Stephanie's Pillowbook

 

MADNESS

I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night. Although I long for luminous ecstasies, I wouldn’t ask for any, because I know they are followed by great depressions. I would like instead a shower of warm light to fall from me, transfiguring the entire world, an unecstatic burst of light preserving the calm of luminous eternity. Far from the concentrations of ecstasy, it would be all graceful lightness and smiling warmth. The entire world should float in this dream of light, in this transparent and unreal state of delight. Obstacles and matter, form and limits would cease to exist. Then let me die of light in such a landscape.” {E.M. Cioran]

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. [Albert Einstein]

… as temporal continuities break down the experience of the present becomes powerfully, overwhelmingly vivid and material: the world comes before the schizophrenic with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious and oppressive charge of affect, glowing with hallucinatory energy. [Fredric Jameson]

That is the truest sign of insanity – insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy. [Nora Ephron]

Hysteria is the model for mind over matter. The hysteric, like the patient who feels pains or itches in a missing limb, has physical symptoms that defy neurology. The hysteric’s seizures, twitches, coughs and squints are not the result of lesions but of neurotic cathexes, of the pathological attachment of libidinal energies to body parts. In other words, parts of the body in hysterics become occupied, taken possession of, filled with energies that manifest themselves organically. (The German noun Besetzung is translated by the English neologism ‘cathexis.’ The verb besetzen also has the sense of ‘charged as is a furnace, or tamped down, as is a blasting charge, or put in place as is a paving stone or a jewel’). [Thomas W. Laqueur]

The délire de negation, the Weltuntergangserlebnis, the delusions of grandeur, the messianic talk of the schizophrenic have brought us to the third of the Three Bodies, the phantom body of death, streamlined and futuristic. If the schizophrenic has been the cultural refuge of the archetypal past, the infant, the primitive, that same schizophrenic has been haunted by a future, dangerous, explosive.
It is a slick, efficient future, whose language is newspeak, neologism, headlines and slogans. Such, often, has been the language of the schizophrenic, a language of abbreviations and codes and paradoxes which may seem like autism or derailment but may also be a genius of economy.
It is a streamlined future whose invasive forces are the characteristic rays, radio waves, telephone lines, television cameras of the schizophrenic’s more paranoid experiences. The schizophrenic imagination has thus been particularly affected by science and science fictions and is peculiarly up-to-date on technology.
It is an ersatz, mechanical future engineered for automata and substitutions. Early on, schizophrenics appeared as either machines with stereotyped movements or the creatures of ‘influencing-machines’ whose operations controlled their own. [Hillel Schwartz]

According to G.K. Chesterton a madman is one who has lost everything except his reason.

 

MAN

Man has derived all that makes him ‘man’ from the deficiencies in his system. From maladjustments, from difficulties of adaptation, from being forced to put up with what he calls the ‘irrational.’
He has sublimated them, seen in them sources of ‘melancholy,’ reminders of a bygone Golden Age, or intimations of divinity and a promise for the future.
Every emotion, every feeling is a symptom of faulty construction or failure to adapt oneself. An uncompensated shock. A lack of resilience, or its deterioration.
And on top of all this comes artificial adaptation: a heightening of consciousness and intelligence… With what strange results! Emotion deliberately sought for, manufactured; efforts to make one ‘lose one’s head,’ to baffle and disrupt.
Then again, why are there physiological urges (without which nature would peter out)? That need to bewilder one’s judgement, to see indistinctly, or to build up a world of fantasy – ‘falling in love’ – but for which the world would come to an end.
Man’s perfected, conscious functions as opposed to life. The final nonadjustment. [Paul Valéry]

Men are simplified, and thus made alike almost to the point of identity, in spasms of intense pain, in bursts of laughter, in yawning, in violent excitement, in their mystic yearnings and their sensual orgasms. But even in quite everyday circumstances they are no less like each other; in sleep, in moments of surprise, in all the acts and mild alertness needed for dressing, eating, going home.
In what ways, then, can they be distinguished?
In their tactics and in those complicated procedures which, starting out from the norm of daily life, lead them to moments of abnormal insight, or which are traversed, shot through by such moments. [Paul Valéry]

Man is to man all kinds of beasts; a fawning dog, a roaring lion, a thieving fox, a robbing wolf, a dissembling crocodile, a treacherous decoy, and a rapacious vulture. [Abraham Cowley]

We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong. [Arthur Eddington]

We do not realize how deeply our starting assumptions affect the way we go about looking for and interpreting the data we collect. We should recognize that nonhuman organisms need not meet every new definition of human language, tool use, mind, or consciousness in order to have versions of their own that are worthy of serious study. We have set ourselves too much apart, grasping for definitions that will distinguish man from all other life on the planet. We must rejoin the great stream of life from
whence we arose and strive to see within it the seeds of all we are and all we may become. [Roger Lewin]

I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability. [Oscar Wilde]

A man said to the universe: “Sir I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.” [Stephen Crane]

One of the things I like best about animals in the wild is that they’re always off on some errand. They have appointments to keep. It’s only we humans who wonder what we’re here for. [Diane Ackerman]

It is written in the Zohar: ‘When man appeared, thereupon appeared the flowers.’ I suspect they were there long before him, and that his advent plunged them all into a stupefaction from which they have not yet recovered. [E.M. Cioran]

When someone behaves like a beast, he says: ‘After all, one is only human.’ But when he is treated like a beast, he says: ‘After all, one is human.’ [Karl Kraus]

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is. [Albert Camus]

The world began without man, and it will end without him. [Claude Lévi-Strauss]

A self-balancing, 28-pointed adapter-based biped; an electrochemical reduction-plant, integral with segregated storages of special energy extracts in storage batteries, for subsequent activation of thousands of hydraulic and pneumatic pumps, with motors attached; 62,000 miles of capillaries; millions of warning signals, railroad and conveyor systems; crushers and cranes (of which the arms are magnificent 23-jointed affairs with self-surfacing and lubricating systems, and a universally distributed telephone system (needing no service for 70 years if well-managed); the whole extraordinarily complex mechanism guided with complete precision from a turret in which are located telescopic and microscopic self-registering and recording range-finders, a spectroscope, etc, air-conditioning intake-and exhaust and a main fuel intake Within the few cubic inches housing the turret mechanism, there is room also for two soundwave and sound-direction-finder recording diaphragms, a filing and instant reference system, and an expertly devised analytical laboratory large enough not only to contain minute records of every last and continual event of up to 70 years experience or more, but to extend, by computation and abstract fabrication, this experience with relative accuracy into all corners of the observed universe. There is, also, a forecasting and tactical plotting department for the reduction of future possibilities and probabilities to general successful specific choice. [Buckminster Fuller]

Anticipating those modern anthropologists who maintain that there is continuity between biological evolution and technological evolution, from Paleolithic tools to electronics, Pliny explicitly admits that what man has added to nature becomes part of human nature. To demonstrate that man’s true nature is his culture is only a step away. But Pliny, who has no time for generalisations, looks for what is specifically human in inventions and customs that might be considered universal. According to Pliny (or his sources) there are three cultural matters on which all peoples have reached a tacit agreement. These are the alphabet (both Greek and Latin), the shaving of men’s beards, and the measurement of time by means of a sundial. [Italo Calvino]

The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago… had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands. [Havelock Ellis]

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve. [Erich Fromm]

Homo sapiens… a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree. [Stephen Jay Gould]

Humans do not simply acquire habits from others. We constantly innovate and transform ourselves. There is a fundamental distinction between a process by which certain chimpanzees have learnt to crack open palm nuts using two stones as a hammer and anvil, and a process through which humans have created the industrial revolution, unravelled the sequence of their own genome, developed the concept of human rights and come to debate who owns culture. [Kenan Malik]

What is man? Exemplum of weakness, booty of the moment, plaything of fortune, image of mutability, balance weighing the god’s displeasure and disaster. [doubtfully attributed to Aristotle]

As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man… [?]

I have found the missing link between the higher ape and civilized man; it is we. [Konrad Lorenz]

The essence of a man is found in his faults. [Francis Picabia]

In some far corner of the universe lost in the scintillations of innumerable solar systems, there was one day a star upon which animals endowed with intelligence invented knowledge. It was the proudest and most deceptive moment of universal history, but it was only a moment. Nature had hardly had time to breathe when that star froze over, and the intelligent animals had to die. Indeed their time had come, for though they had flattered themselves that they had already accumulated vast knowledge, they came, to their great disappointment, to discover that at bottom all their knowledge was false. They perished and disappeared with the death of truth. Such was the lot of those animals doomed to despair, who had invented knowledge. [Friedrich Nietzsche]

Man, became man through work, who stepped out of the animal kingdom as transformer of the natural into the artificial, who became therefore the magician, man the creator of social reality, will always stay the great magician, will always be Prometheus bringing fire from heaven to earth, will always be Orpheus enthralling nature with his music. Not until humanity itself dies will art die. [Ernst Fischer]

There is no more active assimilator than the human being: the outside world, anything there that might provide a welcoming structure for otherness is submitted to voracious conquest; the monstrous infinitude of technique has no other mission, no other vocation than this assimilation of the other, no matter what the cost, through a conceptualisation threatened by anything that eludes it. The ravenous imperialism that reduces everything to itself, that keeps whatever it has assimilated (wanting neither to have to return it nor to be burst by it), is the very face of humanity. Just as, contrasted to the pure expenditure of energy that is the sun’s entire existence, the earth seems the most avaricious planet of all, one that captures and profits from solar warmth strictly for its own internal purposes, a planet driven by a unilateral devouring action with no compensation, in the same way the ‘master’ of the earth, man, is the greediest being on his planet. More than any other species his existence is devoted to the conquest and voracious appropriation of whatever is not himself. [Denis Hollier]

