ReConvergence

[reconvergence]

Lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.

-Melville, Moby Dick

[melangerie]

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

[reconvergence]

But my fervent will to create impels me ever again toward man; thus is the hammer impelled toward the stone.  O men, in the stone there sleeps an image, the image of my images.  Alas, that it must sleep in the hardest, the ugliest stone!  Now my hammer rages cruelly against its prison.  Pieces of rock rain from the stone: what is that to me?  I want to perfect it; for a shadow came to me — the stillest and lightest of all things once came to me.  The beauty of the overman came to me as a shadow.  O my brothers, what are the gods to me now?

-Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

[reconvergence]

You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you.

You say you believe in Zarathustra?  But what matters Zarathustra? You are my believers-but what matter all believers? You had not yet sought yourselves: and you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all faith amounts to so little.

Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.  Verily, my brothers, with different eyes shall I then seek my lost ones; with a different love shall I then love you.

[mythologyofblue]

The path to my fixed purpose is hid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (via mythologyofblue)

[reconvergence]

Here is seen the great distinction between intuitive and abstract knowledge, a distinction of such importance and of general application in the whole of our discussion, and one which hitherto has received too little notice. Between the two is a wide gulf; and, in regard to knowledge of the inner nature of the world, this gulf can be crossed only by philosophy. Intuitively, or in concreto, every man is really conscious of all philosophical truths; but to bring them into his abstract knowledge, into reflection, is the business of the philosopher, who neither ought to nor can do more than this.

Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

[reconvergence]

Once Anything might have happened

[reconvergence]

This is Just to Say

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

William Carlos Williams

[reconvergence]

[reconvergence]

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.  (Jorge Luis Borges, "Borges and I")

In old age, passions and desires, together with the susceptibility to their objects, are gradually extinguished; the emotions no longer find any excitement, for the power to make representations or mental pictures becomes weaker and weaker, and its images feebler. The impressions no longer stick to us, but pass away without a trace; the days roll by faster and faster; events lose their significance; everything grows pale. The old man, stricken in years, totters about or rests in a corner, now only a shadow, a ghost, of his former self. What still remains there for death to destroy? One day a slumber is his last, and his dreams are _____________. They are the dreams that Hamlet asks about in the famous monologue. I believe that we dream them just now.

Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

Jorge de la Torre, Drawing of Borges

[reconvergence]

"Alas, poor Yorick!  I knew him, Horatio..."

It is one and the same will, living and appearing in them all, whose phenomena fight with one another and tear one another to pieces. In one individual it appears powerfully, in another more feebly. Here and there it reaches thoughtfulness and is softened more or less by the light of knowledge, until at last in the individual case this knowledge is purified and enhanced by suffering itself. It then reaches the point where the phenomenon, the veil of Maya, no longer deceives it. It sees through the form of the phenomenon, the principium individuationis; the egoism resting on this expires with it. The motives that were previously so powerful now lose their force, and instead of them, the complete knowledge of the real nature of the world, acting as a quieter of the will, produces resignation, the giving up not merely of life, but of the whole will-to-live itself. Thus we see in tragedy the noblest men, after a long conflict and suffering, finally renounce for ever all the pleasures of life and the aims till then pursued so keenly, or cheerfully and willingly give up life itself. Thus the steadfast prince of Calderon, Gretchen in Faust, Hamlet whom his friend Horatio would gladly follow, but who enjoins him to remain for a while in this harsh world and to breathe in pain in order to throw light on Hamlet's fate and clear his memory; also the Maid of Orleans, the Bride of Messina. They all die purified by suffering, in other words after the will-to-live has already expired in them.

Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

[reconvergence]

Just as a circle of one inch in diameter and one of forty million miles in diameter have absolutely the same geometrical properties, so the events and the history of a village and of a kingdom are essentially the same; and we can study and learn to know mankind just as well in the one as in the other.

Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

[reconvergence]

Just as the beautiful bodily form can be seen to the best advantage with the lightest clothing, or even no clothing at all, and thus a very handsome man, if at the same time he had taste and could follow it, would prefer to walk about almost naked, clothed only after the manner of the ancients; so will every fine mind rich in ideas express itself always in the most natural, candid, and simple way, concerned if it be possible to communicate its thoughts to others, and thus to relieve the loneliness that one is bound to feel in a world such as this.

Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present

[reconvergence]

In a similarly limited way man wants the truth: he desires the agreeable life-preserving consequences of truth, but he is indifferent to pure knowledge, which has no consequences, and he is hostile to possibly damaging and destructive truths

Nietzsche, Letter to Sophia

[reconvergence]

The farmer in deep thought is pacing through the rain among his blank fields, with hands in pockets, in his head a harvest already planted. A cold wind ruffles the water among the browned weeds. On all sides the world rolls coldly away: black orchards darkened by the March clouds- leaving room for thought. Down past the brushwood bristling by the rainsluiced wagonroad looms the artist figure of the farmer - composing

William Carlos Williams

[reconvergence]

As long as any one desires life as a pleasure in itself, he has not raised his eyes above the horizon of the beast; he only desires more consciously what the beast seeks by a blind impulse. It is so with us all, for the greater part of our lives. We do not shake off the beast, but are beasts ourselves, suffering we know not what.

Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations

Erik Satie, Gymnopedie 3

[reconvergence]

The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvellous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.

Einstein