — it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of ‘work,’ that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to ‘get everything done’ at once, including every old or new book: — this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously fore and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers.
--Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak