just some sulphurous fume induced utterings
We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.
Stephen Fry (via shakethecobwebs)
She loved the sea only for its storms and greenery only when it grew up here and there among ruins. She needed to derive from things a sort of personal gain; and she rejected as useless everything that did not contribute to the immense gratification of her heart,—being by temperament more sentimental than artistic, in search of emotions and not landscapes.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
“Herodotus has been growing increasingly ingenious in recent years.
Once the credulous reader of everything he heard or saw, useful precisely because he was uncritical, he has emerged as a figure almost sinisterly clever, creating patterns of reciprocity, setting up expectations which he then subverts, manipulating his characters and their preoccupations like puppets. Herodotus’ portrayal of character has been compared to the technique of a ‘master-musician’, the architecture of his Histories to the ‘pedimental structure’ of a Greek temple.
In most respects, there is no cause for mourning the loss of Herodotus’ innocence…”
-Thomas Harrison, Divinity and History: The Religion of Herodotus(2000)
Historical footnotes resemble traditional glosses in form. But they seek to show that the work they support claims authority and solidity from the historical conditions of its creation: that its author excavated its foundationsa nd discvoered its componenets in the right places, and used the right crafts to mortise them together. To do so they locate they production of the work in question in time and space, emphasizing the limited horizions and opportunities of its author, rather than those of its reader. Footnoes buttress and undermine, at one and the same time.
Anthony Grafton,The Footnote: A Curious History (1997)
God does not wish to have narrow-minded and empty-headed children. On the contrary, he demands that we should know him; he wishes his children to be poor in spirit but rich in knowledge of him, and to set the highest value on acquiring knowledge of God.
G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History
Trans. H.B. Nisbet. 1975, Cambridge University Press
Trans. H.B. Nisbet. 1975, Cambridge University Press
Rightly or wrongly, ancients and moderns believe in the historicity of the Trojan War—but for the opposite reasons. We believe because of the marvelous aspect; they believed in spite of it. For the Greeks, the Trojan War had existed because a war has nothing of the marvelous about it; if one takes the marvelous out of Homer, this war remains. For the modems, the Trojan War is true because if the fabulous elements with which Homer surrounds it: only an authentic event that moved the national soul gives birth to epic and legend.
Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? an Essay on the Constitutive Imagination
…to be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take oneself as an object of a complex and difficult elaboration…Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself.
Michel Foucault
That’s how stories happen - with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s as Tolstoy said: happiness is an allegory, unhappiness is a story.
Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the shore
(via nuevoprincipio)
Freshly reburnished,
the temple mirror is clear—
blossoming snowflakes
the temple mirror is clear—
blossoming snowflakes
Matsuo Basho
Behold! The Lego Guggenheim