… the fundamental distinction between man and animals underlay everyone’s behaviour. What, for example, were religion and morality, if not attempts to curb the supposedly animal aspects of human nature, what Plato called ‘the wild beast within us’?…
… Erasmus’s decisively influential textbook on civility had made differentiation from animals the very essence of good table manners, more so even than differentiation from ‘rustics’.. Don’t smack your lips, like a horse, he warned; don’t swallow your meat without chewing, like a stork; don’t gnaw the bones, like a dog; don’t lick the dish, like a cat… Erasmus’s rules for bodily comportment show the same preoccupation: don’t shake your hair like a colt; don’t neigh when you laugh, like a horse, or show your teeth, like a dog; don’t move your whole body when speaking, like a wagtail, don’t speak through your nose: ‘It is the property of crows and elephants’…
Since all the bodily functions had undesirable animal associations, some commentators thought it was physical modesty, even more than reason, which distinguished men from beasts…
Lust, in particular, was synonymous with the animal condition, for the sexual connotations of such terms as ‘brute’, ‘bestial’ and ‘beastly’ were much stronger than they are today. Lust, said a sixteenth-century moralist, made men ‘like… swine, goats, dogs and the most savage and brutish beasts in the world’…
Wherever we look in early modern England, we find anxiety, latent or explicit, about any form of behaviour which threatened to transgress the fragile boundaries between man and the animal creation. Physical cleanliness was necessary because, as John Stuart Mill would put it, its absence, ‘more than anything else, renders man bestial’. Nakedness was bestial, for clothes, like cooking, were a distinctively human attribute. It was bestial for men to have long hair…
Animal analogies came particularly readily to the lips of those who saw more of animals, wild and domestic, than do most people today. The brute creation provided the most readily-available point of reference for the continuous process of human self-definition. Neither the same as humans, nor wholly dissimilar, the animals offered an almost inexhaustible fund of symbolic meaning.
Yet there was little objective justification for the way in which the beasts were perceived. ‘As drunk as a dog,’ the proverb said. But who has ever seen a drunken dog? Men attributed to animals the natural impulses they most feared in themselves – ferocity, gluttony, sexuality – even though it was men, not beasts, who made war on their own species, ate more than was good for them and were sexually active all year round. [Keith Thomas]

It was certain that lions and tigers were not more savage and cruel, geese and asses not half so stupid, foxes and donkeys less knavish and ridiculous, wolves not more ravenous, nor goats more lascivious than abundance of those grave, bearded animals that pride themselves with the empty title of rational souls. [Thomas Tryon]

Man excels in complexity and minuteness of differentiations. [John Dewey]

Man is born a barbarian, and only raises himself above the beast by culture. [Baltasar Gracian]

… as brave as a lion, as timid as a hare, as bold as a rooster, as irritating and disagreeable as a dog, as severe as a deer, as compassionate as a turtle-dove, as malicious as a hyena, as pleasant as a dove, as deceitful as a fox, as gentle as a lamb, as fast as a roebuck, as cowardly and foolish as an ass, as obedient as a peacock, as chatty as a sparrow, as roving as a goat, as indomitable as a bull, as recalcitrant as a mule, as quiet as a fish, as reasonable as a lamb, as lecherous as a pig, as malicious as an owl, as useful as a horse, as harmful as a wolf… Only man has all the qualities of animals. [della Porta]

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.” [G.K. Chesterton]

Human beings, on this view, become a resource to be used – but more important, to be enhanced – like any other: ‘Man, who no longer conceals his character of being the most important raw material, is also drawn into this process.’ In the film 2001, the robot HAL, when asked if he is happy on the mission, say: ‘I am using all my capacities to the maximum. What more could a rational entity want?’ This is a brilliant expression of what anyone would say who is in touch with our current understanding of being. We pursue the development of our potential simply for the sake of further growth. We have no specific goals. The human potential movement perfectly expresses this technological understanding of being, as does the attempt to better organise the future use of our natural resources. We thus become a part of a system that no one directs but that moves toward the total mobilisation and enhancement of all beings, even us. [Hubert L. Dreyfus]

 

MANNERS

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of our selves and how little we think of other persons. [Mark Twain]

The test of a man or woman’s breeding is how they behave in a quarrel. [George Bernard Shaw]

Always behave as if nothing had happened, no matter what has happened. [Arnold Bennett]

Politeness… is fictitious benevolence. [Samuel Johnson]

He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest. [Walter Benjamin]

A gentleman makes no noise: a lady is serene. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

Anyone can be heroic from time to time, but a gentleman is something you have to be all the time. [Pirandello]

Now there were many things in which the Victorians were quite wrong. But in their punctiliousness about etiquette in things like this, they were right. In insisting that the young lady should be called at one stage Miss Vavasour, and only at another stage Gloria, and only in extreme and almost desperate cases of confidence Gurgles, they were a thousand times right. They were maintaining a wholly superior social system, by which social actions were significant, and not (as they are now) all of them equally significant…
The old stages of intimacy were individual, and in that sense even unconventional. The new comradeship is entirely conventional. It is in the exact and solid sense a convention. The old admission to special friendship occurred at different stages with different people; it was an adventure. The new familiarity is really a formality…
Life is much more rich and interesting when there are individual initiations, special favours, and different titles for different relations of life…
If I were constructing a Utopia, which God forbid, I should describe a higher civilisation in which every human being had a hundred names; in which each had a particular name known only to a particular friend; in which there were more and not less ceremonies differentiating the various kinds of love and friendship and in which the suitor had to go through ten names before he got to Glory. [G.K. Chesterton]

