There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world. At least descriptive psychology is probably, taken as a whole, a form of anthropomorphism, a nibbling at our own limits. The inner world can only be experienced, not described - Psychology is the description of the reflection of the terrestrial world in the heavenly plane, or, more correctly, the description of a reflection such as we, soaked as we are in our terrestrial nature, imagine it, for no reflection actually occurs, only we see the earth wherever we turn.

Psychology is impatience.

All human errors are impatience, the premature breaking off of what is methodical, an apparent fencing in of the apparent thing.

-Franz Kafka, Notebooks, October 19, 1917, "Wedding Preparations"

Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.

-Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae

Around the time that President Kennedy went to Germany and gave his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, Europe represented 12.5 percent of the world’s population. Today it is 7.2 percent, and if current trends continue, by 2050 only 5 percent of the world will be European.

-NYT

When Auden chose Ashbery’s first volume for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, he wrote O’Hara a thoughtful rejection, saying, “I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any ‘surrealistic’ style, namely of confusing authentic nonlogical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.”

-NYT

Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often—and in my inmost self perhaps all the time— I doubt that I am a human being.

-Franz Kafka

[via 3 quarks daily]

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter [or email or facebook wall post] from them.

-Arthur Schopenhauer

When the birds are sleeping
That's when the trees sing

In your boat, tied to a tree
I hope you'll find the sea

-Seabear, 'I Sing, I Swim'

"No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence - that which makes its truth, its meaning - its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream - alone."

-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

-Little People - A Tiny Street Art Project

I am really trying to make clear the nature of the artist’s responsibility to his society. The peculiar nature of this responsibility is that he must never cease warring with it, for its sake and for his own.

-James Baldwin

Michael Kenna: Silent World

[via Monoscope]

What did surgeons, artists, and CEO’s have in common? Most of them reported that they managed both their time and their attention. In surgery, in the studio, and in the time carved out to think through strategies and issues, these professionals reported shutting down the devices and endless inputs (email, phone, interruptions), at scheduled times, and claiming those moments to focus. In almost every case, these professionals reported experiencing “flow” (a la Csikszentmihalyi) in their work.

-Linda Stone, who coined the phrase “continuous partial attention”

[via 43 folders]
__________________________

In his seminal work, 'Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience', Csíkszentmihályi outlines his theory that people are most happy when they are in a state of flow— a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation.

[Wikipedia]

I am sorry I have not learnt to play at cards. It is very useful in life: it generates kindness, and consolidates society.

-Samuel Johnson

Philip Glass Violin Concerto, mvt. I
[with time lapse video of Edinburgh]

The Negative alone, however strong it may be, cannot suffice, as in my unhappiest moments I believe it can. For if I have gone the tiniest step upward, won any, be it the most dubious kind of security for myself, I then stretch out on my step and wait for the Negative, not to climb up to me, indeed, but to drag me down from it. Hence it is a defensive instinct in me that won't tolerate my having the slightest degree of lasting ease and smashes the marriage bed, for example, even before it has been set up.

-Franz Kafka, 1922 Diaries

Max Brod, responding to Kafka's now-famous remark - "We are nihilistic thoughts that came into God's head" - explained to his friend the Gnostic notion that the Demiurge had made this world both sinful and evil. "No," Kafka replied, "I believe we are not such a radical relapse of God's, only one of His bad moods. He had a bad day." Playing straight man, the faithful Brod asked if this meant there was hope outside our cosmos. Kafka smiled, and charmingly said: "Plenty of hope - for God - no end of hope - only not for us."

-Harold Bloom, Introduction to Modern Critical Interpretations: Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis

A Little Fable

"Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."

"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.


-Franz Kafka

"They said it's okay to kill Jews: Jews represent a threat to our way of life, to our gene pool, to our values, and so on. They've justified their behavior completely. But, if you think it's okay, then why try to cover it up? Why try to conceal the fact that you're doing it?"

-Errol Morris


Seed Video Feature: Marc Hauser + Errol Morris (Highlights)
The evolutionary psychologist and the documentary filmmaker game theory, Stanley Milgram, and whether science can make us better people.

In the summer of 1925, Werner Heisenberg was stricken with hay fever and having trouble with math. He asked his advisor for two weeks off and left for a barren island in the North Sea. He spent his mornings swimming and hiking, but every evening Heisenberg tried to describe atoms in a theory that included only what could be measured. One night, feverish with insight, he calculated until dawn. After Heisenberg put down his pencil as the sun began to rise, he walked to the tip of the island, confident he had discovered quantum mechanics.

