-"They have written about physical and emotional woes, about victories and exploits in affairs of war, of sensuality, of passion, etc. They have overlooked the great misfortune, of not understanding -- or of its opposite, the joy of doing so."
-What Dante learned from the Bible was how to write so that the man in the street could understand but the scholar would be perplexed.
-Al Farabi: the soul is that which is capable of defining and by defining reaching the pure reality of an object.
Showing posts with label prose. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prose. Show all posts
Monday, April 11, 2016
Thursday, February 4, 2016
Notes from an Old Journal
1. "People said of Sam Ward that he was the only man capable of strutting while seated."
2. "The effect of the telegraphic style is to intimate a whole spectrum of moral discriminations without ever making them explicit."
3. "Is the primary task of human reason to find formal solutions to abstract problems, and impose these solutions on the raw material of the world, as we experience it? Or is the primary task to get acquainted with the world of experience in all its concrete detail, stating our problems and resolving them later, in the light of that experience?"
2. "The effect of the telegraphic style is to intimate a whole spectrum of moral discriminations without ever making them explicit."
3. "Is the primary task of human reason to find formal solutions to abstract problems, and impose these solutions on the raw material of the world, as we experience it? Or is the primary task to get acquainted with the world of experience in all its concrete detail, stating our problems and resolving them later, in the light of that experience?"
Saturday, January 23, 2016
Two Accounts of Literary Decadence
"What is the mark of every literary decadence? That the life no longer resides in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, and the pages comes to life at the expense of the whole -- the whole is no longer a whole. This, however, is the style of every style of decadence: every time there is an anarchy of atoms."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, Section 7
"I would define that baroque as the style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. In vain did Andrew Lang attempt in the 1880's to imitate Pope's Odyssey, it was already a parody and so defeated the parodist's attempt to exaggerate its tautness. "Baroco" was a term used for one of the syllogistic reasoning: the 18th century applied it to certain abuses in 17th century architecture and painting. I would venture to say that the baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders all its resources. The baroque is intellectual, and Bernard Shaw has said that all intellectual labor is inherently humorous."
Jorge Luis Borges, Preface to the 1954 edition of A Universal History of Inquity
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, Section 7
"I would define that baroque as the style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. In vain did Andrew Lang attempt in the 1880's to imitate Pope's Odyssey, it was already a parody and so defeated the parodist's attempt to exaggerate its tautness. "Baroco" was a term used for one of the syllogistic reasoning: the 18th century applied it to certain abuses in 17th century architecture and painting. I would venture to say that the baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders all its resources. The baroque is intellectual, and Bernard Shaw has said that all intellectual labor is inherently humorous."
Jorge Luis Borges, Preface to the 1954 edition of A Universal History of Inquity
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