"There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless."
"That finding leads us to a shocking conclusion: a gesture is more individual than an individual. [...] it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations."
Gestures are more unique and rare than humans.
"Everything else is without importance, from the Creator's point of view, and is only a play of permutations and combinations within a general program, which is not a prophetic anticipation of the future but merely sets the limits of possibilities within which all power of decision has been left to chance."
"When we are thrust out into the world just as we are, we first have to identify with that particular throw of the dice, with that accident organized by the divine computer: to get over our surprise that precisely this (what we see facing us in the mirror) is our self. Without the faith that our face expresses our self, without that basic illusion, that archillusion, we cannot live, or at least we cannot take life seriously. And it isn't enough for us to identify with our selves, it is necessary to do so passionately, to the point of life and death. Because only in this way can we regard ourselves not merely as a variant of a human prototype but as a being with its own irreplaceable essence."
"She would go out into the street holding the flower before her eyes, staring at it tenaciously so as to see only that single beautiful blue point, to see it as the last thing she wanted to preserve for herself from a world she had ceased to love."
"Suddenly frightened by her hatred, she said to herself: the world is at some sort of border; if it is crossed, everything will turn to madness: people will walk the streets holding forget-me-nots or kill one another on sight"
As if those two were the same thing...
"Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary. This is the obscenity of war: the
intimacy of mutually shed blood, the lascivious proximity of two soldiers who, eye to eye, bayonet each other."
"The purpose of the poetry is not to try to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia."
"That instant when Agnes suddenly, without preparation, lifted her arm in a flowing, easy motion was miraculous. How was it possible that in a single fraction of a second, and for the very first time, she discovered a motion of the arm and body so perfect and polished that it resembled a finished work of art?"
A gesture becoming a masterpiece in itself.
"It was as if two distant times had suddenly met in a single second and two different women in a single gesture."
"[...] things exist in their essence even before they are materially realized and named."
Fully believe that.
Bettina and Goethe: "[...] but I soon understood that what you wanted to show me was not a drawing but a pistol that you are holding, aiming far into my immortality." She wanted to follow him into immortality.
"And I realized that my Faust didn't interest them at all and that the show they wished to see was not the puppets I was leading around the stage, but me myself! Not Faust, but Goethe!"
When it comes to revering authors- we must admire their work not their personal lives.
"There are two methods for cultivating the uniqueness of the self: the method of addition and the method of subtraction. "
Adding: " But the matter becomes less idyllic if a person decides to add love for communism, for the homeland, for Mussolini, for Catholicism or atheism, for fascism or antifascism"
"And since for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have be- some a kind of higher reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth."
Please tell us the REALITY.
"Things will lose ninety percent of their meaning and will become light. In such a weightless environment fanaticism will disappear. War will become impossible."
"Strange: she was up to her ears in love with him and yet she had no interest in him. I could even say: she was up to her ears in love with him and precisely for that reason she had no interest in him. ([...] The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other. "
We can see a parallel between Laura and Bettina:
"[...] the cause and object of her love was not Goethe, but love."
American culture:
" As soon as feelings are seen as a value, everyone wants to feel; and because we all like to pride ourselves on our values, we have a tendency to show off our feelings."
"It is part of the definition of feeling that it is born in us without our will, often against our will. As soon as we want to feel {decide to feel, just as Don Quixote decided to love Dulcinea), feeling is no longer feeling but an imitation of feeling, a show of feeling. This is commonly called hysteria."
"Nineteenth-century writers often ended their novels with marriage. This was not because they wanted to save the love story from marital boredom. No, they wanted to save it from intercourse!"
Ahh-- now I understand Jane Austen.... :)
The Russian soul- "The modern age, based on Cartesian critical thought, only penetrated there after a lag of some one or two hundred years. Homo sentimentalis thus failed to find there a sufficient counterweight and became his own hyperbole commonly known as the Slavic soul."
Everything is forgiven if it's done in the name of love. France has ceased to feel.
"The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings."
"Beauty, more than ugliness, reveals the nonindividuality, the impersonality of a face."
"And that's life: it does not resemble a picaresque novel in which from one chapter to the next the hero is continually being surprised by new events that have no common denominator. It resembles a composition that musicians call a theme with variations."
About the horoscope. How true.
"Your life will always be built from the same materials, the same bricks, the same problems, and what will seem to you at first "a new life" will soon turn out to be just a variation of your old existence."
"An individual does not receive a share of indecent fantasy from a lover by means of Telephone but by means of this impersonal (or superpersonal or sub-personal) stream. To say that this river that runs through us is impersonal means that it does not belong to us but to him who created us and made it flow within us; in other words, that it belongs to God or even that it is God or one of his incarnations."
That's saying something. Sexuality is a spiritual creation.
"That's why love, in order to prove itself true, wishes to escape the sensible, wishes to reject moderation, doesn't wish to seem probable; longs to change into the delires actifs de la passion (let's not forget Eluard!), in other words, wishes to be mad! "
"[...] no episode is a priori condemned to remain an episode forever, for every event, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and thus changing into a story or an adventure."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So many ideas iin this book! Really I haven't even begun to process all of them. I must read it again and again... Throughout my entire lifespan.