-Seed Magazine, 'The Reality Tests: Do we create the world just by looking at it?'

Talking in Bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.


-Philip Larkin

Hallmark cards for the damned

-William Logan, on Franz Wright's Walking to Martha's Vineyard

Now, by "comic" Kavanagh didn't necessarily mean something that makes you double over with laughter. He meant comic in the sense that tragedy is overcome, or, more accurately, he meant that in the deepest human tragedy there is a seed of supernatural joy.

I would like that kind of life, that kind of death.

-Christian Wiman, from an interview with Christianity Today

I lost interest in writing poetry because it requires one's entire attention—a hell of a lot of patience.

-Josef Stalin, in a letter to a friend

Mr. Wiman reminds us of the vital truth that the critic Yvor Winters taught, and that most contemporary poets refuse to hear: that form, in a good poem, does not stem from a deficiency of feeling, but from its painful excess. "Art — or, to be more precise, form — is not only what enables artists to experience this sense of wrongness at all ... it is their only hope of wholeness and release."

-'The Poet's Ambition'

Andrew Largeman: You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff, that idea of home is gone.

Sam: I still feel at home in my house.

Andrew Largeman: You'll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day. One day, and it's just gone and you can never get it back. It's like you get homesick for a place that doesn't exist. I mean it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.

Life isn't simple, it's complicated. We're all just thrown in here together, in a world full of chaos and confusion, a world full of questions and no answers, death always lingering around the corner, and we do our best. We can only do our best, and my dad did his best. He always tried to tell me that you have to go for what you want in life because you never know how long you're going to be here. And whether you succeed or you fail, the most important thing is to have tried. And apparently no one will guide you in the right direction, in the end you have to learn for yourself. You have to grow up yourself.

-Death at a Funeral

the most insufferable band of the decade.

-Jon Pareles, 'The Case Against Coldplay'

We'll do more and more reading on screens, but they won't replace paper—never mind what your friend with a Kindle tells you. Rather, paper seems to be the new Prozac. A balm for the distracted mind. It's contained, offline, tactile. William Powers writes about this elegantly in his essay "Hamlet's BlackBerry: Why Paper Is Eternal." He describes the white stuff as "a still point, an anchor for the consciousness."

Moby Dick has become a spa.

Slate is Grand Central Station.

-Michael Agger, 'Lazy Bastards: How We Read Online'

-Jason Tozer

[via CR blog]

Paradise Lost

ADAM: Paradise has arbitrary dietary restrictions?

DEVIL: They're really more like guidelines.

GOD: Incorrect.

-Lit 101 Class In Three Lines or Less

The events of the twentieth century, he says there, raise real doubts about the fate of justice in this world. But if the question cannot be answered in the affirmative, and people are largely amoral and self-centered, then "one might ask with Kant whether it is worthwhile for human beings to live on the earth." We must therefore, he says, begin "with the assumption that a reasonably just political society is possible," and with the related assumption that human beings have enough of a moral nature that they can be moved by considerations of fairness and respect. Beginning from such assumptions, he sets out to produce a plausible blueprint for an affirmative answer to the question of political stability.

-'John Rawls and Our Plural Nation' [via 3quarksdaily]

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

-George Orwell, 'Why I Write'

Pop culture references to the butterfly effect may be bad physics, but they're a good barometer of how the public thinks about science. They expose the growing chasm between what the public expects from scientific research - that is, a series of ever more precise answers about the world we live in - and the realms of uncertainty into which modern science is taking us.

-The Meaning Of The Butterfly

The only thing is to see.

-Auguste Rodin

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

-Paul Gauguin

from 'The Mother'

But I will speak their names to my own heart
In the long nights;
The little names that were familiar once
Round my dead hearth.
Lord, thou art hard on mothers:
We suffer in their coming and their going

-- Padraic H. Pearse

[Wheaton Concert Choir sings]

Everyone thinks:
"I am the most important
Person at present."
The sane remember to add:
"Important, I mean, to me."
_____

True Love enjoys
twenty-twenty vision,
but talks like a myopic.


-W.H. Auden, from "Marginalia I"

Active nihilism, in the sense of wanting nothing itself, is this active self-destruction which would be precisely the passion of the real - the idea that, in order to live fully and authentically, you must engage in self-destruction. On the other hand, there is passive nihilism, what Nietzsche called 'The last man' - just living a stupid, self-satisfied life without great passions.