[In the Regency] Men took great pains with themselves; they did not slouch and moon through life. [Alexander Cochrane]

I have wondered whether the art of being amusing, with its implied detachment from self, is not one of the most undervalued requisites of human civilization. [Brian Aldiss]

While the body is still pliable, therefore, one ought to condition it to all fashions and customs. Provided that we can keep a young man’s will and appetite under control, let us boldly make him used to all nations and all countries, to irregularity and excess, if need be. In his practice he should follow custom. He should be able to do everything, but only like doing what is good. Even philosophers do not find it praiseworthy in Callisthenes that he forfeited the favour of his master, Alexander the Great, by refusing to keep up with him in drinking. He should laugh and sport and debauch himself with his prince. Even in his debauches I would have him surpass his companions in vigour and persistency, and refrain from evil-doing not from lack of strength or skill, but only from lack of inclination…
I have often reflected most admiringly on the wonderful constitution of Alcibiades, who adapted himself so easily to very diverse customs without injury to his health, sometimes outdoing the Persians in pomp and luxury, sometimes the Lacedaemonians in austerity and frugality. He was as much the ascetic in Sparta as in Ionia he was the voluptuary. [Montaigne]

To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law. [Goethe?]

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference. [Cesare Pavese]

To discard magnificence, and remain magnificent, is the inimitable privilege of aristocracy. [Geoffrey Madan]

I have observed that the distinguishing trait of people accustomed to good society, is a calm imperturbable quiet, which pervades all their actions and habits, from the greatest to the least; they eat in quiet, live in quiet, and lose their wife, or even their money in quiet; while low persons cannot take up either a spoon or an affront without making such an amazing noise about it. [Bulwer Lytton]

All Politeness is owing to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our corners and rough sides by a sort of amical collision. [Earl of Shaftesbury]

 

MARRIAGE

It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time. [Balzac]

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished. [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]

Marriage is not commonly unhappy, otherwise than as life is unhappy. [Samuel Johnson]

I have met, said the princess, with many who live single for that reason; but I have never found that their prudence ought to raise envy. They dream away their time without friendship, without fondness, and are driven to rid themselves of the day, for which they have no use, by childish amusements, or vicious delights. They act as beings under the constant sense of some known inferiority, that fills their minds with rancour, and their tongues with censure. They are peevish at home, and malevolent abroad; and, as the outlaws of human nature, make it their business and their pleasure to disturb that society which debars them from its privileges. To live without feeling or exciting sympathy, to be fortunate without adding to the felicity of others, or afflicted without tasting the balm of pity, is a state more gloomy than solitude: it is not retreat but exclusion from mankind. Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures. [Samuel Johnson]

Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and a maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention, or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together. They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations, and charge nature with cruelty. [Samuel Johnson]

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part. [George Bernard Shaw]

A bachelor’s life is a fine breakfast, a flat lunch, and a miserable dinner. [Francis Bacon]

Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived. It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive. [F.H. Bradley]

Marriage excuses no one the freaks’ roll-call. [Joe Orton]

Marriage isn’t a word – it’s a sentence! [King Vidor]

York’s fellow radical in Paris, John Sheares, had evidently fallen in love with Théroigne [de Méricourt], and in the hope of giving up politics and retiring into private life he had proposed marriage. ‘When he tendered his proposals, she pulled a pistol from her pocket, and threatened to shoot him if he uttered another syllable upon the subject.’ [Melvin J. Lasky]

If I had a son of marriageable age, I should say to him: ‘Beware of young women who love neither wine nor truffles nor cheese nor music.’ [Colette]

Between husband and wife a shadow of courtship should always subsist. [Queen Marie of Rumania]

I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand. [Oscar Wilde]

The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married. [Cyril Connolly]

Marriage is the grave of savage love. [Benedetto Croce]

Marriage is tolerable enough in its way if you’re easygoing and don’t expect too much from it. But it doesn’t bear thinking about. [George Bernard Shaw]

Russian third-degree interrogator to Keeling: ‘How do you manage to look so fit and well, after being woken up in the middle of the night, and asked these endless questions…?’ ‘Oh that’s all right: I’ve been married sixteen years.’ [Geoffrey Madan]

Rather vexation than stagnation: marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horsepond. [Thomas Love Peacock]

In all the pleasing palpitations of anticipated wedlock. [Lord Byron]

Many a housewife staring at the back of her husband’s newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed, is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room. [Germaine Greer]

From a Prophane Libertine, from one Affectedly Pious, from a Profuse Almoner, from an Uncharitable Wretch, from a Wavering Religioso; and an Injudicious Zealot – Deliver me! From one of a Starcht Gravity, or of Ridiculous Levity; from an Ambitious Statesman, from a Restless Projector, from one that loves any thing besides me, but what is very Just and Honourable – Deliver me! From an Extacy’d Poet, from a Modern Wit, from a Base Coward and a Rash Fool, from a Pad and a Pauper – Deliver me; from a Venus darling, from a Bacchus Proselite, from a Travelling Half, from a Domestic Animal; from all Masculine Plagues not yet recounted – Deliver me! [from The Athenian Spy]

The deep, deep peace of the double-bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue. [Mrs. Patrick Campbell]

