"Every one of us is losing something precious to us... Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That's part of what it means to be alive."
Haruki Murakami
Kafka on the Shore
"Every one of us is losing something precious to us... Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That's part of what it means to be alive."
Haruki Murakami
Kafka on the Shore
Yeats and the Divine
Although Yeats is often characterised as a mystical or even spiritual writer he is little concerned with God or with spiritual experience of the divine. It would be wrong to say that he is an atheist, since he certainly believes in the divine ‘uncreated spirit’, however, he does not see himself as concerned with the divine. He puts God onto one side of his System, the primary, and distances Him from creation to such an extent that He is no longer relevant, at least to those of antithetical disposition. When God appears in the poetry, He is often addressed through a character such as Crazy Jane or Ribh, or in a mythifying phrase, such as the ‘Primum Mobile that fashioned us’ in ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ or ‘the Great Questioner’ in ‘At Algeciras—A Meditation upon Death’. Considering the mystical Christian philosopher Friedrich von Hügel, Yeats admits much similarity of character, since he too accepts ‘the miracles of the saints’, but he cannot embrace the religion in which they lived and died:
I—though heart might find relief
Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief
What seems most welcome in the tomb—play a predestined part.
Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.
‘Vacillation’ VIII (VP 503)
Note: the above is part of a discussion of the book "A Vision" by Wm B Yeats.
Last edited by rich14285; 08-20-2007 at 09:25 AM. Reason: add note
Whoa! You're reading it too?Originally Posted by caffeinecups
"I know. You've never killed anyone, and don't want to. But listen to me - there are tmes in life when those kinds of excuses don't cut it anymore."
Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore
Not seeing people permits one to attribute to them all possible perfections.
A hundred years is youth in a church and age in a house. It seems as though man's lodging partook of his ephemeral character, and God's house of his eternity.
Hugo Victor - Les Miserables
At thunder and tempest, At the world's coldheartedness,
During times of heavy loss And when you're sad
The greatest art on earth Is to seem uncomplicatedly gay.
To get things clear, they have to firstly be very unclear. But if you get them too quickly, you probably got them wrong.
If you need me urgent, send me a PM
"Who is John Galt?"
(from Atlas Shrugged... by Ayn Rand... I'm on page 40... and this is what making me go on with it.. right now...)
And am I dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven around the stars
Yep, actually finished. It's a good read. I wanna try his other works.
"... Once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about."
Kafka on the Shore, still.
"Good luck to the farmer! Good luck to the man who owns this place, the man who works it, the faithful, the virtuous! I can love him, I can revere him, I can envy him. But I have wasted half my life trying to live his life. I wanted to be something that I was not. I even wanted to be a poet and a middle-class person at the same time. I wanted to be an artist and a man of fantasy, but I also wanted to be a good man, a man at home. It all went on for a long time, till I knew that a man cannot be both and have both, that I am a nomad and not a farmer, a man who searches and not a man who keeps. A long time I castigated myself before gods and laws which were only idols for me. That was what I did wrong, my anguish, my complicity in the world's pain. I increased the world's guilt and anguish, by doing violence to myself, by not daring to walk toward my own salvation. The way to salvation leads neither to the left nor the right: it leads into your own heart, and there alone is God, and there alone is peace..."
Wandering, Notes and Sketches,
by Herman Hesse
...He dug in a box and produced a board and a wooden box of men. Morris had never seen the chess-set befor but Honey stroked them as if greeting old friends. He set out the pieces tenderly.
'First the castles, one at each corner, like the legs of a cow. Then the knights - I love the knights; such proud horseheads, such flaring nostrils and, besides, they move obliwuely. Now the reverend gentlemen, next to the caballeros. And the Queen, the travelling lady; she's my favourite piece, she can go anywhere on the board - zip, zip. And a femme fatale, she is, whose kiss is death. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, here is the King. Vulnerable your King - in the last resort he has to hop off one by one, stage by stage, like Luis XIV escaping from Versailles. Morris shall be black and I white. There are our infantry, our pawns, all ready to go over the top.
Let's begin'
From Shadow Dance - Angela Carter
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. ~ Mark Twain
"Nothing in life is so beautiful as the night before what is yet to be, the night and it's dew."
From Independent People by Halldór Laxness.
Man, I love this book!
the luminous grass of the prairie hides
feet lovely and still as sleeping doves,
porcelain bones strong enough to carry a life,
but weighty and unmovable
As black Dakota hills. ~ Riesa
"Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!"
~Vladimir Nabokov, p. 34 Lolita
"I have so often dreamed of you that you become unreal." ~ Robert Desnos
"The Fascist guns were of the same make and calibre as our own, and the unexploded shells were often reconditioned and fired back. There was said to be one old shell with a nickname of its own which travelled daily to and fro, never exploding."
(Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell)
Seriously...this is like the prototype for Catch-22
Sweet is the voice from far away
That speaks sotto voce and
Is lingering there in the golden air
To quiet the day
"I must be happy, he said, it is less pleasant than I should have thought."
Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett
the luminous grass of the prairie hides
feet lovely and still as sleeping doves,
porcelain bones strong enough to carry a life,
but weighty and unmovable
As black Dakota hills. ~ Riesa
~I just found this whole paragraph so beautiful I copied it all. It's the first page of Weaveworld by Clive Barker.
Shall these bones live?
"...For me a projection involves the two perceptions of sound and sight. I draw upon picture and sonic images in my memory circuits. Since I have read and summarized every book in print during my time, seen and summarized and cross-filed lectures, conversations between individuals, and been separately programmed to evaluate all formal human philosophies ... Dr. Pierce's request evokes a process of options, each of which I produce for myself in the form of images on a screen. It's as if I'm actually looking at a different future each time. And, since I have no bias, no preconception, the decision as to which is the most likely to happen is something I observe in a mechanically detached way."
-from Computerworld by A.E. Van Vogt
"When you listen to the radio you are a witness of the everlasting war between thing and idea, appearance and reality--the human, and the divine."
-Hermann Hesse
..............."I will have such difficulty in becoming English again: here I am Arab in habits, and slip in talking from English to French and Arab unnoticing, yesterday I was 3 hours with an Orleannais, talking French, and he thought at the end I was a compatriot. You may be happy, now all my rough work is finished successfully, and my thesis is I THINK ASSURED. 'Irade' invaluable' ." (Last expression footnote...Lawrence carried {irades} or letters of protection from the Sultan obtained for him by Lord Curzon, then Chancellor of Oxford University.) quote from [Letters of T.E.Lawrence...Archaeology chapter] p77
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