Fearlessness is what love seeks... Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future…by (https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/02/25/love-and-saint-augustine-hannah-arendt/) Illustration by Maurice Sendak from I’ll Be You and You Be Me by Ruth Krauss.
The meaning of freedom can never be grasped by the divided mind. If I feel separate from my experience, and from the world, freedom will seem to be the extent to which I can push the world around, and fate the extent to which the world pushes me around. But to the whole mind there is no contrast of “I” and the world. There is just one process acting, and it does everything that happens. It raises my little finger and it creates earthquakes. Or, if you want to put it that way, I raise my little finger and also make earthquakes. No one fates and no one is being fated.by (https://www.brainpickings.org/2021/03/16/alan-watts-freedom-fear-love/) Art by Thomas Wright from his Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, 1750.
Magic… in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one perceives — from the swallow swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of grass, and indeed the blade of grass itself — is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different from our own.by (https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/07/07/the-spell-of-the-sensuous-david-abram/)
Song: “Blue Moon” by Snowblink
Mad Girl’s Love Song I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.) The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.) God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade: Exit seraphim and Satan’s men: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I fancied you’d return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.) I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.)by Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar
by (https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/19/simone-weil-attention-gravity-and-grace/)We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.
The will only controls a few movements of a few muscles, and these movements are associated with the idea of the change of position of nearby objects. I can will to put my hand flat on the table. If inner purity, inspiration or truth of thought were necessarily associated with attitudes of this kind, they might be the object of will. As this is not the case, we can only beg for them… Or should we cease to desire them? What could be worse? Inner supplication is the only reasonable way, for it avoids stiffening muscles which have nothing to do with the matter. What could be more stupid than to tighten up our muscles and set our jaws about virtue, or poetry, or the solution of a problem. Attention is something quite different.
Pride is a tightening up of this kind. There is a lack of grace (we can give the word its double meaning here) in the proud man. It is the result of a mistake.
In a section of his 1843 masterwork Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, which also gave us Kierkegaard on our greatest source of unhappiness, the Danish philosopher defines boredom as a sense of emptiness and examines it not as an absence of stimulation but as an absence of meaning — an idea that also explains why it’s possible, today more than ever, to be overstimulated but existentially bored.by (https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/14/kierkegaard-boredom-idleness-either-or/)
Too-ticky offers comforting solidarity in Moomintroll’s lament that he doesn’t understand the snow: I don’t either… You believe it’s cold, but if you build yourself a snowhouse it’s warm. You think it’s white, but at times it looks pink, and another time it’s blue. It can be softer than anything, and then again harder than stone. Nothing is certain.by (https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/29/too-ticky-quotes-tove-jansson/)
Leave something of sweetness and substance in the mouth of the world.by (https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/02/03/emily-levine-cold-solace-anna-belle-kaufman/)
The crucial point of all this is that agency – like consciousness, and indeed life itself – isn’t just something you can perceive by squinting at the fine details. Nor is it some second-order effect, with particles behaving ‘as if’ they’re agents, perhaps even conscious agents, when enough of them get together. Agents are genuine causes in their own right, and don’t deserve to be relegated to scare quotes. Those who object can do so only because we’ve so far failed to find adequate theories to explain how agency comes about. But maybe that’s just because we’ve failed to seek them in the right places – until now.by (https://aeon.co/essays/the-biological-research-putting-purpose-back-into-life)
Despair, like the absurd, has opinions and desires about everything in general and nothing in particular. Silence expresses this attitude very well. But from the moment that the rebel finds his voice — even though he says nothing but “no” — he begins to desire and to judge… Not every value entails rebellion, but every act of rebellion tacitly invokes a value… Awareness, no matter how confused it may be, develops from every act of rebellion: the sudden, dazzling perception that there is something in man with which he can identify himself, even if only for a moment.
One must accept the unacceptable and hold to the untenable… From absolute despair will spring infinite joy, from blind servitude, unbounded freedom. To be free is, precisely, to abolish ends. The innocence of the ceaseless change of things, as soon as one consents to it, represents the maximum liberty. The free mind willingly accepts what is necessary. Nietzsche’s most profound concept is that the necessity of phenomena, if it is absolute, without rifts, does not imply any kind of restraint. Total acceptance of total necessity is his paradoxical definition of freedom. The question “free of what?” is thus replaced by “free for what?” Liberty coincides with heroism. It is the asceticism of the great man, “the bow bent to the breaking-point.”by (https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/06/17/albert-camus-the-rebel/)
Tell the whole truth. Don’t be lazy, don’t be afraid. Close the critic out when you are drafting something new. Take chances in the interest of clarity of emotion... Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.
Jane Kenyon - BrainPickings
Illustration by Kris Di Giacomo from Enormous Smallness by Matthew Burgess, a picture-book biography of E.E. Cummings
We emerge from laws that, as far as we can tell, are timeless, and yet we exist for the briefest moment of time. We are guided by laws that operate without concern for destination, and yet we constantly ask ourselves where we are headed. We are shaped by laws that seem not to require an underlying rationale, and yet we persistently seek meaning and purpose.
Brian Greene / BrainPickings
Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
Radiating from the pages is also the welcome disorientation of time travel, deconditioning our habit of mistaking today’s culturally constructed commonplaces for ahistorical givens: Blackwell’s bright-red tomato blazes the reminder that this plant — so common today as to be commonplace the world over — was then an exotic native of the New World, known in the Old World as love-apple.by https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/01/29/elizabeth-blackwell-curious-herbal/?mc_cid=8f54bc6cad&mc_eid=d361d399e1
Unable to perceive the shape of you, I find you all around me. Your presence fills my eyes with your love. It humbles my heart, for you are everywhere.
I watched the Shape Of Water over Christmas and although it was visually pleasing I did not find it that interesting. Except for the poem at the end.
Hemenway’s translation appears on page 41 of her book The Book of Everything: Journey of the Heart’s Desire : Hakim Sanai’s Walled Garden of Truth
https://books.google.ca/books?id=_ERX2xRllz8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.ca/books?id=C9MNlTCgi8cC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=falseps
https://www.ted.com/talks/bj_miller_what_really_matters_at_the_end_of_life#t-723640 :...Let death be what takes us, not lack of imagination.
You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts; And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime. And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered. For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.by (https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/11/21/kahlil-gibran-prophet-talking/?mc_cid=190867f242&mc_eid=d361d399e1)
In this, too, I see a poignant lesson in love, evocative of Rilke and what may be the greatest relationship advice ever committed to words: “I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.”by (https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/11/13/robert-macfarlane-underland-tree-love/?mc_cid=e315e9cc24&mc_eid=d361d399e1)
Posts
All Comments