Arnold Bennett says that the horror of marriage lies in its ‘dailiness’. All acuteness of relationship is rubbed away by this. The truth is more like this: life – say 4 days out of 7 – becomes automatic; but on the 5th day a bead of sensation (between husband and wife) forms which is all the fuller and more sensitive because of the automatic customary unconscious days on either side. That is to say the year is marked by moments of great intensity. Hardy’s ‘moments of vision’. How can a relationship endure for any length of time except under these conditions. [Virginia Woolf]

A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day. [André Maurois]

The critical period in matrimony is breakfast-time. [A.P.Herbert]

When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory. [Friedrich Nietzsche]

Leibniz never married; he had considered it at the age of fifty; but the person he had in mind asked for time to reflect. This gave Leibniz time to reflect, too, and so he never married. [Fontenelle]

Nobody, so far as I know, has dared to say that love, as understood nowadays, is the flat negation of the marriage to which it is claimed that this love can serve as support…
… in America the terms ‘love’ and ‘marriage’ are practically equivalent; that when one ‘loves’ one must get married instantly; and further, that ‘love’ should normally overcome all obstacles, as is shown every day in films, novels, and comic-strips. In reality, however, let romantic love overcome no matter how many obstacles, it almost always fails at one. That is the obstacle constituted by time. Now, either marriage is an institution set up to be lasting – or it is meaningless…
Romance feeds on obstacles. short excitations, and partings; marriage, on the contrary, is made up of wont, daily propinquity, growing accustomed to one another. Romance calls for ‘the far-away love’ of the troubadours; marriage, for love of ‘one’s neighbour.’ Where, then, a couple have married in obedience to a romance, it is natural that the first time a conflict of temperament or of taste becomes manifest the parties should ask themselves: ‘Why did I marry?’ And it is no less natural that, obsessed by the universal propaganda in favour of romance, each should seize the first occasion to fall in love with somebody else…
… it is marriage which, in my opinion, has been made too easy, through the supposition that let there be ‘love’ and marriage should follow, regardless of outmoded conventions of social and religious station, of upbringing and substance. It is certainly possible to imagine new conditions which candidates for marriage – that true ‘coexistence’ which should be enduring, peaceable, and mutually educative – should fulfil. It is possible to exact tests or ordeals bearing on whatever gives any human union its best chances of lasting: aims in life, rhythms of life, comparative vocations, characters, and temperaments. If marriage – that is to say, lastingness – is what is wanted, it is natural to ensure its conditions. But such reforms would have little effect in a world which retained, if not true passion, at least the nostalgia of passion that has grown congenital in western man…

Once we ask ourselves what is involved in choosing a man or woman for the rest of one’s life, we see that to chose is to wager… the delusion that the choice of a wife or a husband may be governed by a certain number of accurately weighable pros and cons… You may try as hard as you like to put all the possibilities at the outset in your own favour – and I am assuming that life allows you the spare time for such nice calculations – but you will never be able to foresee how you are going to develop, still less how the wife or husband you choose is going to, and still less again how the two of you together are going to…

To choose a woman for wife is not to say to Miss So-and So: ‘You are the ideal of my dreams, you more than gratify all my desires, you are the Iseult altogether lovely and desirable – and endowed with a suitable dowry – of whom I want to be the Tristan.’ For this would be deceit, and nothing enduring can be founded on deceit. Nobody in the world can gratify me; no sooner were I gratified than I would change! To choose a woman for a wife is to say to Miss So-and-So: ‘I want to live with you just as you are.’ For this really means: ‘It is you I choose to share my life with, and that is the only evidence there can be that I love you.’ If anybody says ‘Is that all?’ – and this is no doubt what many young people will say, having been led by virtue of the myth to expect goodness knows what divine transports – he must have had little experience of solitariness and dread. [Denis de Rougemont]

 

MATHEMATICS

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of a sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trapping of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. [Bertrand Russell]

… the common idea [is] that mathematics is a dull subject whereas the testimony of all those who have any dealings with it shows that it is one of the most thrilling and tantalising and enchanting subjects in the world. [G.K.Chesterton]

One of the endearing things about mathematicians is the extent to which they will go to avoid doing any real work. [Matthew Pordage]

Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about “any” things or about “some” things, without specifications of definite particular things. [A.N. Whitehead]

The concept of number is the obvious distinction between the beast and man. Thanks to number, the cry becomes song, noise acquires rhythm, the spring is transformed into a dance, force becomes dynamic, and outlines figures. [Joseph de Maistre]

Some people have contended that mathematics ought to be taught by making illustrations obvious to the senses. Nothing can be more absurd or injurious: It ought to be our never-ceasing effort to make people think, not feel. [Samuel Coleridge]

All things in the whole wide world happen mathematically. [Leibniz]

The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom. [Georg Cantor]

It is from this absolute indifference and tranquillity of the mind, that mathematical speculations derive some of the most considerable advantages; because there is nothing to interest the imagination; because the judgement sits free and unbiased to examine the point. All proportions, every arrangement of quantity, is alike to the understanding, because the same truths result to it from all; from greater
from lesser, from equality and inequality. [Edmund Burke]

The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought. [Havelock Ellis]

