Tuesday, October 04, 2016

Dream Before the Awakening


"It is possible to believe
that all the past is but
the beginning of a beginning,
and that all that is and
has been is but the
twilight of the dawn.
It is possible to believe
that all the human mind
has ever accomplished is
but the dream
before the awakening."

- H. G. Wells (1866 - 1946)

Sunday, October 02, 2016

Breathed on by Light


"It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence."

- Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Mountains Simply Exist


"The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "meaning," they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day."

- Peter Matthiessen (1927 - 2014)

Monday, September 26, 2016

Silence


"My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear — a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence. The 'I' in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable."

- Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)

Sunday, September 25, 2016

A Patchwork Quilt


"Our aesthetic sense, whether in works of art or in lives, has overfocused on the stubborn struggle toward a single goal rather than on the fluid, the protean, the improvisatory. We see achievement as purposeful and monolithic, like the sculpting of a massive tree trunk that has first to be brought from the forest and then shaped by long labor to assert the artist’s vision, rather than something crafted from odds and ends, like a patchwork quilt, and lovingly used to warm different nights and bodies."

Saturday, September 24, 2016

Network of Perceptions


"A world of evanescent impressions; a world without matter or spirit, neither objective nor subjective, a world without the ideal architecture of space; a world made of time, of the absolute uniform time of [Newton’s] Principia; a tireless labyrinth, a chaos, a dream.

"Once matter and spirit — which are continuities — are negated, once space too is negated, I do not know with what right we retain that continuity which is time. Outside each perception (real or conjectural) matter does not exist; outside each mental state spirit does not exist; neither does time exist outside the present moment.

"And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad.

Time is the substance
I am made of.
Time is a river which
sweeps me along
but I am the river;
it is a tiger which
destroys me,
but I am the tiger;
it is a fire which
consumes me,
but I am the fire.
The world, unfortunately, is real;
I, unfortunately, am Borges."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
"A New Refutation of Time," Labyrinths

Thursday, September 22, 2016

Amidst the Mystery


"To know objects only through dissecting and
cataloguing them is to miss their full reality.
It is to fall asleep amidst the mystery
and to become numb to the wonder
of this great Earth"

(1931 - 2009)