June 2012
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In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.
Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks
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Some are to be found who cultivate honourable practices for the recompense, and care nothing for virtue that is unrewarded; whereas it has nothing glorious in it if it shows any element of profit. For what is more shameful than for anyone to calculate the value to a man of being good, since Virtue neither invites by the prospect of gain, nor deters by the prospect of loss, and, so far is she...
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For the Cosmos is mighty and superior to us, and has taken better counsel for us than we can, by uniting us together with the universe under its governance. Besides, to act against it is unreason, and while accomplishing nothing but a vain struggle, it involves us in pains and sorrows.
Epictetus, Fragments
May 2012
254 posts
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No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience… We know but few great men, a great many coats and breeches.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
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Those are amusing persons… who take great pride in the things which are not under our control. A man says, ‘I am better than you; for I have many estates, and you are half-dead with hunger.’ Another says, ‘I am a consular.’ Another, ‘I am a procurator.’ Another, ‘I have thick curly hair.’ But one horse does not say to another horse,...
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The odd sound. What a mercy to have that to turn to. Now and then. In dark and silence to close as if to light the eyes and hear a sound. Some object moving from its place to its last place. Some soft thing softly stirring soon to stir no more. To darkness visible to close the eyes and hear if only that. Some soft thing softly stirring soon to stir no more.
Samuel Beckett, Company
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Separation
Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color
W.S. Merwin
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Douglas Lilburn: From the Port Hills (Margaret...
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No creation, no destruction
The chief metaphor I’m using for Principium III: Nothing proceeds out of the Whole, which has other, larger philosophical implications:
The Whole is comprised of forms, just as a wave is formed from an ocean. Through reification, one can distinguish one wave from the ocean as a whole, one wave from another wave, and one can trace the rise and fall of a particular wave. Yet, in spite of...
“I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then...”
– Isaac Newton (via philosophy-quotes)
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John Dowland: Lachrimae Antiquae (Ensemble...
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The point of view of the cosmos
[T]he ‘point of view of the cosmos’ is very different from a transcendent perspective. As such, it can be contrasted with the theme of a ‘view from above’ that appears throughout ancient philosophy and literature, and is particularly associated with Platonism. Within this Platonic tradition, the ‘view from above’ is the view of a soul that is detached from...
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If you consider yourself as a detached being, it is natural for you to live to old age and be rich and be healthy; but if you consider your self a human being, and as part of the whole, it will be fitting, on account of that whole, that you should be sick, at another take a voyage and be exposed to danger, sometimes to be in want, and possibly—it may happen—to die before your time.
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“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat...”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (via myquotelibrary)
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Theistic continuum in philosophical discourse
For my part, I think—perhaps falsely—that the word religion should be used to designate a phenomenon that involves images, people, offerings, celebrations, and places that are devoted to God or to gods. This absolutely does not exist in philosophy. One might say, but then what do you do with the religion in spirit and in truth, with religion freed from sociological and ritualistic aspects and...
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Each opinion, each view is necessarily partial, truncated, inadequate. In philosophy and in anything, originality comes down to incomplete definitions.
E.M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born
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As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
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[N]ot the status, but the intention, of the one who bestows is what counts. Virtue closes the door to no man; it is open to all, admits all, invites all, the freeborn and the freedman, the slave and the king, and the exile; neither family nor fortune determines its choice—it is satisfied with the naked human being.
Seneca, De Beneficiis, Book III
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To have may be taken from us, to have had, never.
Seneca, Epistulae, XCVIII
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Remember that what you love is mortal, and that nothing of what you love belongs to you in the proper sense of the term. It has been given to you for the time being, not forever or in such a way that it cannot be taken away from you…
Epictetus, Discourses, Book III
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I have seen the poor boy when he came to a tuft of violets in the wood, kneel down on the ground, smell of them, kiss them, & depart without plucking them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal, 1842 (on his son Waldo, who died at age five)
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Men talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head.
Henry David Thoreau, Journal, June 1850
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Nor does greed suffer any man to be grateful; for incontinent hope is never satisfied with what is given and, the more we get, the more we covet; and just as the greater conflagration from which the flame springs, the fiercer and more unbound is its fury, so greed becomes much more active when it is employed in accumulating great riches.
Seneca, De Beneficiis, Book II
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The unexpected always happens.
German proverb (from The Routledge Book of World Proverbs)
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If we allow an encounter with a given thing to be shaped by this expectation that it may last, every such experience will be spoiled and falsified, and ultimately it will be prevented from unfolding its most proper and authentic potential and fertility. All the things that cannot be gained through our pleading can be given to us only as something unexpected, something extra: this is why I am...
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The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy, which depends upon the morrow and wastes to-day.
Seneca, De Brevitate Vitae
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Added music
New tracks added to the music player, all performed by the Hilliard Ensemble: Perotin: Viderunt Omnes Machaut: Ma fin est mon commencement Dunstable: Veni Sancte Spiritus Palestrina: Heu mihi Domine
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Sunday poem: Rainer Maria Rilke
Again and again, however we know the landscape of love and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names, and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others fall: again and again the two of us walk out together under the ancient trees, lie down again and again among the flowers, face to face with the sky.
Rainer Maria Rilke...
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Sunday poem: F.S. Flint
NOVEMBER What is eternal of you I saw in both your eyes. You were among the apple branches; the sun shone, and it was November. Sun and apples and laughter and love we gathered, you and I. And the birds were singing. F.S. Flint
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Sunday poem: Galway Kinnell
From FLOWER HERDING ON MOUNT MONADNOCK In the forest I discover a flower. The invisible life of the thing Goes up in flames that are invisible, Like cellophane burning in the sunlight. It burns up. Its drift is to be nothing. In its covertness it has a way Of uttering itself in place of itself, Its blossoms claim to float in the Empyrean, A wrathful presence on the blur of the ground. The appeal...
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