Mathematics is neither a description of nature nor an explanation of its operation; it is not concerned with physical motion or with the metaphysical generation of quantities. It is merely the symbolic logic of possible relations, and as such is concerned with neither approximate nor absolute truth, but only with hypothetical truth. That is, mathematics determines what conclusions will follow logically from given premises. The conjunction of mathematics and philosophy, or of mathematics and science is frequently of great service in suggesting new problems and points of view. [Carl Boyer]

For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics. [Roger Bacon]

Neglect of mathematics works injury to all knowledge, since he who is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or the things of this world. And what is worse, men who are thus ignorant are unable to perceive their own ignorance and so do not seek a remedy. [Roger Bacon]

All too many mathematical textbooks today have a nervous, breathless quality in which a fixed goal is systematically and inexorably pursued. The goal having been attained, one is left not with a feeling of exhilaration but of anticlimax. Nowhere in such books is any appreciation to be found of why or how the goal is important, other, possibly, than the statement that the goal may now be used as the starting point for reaching other, deeper goals, which considerations of space, alas, prevent the author from pursuing. Blame it on Euclid, if you want, for the tendency was already in his exposition. [Reuben Hersh

The dictum that everything that people do is “cultural” licenses the idea that every cultural critic can meaningfully analyse even the most intricate accomplishments of art and science... It is distinctly weird to listen to pronouncements on the nature of mathematics from the lips of someone who cannot tell you what a complex number is! [Norman Levitt]

A mathematician of the first rank, Laplace quickly revealed himself as only a mediocre administrator; from his first work we saw that we had been deceived. Laplace saw no question from its true point of view; he sought subtleties everywhere; had only doubtful ideas, and finally carried the spirit of the infinitely small into administration. [Napoleon]

Mathematics is not a popular subject, even though its importance may be generally conceded. The reason for this is to be found in the common superstition that mathematics is but a continuation, a further development, of the fine art of arithmetic, of juggling with numbers. [David Hilbert]

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. [Robert Heinlein]

The interplay between generality and individuality, deduction and construction, logic and imagination — this is the profound essence of live mathematics. Any one or another of these aspects of mathematics can be found at the centre of a given achievement. In a far reaching development all of them will be involved. Generally speaking, such a development will start from the “concrete,” then discard ballast by abstraction and rise to the lofty layers of thin air where navigation and observation are easy: after this flight comes the crucial test for learning and reaching specific goals in the newly surveyed low plains of individual “reality.” In brief, the flight into abstract generality must start from and return again to the concrete and specific. [Richard Courant]

Mathematical proofs, like diamonds, are hard as well as clear, and will be touched with nothing but strict reasoning. [John Locke]

… mathematics is not a science — it is not capable of proving or disproving the existence of real things. In fact, a mathematician’s ultimate concern is that his or her inventions be logical, not realistic.
[Michael Guillen]

There is no branch of mathematics however abstract which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world. [Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevskii]

Mathematics is not a way of hanging numbers on things so that quantitative answers to ordinary questions can be obtained. It is a language that allows one to think about extraordinary questions.
[James Bullock]

… relations of numbers are the key to the whole mystery of nature. [Plato]

How happy the lot of the mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve. [W.H. Auden]

I advise my students to listen carefully the moment they decide to take no more mathematics courses. They might be able to hear the sound of closing doors. [James Caballero]

The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future. [E.T. Bell]

[The universe] cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word. [Galileo Galilei]

Many who have had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confuse it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination. [Sofia Kovalevskaya]

Rigour is to the mathematician what morality is to man. It does not consist in proving everything, but in maintaining a sharp distinction between what is assumed and what is proved, and in endeavouring to assume as little as possible at every stage. [André Weil]

Mathematics is not only real, but it is the only reality. That is that entire universe is made of matter, obviously. And matter is made of particles. It’s made of electrons and neutrons and protons. So the entire universe is made out of particles. Now what are the particles made out of? They’re not made out of anything. The only thing you can say about the reality of an electron is to cite its mathematical properties. So there’s a sense in which matter has completely dissolved and what is left is just a mathematical structure. [Martin Gardner]

There should be no such thing as boring mathematics. [Edsger Dijkstra]

To criticize mathematics for its abstraction is to miss the point entirely. Abstraction is what makes mathematics work. If you concentrate too closely on too limited an application of a mathematical idea, you rob the mathematician of his most important tools: analogy, generality, and simplicity. Mathematics is the ultimate in technology transfer. [Ian Stewart]

… mathematics is the science of patterns, and nature exploits just about every pattern that there is. [Ian Stewart]

It may be observed of mathematicians that they only meddle with such things as are certain, passing by those that are doubtful and unknown. They profess not to know all things, neither do they affect to speak of all things. What they know to be true, and can make good by invincible arguments, that they publish and insert among their theorems. Of other things they are silent and pass no judgement at all, choosing rather to acknowledge their ignorance, than affirm anything rashly. [Isaac Barrow]

Music and higher mathematics share some obvious kinship. The practice of both requires a lengthy apprenticeship, talent, and no small amount of grace. Both seem to spring from some mysterious workings of the mind. Logic and system are essential for both, and yet each can reach a height of creativity beyond the merely mechanical. [Frederick Pratter]

