Quotes

[BECOMING-INTENSE]

One night as he sat at his table head on hands ... Lift his
past head a moment to see his past hands ...

- Samuel Beckett Stirrings Still(1988)

[Nizar]

“Each material has its specific characteristics in which we must understand it if we want to use it. In other words, no design is possible until the materials with which you design are completely understood.”

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

[BECOMING-INTENSE]

The Landscape sees. ... The percept is the landscape
before man, in the absence of man.

- Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari What is Philosophy?(1994)

[BECOMING-INTENSE]

Through the next hour, during which the gentle morning
breeze freshened, the dusty vapour had developed itself far
and wide into the appearance of huge aerial draperies, hanging
in mighty volumes from the sky to the earth; and at particular
points, where the eddies of the breeze acted upon the pendulous
skirts of these aerial curtains, rents were perceived, sometimes
taking the form of regular arches, portals, and windows, through
which began dimly to gleam the heads of camels 'indorsed" with
human beings - and at intervals the moving of men and horses
in tumultuous array - and then through other openings or vistas
at far distant points the flashing of polished arms. But sometimes,
as the wind slackened or died away, all those openings, of
whatever form, in the cloudy pall would slowly close, and for a
time the whole pageant was shut up from view; although the
growing din, the clamours, shrieks, and groans, ascending
from infuriated myriads, reported, in a language not to be
misunderstood, what was going on behind the cloudy screen.

- Thomas de Quincey The Revolt of the Tartars(1837)

[Faust]

"Maybe an unexamined life is not worth living. But a man's examined life can surely make him wish he was dead."

- Saul Bellow, Ravelstein.

[crouka]

"cold dark deep and absolutely clear"

elizabeth bishop

[Fade to Black]

"A curious thing: the characters who laugh most in the book are not the ones with the greatest sense of humor; on the contrary, they are those who have none at all. A group of young people leave a country house to stroll in the park; three girls among them "keep laughing so complaisantly at Evgeny Pavlovitch's banter that he comes to suspect they may no longer even be listening to what he's saying." This suspicion "made him burst into sudden laughter." A fine observation: first the collective laughter from the girls who, as they laugh, lose track of their reason for laughing and go on laughing for no reason at all; and then the laughter (this sort quite rare, quite precious) of Evgeny Pavlovitch as he realizes that the girls' laughter is devoid of any comic rationale at all, and, in the face of this comical absence of the comical, he bursts into laughter himself."

- Milan Kundera, "The Comical Absence of the Comical (Dostoyevsky: The Idiot)"

[BECOMING-INTENSE]

We are often content to distinguish between daydreams or waking dreams and
the dreams of sleep. But these are questions of tiredness and repose. We thereby
miss the third state, which is perhaps the most important one: insomnia, which alone
is appropriate to night, and the dream of insomnia, which is a matter of exhaustion.
The exhausted person is the wide-eyed person. We dreamed in sleep, but we dream
alongside insomnia. The two exhaustions, the logical and the psychological,
"the head and the lungs," as Kafka said, meet up behind our backs. Kafka and
Beckett hardly resemble each other, but what they do have in common is the
insomniac dream. In the dream of insomnia, it is a question not of realizing the
impossible but of exhausting the possible, either by giving it a maximal extension that
allows it to be treated like a real waking day, in the manner of Kafka, or else by
reducing it to a minimum that subjects it to the nothingness of a night without sleep,
as in Beckett. The dream is the guardian of insomnia that keeps it from falling asleep.
Insomnia is the crouching beast that stretches out as long as the days and curls up
as tightly as the night. The terrifying posture of insomnia.

- Gilles Deleuze Essays: Critical and Clinical(1993)

[MASUGNEN]

Development takes place only as occurrences vaporize.

[HreP]

,-.

"An artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his work wouldn't exist, for the artist doesn't live in a vacuum. Some sort of pressure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn't look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world." - Tarkovsky

"If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company." - Sartre. This one is so simple, yet so true.

[BSR]

We speak of dress, to which we alone are impelled by an original instinct, that of the ape being merely one of imitation. We speak not of other points of view, which either do not deserve to be examined or must stand over to other opportunities, of the use of clothes as a protection against the inclemency of weather, of the sense of modesty that chooses them as covering; our inquiry is exclusively as to the source of pleasure which they and other kinds of decoration to the human soul. It lies by no means only in the gratification of the vanity that seeks to be admired by others, but in the heightened and ennobles vital feeling of the wearer himself.

Hermann LOTZE, Microcosmus
a romantic account of clothing (which i'm pretty sure many SZers will endorse) according to which it is more a material extension of the self than a covering of the body

[interest1]

.

"Four things come not back:
the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life and the neglected opportunity."

- proverb

.

[MASUGNEN]

Reaching forward is neglecting God's will.

[BECOMING-INTENSE]

If I am a giraffe, and the ordinary Englishmen
who write about me are nice, well-behaved dogs,
there it is, the animals are different .... The animal
I am you instinctively dislike.

- D. H. Lawrence Letter to John Middleton Murry(1929)

[BECOMING-INTENSE]

a calf, the head, the eyes, the snout, the nostrils ... and
sometimes he lost himself in such sustained contemplation
of the beast that he really believed he experienced, for an
instant, the type of existence of such a being ... in short,
the question if he, among men, was a dog or another animal
had already occupied his thoughts since childhood.

- Karl Philipp Moritz Anton Reiser(1785-90)