-Žižek

Here I need to ask myself a simple Habermasian question: how can we ground universality in our experience? Naturally, I don't accept this postmodern game that each of us inhabits his or her particular universe. I believe there is universality. But I don't believe in some a priori universality of fundamental rules or universal notions. The only true universality we have access to is political universality. Which is not solidarity in some abstract idealist sense, but solidarity in struggle.

-Žižek [via pour-soi]

"Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art."
- Pablo Picasso

Every lament is a love song.

-Jon Foreman, from "Yesterday"

When people say that they are acting out of religious conviction, I tend to be skeptical; I tend to wonder whether they're not acting as I usually do, out of motives and impulses over which I could paint a thin religious veneer but which are really not religious at all.

-Dr. Alan Jacobs, "Too Much Faith in Faith"

The Only Animal

The only animal that commits suicide
went for a walk in the park,
basked on a hard bench
in the first star,
traveled to the edge of space
in an armchair
while company quietly
talked, and abruptly
returned,
the room empty.

The only animal that cries
that takes off its clothes
and reports to the mirror, the one
and only animal
that brushes its own teeth-

Somewhere

the only animal that smokes a cigarette,
that lies down and flies backward in time,
that rises and walks to a book
and looks up a word
heard the telephone ringing
in the darkness downstairs and decided
to answer no more.

And I understand,
too well: how many times
have I made the decision to dwell
from now on
in the hour of my death
(the space I took up here
scarlessly closing like water)
and said I'm never coming back,
and yet

this morning
I stood once again
in this world, the garden
ark and vacant
tomb of what
I can't imagine,
between twin eternities,
some sort of wings,
more or less equidistantly
exiled from both,
hovering in the dreaming called
being awake, where
You gave me
in secret one thing
to perceive, the
tall blue starry
strangeness of being
here at all.

You gave us each in secret something to perceive.

Furless now, upright, My banished
and experimental
child

You said, though your own heart condemn you

I do not condemn you.

-Franz Wright

Slowly we are learning,
We at least know this much,
That we have to unlearn
Much that we were taught,
And are growing chary
Of emphatic dogmas;
Love like Matter is much
Odder than we thought.


-W.H. Auden, "Heavy Date"

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."

-Pablo Picasso

Amazing.

It is very good to copy what one sees; it is much better to draw what you can't see anymore but is in your memory. It is a transformation in which imagination and memory work together. You only reproduce what struck you; that is to say, the necessary.

-Edgar Degas

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command... The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth's center. With the feeling that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

-George Orwell, 1984, Book I Chapter VII

MIDDLEBURY, Vermont (AP) -- Call it poetic justice: More than two dozen young people who broke into Robert Frost's former home for a beer party and trashed the place are being required to take classes in his poetry as part of their punishment.

-CNN

[via clusterflock]

When I looked at the congregants kneeling on cushions, their heads bent to touch the wooden pews, it seemed to me as if they were literally butting their heads against a palpable impossibility. And this was years before I discovered Samuel Butler’s image for the inutility of prayer in his novel “The Way of All Flesh”—the bee that has strayed into a drawing room and is buzzing against the wallpaper, trying to extract nectar from one of the painted roses.

-James Wood, "Holiday in Hellmouth"

It seemed to me a typical Pre-Raphaelite production: garish, melodramatic, cloying in its technique and sentimentality; pretentious humbug. The contrast between Bergman’s severe, honest art and this painting, on the same screen, chilled me. Was this what the minister held in his mind as the answer to all our problems—a kitschy figure from a calendar? I turned to Rob. “Let’s get a pint.”

But Rob was intent on this very image. Rapt. He barely glanced at me. “You go on.”

That night—to some extent, that picture—changed his life. He enrolled in Bible classes at the church, and went on to become a missionary in Africa. The same night sent me in the opposite direction, at least for a time.

-Tobias Wolff, "Winter Light"

To claim that we can get along without study of the antique and the classics is either madness or laziness.

-Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

A conversation on the possible rationale for expensive religious architecture:

Religious architecture and art were to medieval feudalism what advertising and commercialism are to modern capitalism: A rather effective way to build support for the status quo using aesthetics instead of argument. My claim, in short, is that Notre Dame played the same role during the Middle Ages that fashion magazines play today. Notre Dame was not an argument for feudalism, and Elle is not an argument for capitalism. But both are powerful ways to make regular people buy into the system.


[via clusterflock]