I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible. [May Sarton]

Much research for new proofs of theorems already correctly established is undertaken simply because the existing proofs have no aesthetic appeal. There are mathematical demonstrations that are merely convincing; to use a phrase of the famous mathematical physicist, Lord Rayleigh, they “command assent.” There are other proofs which woo and charm the intellect. They evoke delight and an overpowering desire to say, “Amen, Amen.” An elegantly executed proof is a poem in all but the form in which it is written. [Morris Kline]

… one’s intellectual and aesthetic life cannot be complete unless it includes an appreciation of the power and the beauty of mathematics. Simply put, aesthetic and intellectual fulfillment requires that you know about mathematics. [Jerry P. King]

Mathematical reasoning is deductive in the sense that it is based upon definitions which, as far as the validity of the reasoning is concerned (apart from any existential import) needs only the test of self-consistency. Thus no external verification of definitions is required in mathematics, as long as it is considered merely as mathematics. [A.N. Whitehead]

The point of mathematics is that in it we have always got rid of the particular instance, and even of any particular sorts of entities. So that for example, no mathematical truths apply merely to fish, or merely to stones, or merely to colours. So long as you are dealing with pure mathematics, you are in the realm of complete and absolute abstraction… Mathematics is thought moving in the sphere of complete abstraction from any particular instance of what it is talking about. [A.N. Whitehead]

I was just going to say, when I was interrupted, that one of the many ways of classifying minds is under the heads of arithmetical and algebraical intellects. All economical and practical wisdom is an extension of the following arithmetical formula: 2 + 2 = 4. Every philosophical proposition has the more general character of the expression a + b = c. We are mere operatives, empirics, and egotists until we learn to think in letters instead of figures. [Oliver Wendell Holmes]

I know of nothing which acts as such a powerful antidote that which I ventured to call “opinionatedness,” as a study of mathematics. [David Eugene Smith]

In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them. [John von Neumann]

Nature’s beauty dies. The day dawns when the nautilus is no more. The rainbow passes, the flower fades away, the mountain crumbles, the star grows cold. But the beauty in mathematics — the divine proportion, the golden rectangle, spira mirabilis — endures for evermore. [Henry Edwards Huntley]

 

MEANING

Definition is ordinarily supposed to produce clarity in thinking. It is not generally recognized that the more we define our terms the less descriptive they become and the more difficulty we have in using them. [?]

The strangest thing in all this medieval literature is the conviction that if there is a word there must also be a clear meaning behind it, and the only problem is to find out that meaning. [Albert Einstein]

It is precisely for this reason that, pace Steiner, it seems possible to reply to the ‘challenge’ of deconstruction by drawing on epistemological arguments rather than by laying bets against transcendence. Relying on Austin for his evidence, Derrida states that a word takes on meaning only within a phrase but that since the number of possible phrases into which it may be inserted is infinite, it is impossible to assign decidable meanings either to the word or to the phrases. It is not difficult to refute this theory: if it is possible, after all, to understand Derrida… it is because when a word appears, it is not in the infinite set of all its possible contexts but in one or more phrases and in contexts that it is possible to delimit and define… Of course, there is in this world of ours an infinity of possible contexts for words, phrases, and events, but it is entirely possible for us to explain the contexts by reference to which we construct our explanatory and exegetical plots, and by comparing them, to base our choices, when faced with several possible explanations and interpretations, on discussable, verifiable, and falsifiable criteria… it will then be seen that if, in certain cases, several explanations are possible and if the work can bear a network of meanings, certain interpretations are nonetheless excluded. We have a choice, therefore, between two attitudes: we can either raise our hands in despair in the face of an infinitude of possible contexts… or we can base our interpretations on explicit criteria while acknowledging that the search for truth is always asymptotic and that if Absolute Knowledge is not of this world, an understanding, however fragmentary, that is based on close study and human works is still better than the masturbatory self-satisfaction provoked by the headlong flight of meaning. [Nattiez]

 

MEDIOCRITY

To be popular one must be a mediocrity. [Oscar Wilde]

Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetising security of being identified with the majority. [Martin Luther King]

Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a criticism of themselves. [Bertrand Russell]

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognises genius. [Arthur Conan Doyle]

Most of us swim in the ocean of the commonplace. [Pio Baroja]

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent. [Virginia Woolf]

That the middle class, which was to receive such a terrible importance for modern history, is capable of no self-sacrificing action, no enthusiasm for an idea, no exaltation; it devotes itself to nothing but the interests of its mediocrity. It remains always limited to itself, and conquers at last only through its bulk, with which it has succeeded in tiring out the efforts of passion, enthusiasm, consistency. [Bruno Bauer]

Mediocre people have an answer to everything and are astonished at nothing. [Delacroix]

There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause. [P.J. O’Rourke]

My thesis, therefore, is this: the very perfection with which the nineteenth century gave organisation to certain orders of existence has caused the masses benefited thereby to consider it, not as an organised, but as a rational system. Thus is explained and defined the absurd state of mind revealed by the masses; they are only concerned with their own well-being, and at the same time they remain alien to the cause of that well-being. As they do not see, beyond the benefits of civilisation, marvels of invention and construction which can only be maintained by great effort and foresight, they imagine that their role is limited to demanding these benefits peremptorily as if they were natural rights…