"That finding leads us to a shocking conclusion: a gesture is more individual than an individual. [...] it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations."
Gestures are more unique and rare than humans.
"Everything else is without importance, from the Creator's point of view, and is only a play of permutations and combinations within a general program, which is not a prophetic anticipation of the future but merely sets the limits of possibilities within which all power of decision has been left to chance."
"When we are thrust out into the world just as we are, we first have to identify with that particular throw of the dice, with that accident organized by the divine computer: to get over our surprise that precisely this (what we see facing us in the mirror) is our self. Without the faith that our face expresses our self, without that basic illusion, that archillusion, we cannot live, or at least we cannot take life seriously. And it isn't enough for us to identify with our selves, it is necessary to do so passionately, to the point of life and death. Because only in this way can we regard ourselves not merely as a variant of a human prototype but as a being with its own irreplaceable essence."
"She would go out into the street holding the flower before her eyes, staring at it tenaciously so as to see only that single beautiful blue point, to see it as the last thing she wanted to preserve for herself from a world she had ceased to love."
"Suddenly frightened by her hatred, she said to herself: the world is at some sort of border; if it is crossed, everything will turn to madness: people will walk the streets holding forget-me-nots or kill one another on sight"
As if those two were the same thing...
"Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary. This is the obscenity of war: the
intimacy of mutually shed blood, the lascivious proximity of two soldiers who, eye to eye, bayonet each other."
"The purpose of the poetry is not to try to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia."
"That instant when Agnes suddenly, without preparation, lifted her arm in a flowing, easy motion was miraculous. How was it possible that in a single fraction of a second, and for the very first time, she discovered a motion of the arm and body so perfect and polished that it resembled a finished work of art?"
A gesture becoming a masterpiece in itself.
"It was as if two distant times had suddenly met in a single second and two different women in a single gesture."
"[...] things exist in their essence even before they are materially realized and named."
Fully believe that.
Bettina and Goethe: "[...] but I soon understood that what you wanted to show me was not a drawing but a pistol that you are holding, aiming far into my immortality." She wanted to follow him into immortality.
"And I realized that my Faust didn't interest them at all and that the show they wished to see was not the puppets I was leading around the stage, but me myself! Not Faust, but Goethe!"
When it comes to revering authors- we must admire their work not their personal lives.
"There are two methods for cultivating the uniqueness of the self: the method of addition and the method of subtraction. "
Adding: " But the matter becomes less idyllic if a person decides to add love for communism, for the homeland, for Mussolini, for Catholicism or atheism, for fascism or antifascism"
"And since for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have be- some a kind of higher reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth."
Please tell us the REALITY.
"Things will lose ninety percent of their meaning and will become light. In such a weightless environment fanaticism will disappear. War will become impossible."
"Strange: she was up to her ears in love with him and yet she had no interest in him. I could even say: she was up to her ears in love with him and precisely for that reason she had no interest in him. ([...] The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other. "
We can see a parallel between Laura and Bettina:
"[...] the cause and object of her love was not Goethe, but love."
American culture:
" As soon as feelings are seen as a value, everyone wants to feel; and because we all like to pride ourselves on our values, we have a tendency to show off our feelings."
"It is part of the definition of feeling that it is born in us without our will, often against our will. As soon as we want to feel {decide to feel, just as Don Quixote decided to love Dulcinea), feeling is no longer feeling but an imitation of feeling, a show of feeling. This is commonly called hysteria."
"Nineteenth-century writers often ended their novels with marriage. This was not because they wanted to save the love story from marital boredom. No, they wanted to save it from intercourse!"
Ahh-- now I understand Jane Austen.... :)
The Russian soul- "The modern age, based on Cartesian critical thought, only penetrated there after a lag of some one or two hundred years. Homo sentimentalis thus failed to find there a sufficient counterweight and became his own hyperbole commonly known as the Slavic soul."
Everything is forgiven if it's done in the name of love. France has ceased to feel.
"The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings."
"Beauty, more than ugliness, reveals the nonindividuality, the impersonality of a face."
"And that's life: it does not resemble a picaresque novel in which from one chapter to the next the hero is continually being surprised by new events that have no common denominator. It resembles a composition that musicians call a theme with variations."
About the horoscope. How true.
"Your life will always be built from the same materials, the same bricks, the same problems, and what will seem to you at first "a new life" will soon turn out to be just a variation of your old existence."
"An individual does not receive a share of indecent fantasy from a lover by means of Telephone but by means of this impersonal (or superpersonal or sub-personal) stream. To say that this river that runs through us is impersonal means that it does not belong to us but to him who created us and made it flow within us; in other words, that it belongs to God or even that it is God or one of his incarnations."
That's saying something. Sexuality is a spiritual creation.
"That's why love, in order to prove itself true, wishes to escape the sensible, wishes to reject moderation, doesn't wish to seem probable; longs to change into the delires actifs de la passion (let's not forget Eluard!), in other words, wishes to be mad! "
"[...] no episode is a priori condemned to remain an episode forever, for every event, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and thus changing into a story or an adventure."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So many ideas iin this book! Really I haven't even begun to process all of them. I must read it again and again... Throughout my entire lifespan.
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