But the man we are now analysing accustoms himself not to appeal from his own to any authority outside. He is satisfied with himself exactly as he is. Ingenuously, without any need of being vain, as the most natural thing in the world, he will tend to consider and affirm as good everything he finds within himself: opinions, appetites, preferences, tastes…
… it never occurs to the mediocre man of our days, to the New Adam, to doubt of his own plenitude. His self-confidence is, like Adam’s, paradisiacal. The innate hermeticism of his soul is an obstacle to the necessary condition for his discovery of his insufficiency, namely: a comparison of himself with other beings. To compare himself would mean to go out of himself for a moment and to transfer himself to his neighbour. But the mediocre soul is incapable of transmigrations – the supreme form of sport…
It is not a question of the mass-man being a fool. On the contrary, today he is more clever, has more capacity of understanding than his fellow of any previous period. But that capacity is of no use to him; in reality, the vague feeling that he possesses it seems only to shut him more within himself and keep him from using it. Once for all, he accepts the stock of commonplaces, prejudices, fag-ends of ideas or simply empty words which chance has piled up in his mind, and with a boldness only explicable by his ingenuousness, is prepared to impose them everywhere. This is what in my first chapter I laid down as the characteristic of our time; not that the vulgar believes itself super-excellent and not vulgar, but that the vulgar proclaims and imposes the rights of vulgarity, or vulgarity as a right. [Ortega y Gasset]

Often, one could weep tears of blood to think how many unfortunates are crushed by affliction without knowing how to make use of it. But coolly considered, this is not a more pitiful waste than the squandering of the world’s beauty. The brightness of stars, the sound of sea-waves, the silence of the hour before dawn – how often do they not offer themselves in vain to men’s attention? To pay no attention to the world’s beauty is, perhaps, so great a crime of ingratitude that it deserves the punishment of affliction. To be sure, it does not always get it; but then the alternative punishment is a mediocre life and in what ways is a mediocre life preferable to affliction? [Simone Weil]

After all, it is only the mediocre who are always at their best. [Jean Giraudoux]

Woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity. [Eric Hoffer]

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. [Friedrich Nietzsche]

Moderation is all very well, but only in moderation. [Kate Fox]

As my old friend John Jebb used to say, ‘Don’t tell me of a moderate man, he is always a rascal. [Major John Cartwright]

 

MELANCHOLY

Young men often believe that an affectation of melancholy renders them more lovable. And perhaps indeed melancholy, when feigned, can be pleasing for a short time, especially to women. But when it is genuine, it is avoided by the whole human race, and in the long run nothing but cheerfulness please in society, or brings good fortune with it. For in the end – whatever young men may think – the world wishes rather to laugh than to weep, and is not wrong. [Giacomo Leopardi]

March 12, 1763: This was one of the blackest days that I ever passed. I was most miserably melancholy. I thought I would get no commission, and thought that a grievous misfortune, and that I was very ill used in life. I ruminated of hiding myself from the world. I thought of going to Spain and living there as a silent morose Don. Or of retiring to the sweeter climes of France or Italy. But then I considered that I wanted money. I then thought of having obscure lodgings, and looked up and down the bottom of Holborn and towards Fleet Ditch for an out-of-the-way place. How very absurd are such conceits! And yet they are common. When a man is out of humour, he thinks he will vex the world by keeping away from it, and that he will be greatly pitied; whereas in truth the world are too busy about themselves to think of him, and ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ [James Boswell]

All here is gloomy: a faint struggle with the tedium of time; a doleful confession of present misery, and the approach seen and felt of what is most dreaded and most shunned. But such is the lot of man.” [Samuel Johnson]

I was sorely worried by the black dog this morning, that vile palpitation of the heart – that tremor cordis – that hysterical passion which forces unbidden sighs and tears and falls upon a contented life like a drop of ink on white paper which is not the less a stain because it conveys no meaning. [Walter Scott]

Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?
The wound I have just suffered, some setback or other in my love life or my profession, some sorrow or bereavement affecting my relationship with close relatives – such are often the easily spotted triggers of my despair. A betrayal, a fatal illness, some accident or handicap that abruptly wrests me away from what seemed to me the normal category of normal people or else falls on a loved one with the same radical effect, or yet… What more could I mention? An infinite number of misfortunes weigh us down every day… All this suddenly gives me another life. A life that is unliveable, heavy with daily sorrows, tears held back or shed, a total despair, scorching at times, then wan and empty. In short, a devitalized existence that, although occasionally fired by the effort I make to prolong it, is ready at any moment for a plunge into death. An avenging death or a liberating death, it is henceforth the inner threshold of my despondency, the impossible meaning of a life whose burden constantly seems unbearable, save for those moments when I pull myself together and face up to the disaster. I live a living death, my flesh is wounded, bleeding, cadaverised, my rhythm slowed down or interrupted, time has been erased or bloated, absorbed with sorrow… Absent from other people’s meaning, alien, accidental with respect to naïve happiness, I owe a supreme, metaphysical lucidity to my depression. On the frontiers of life and death, occasionally I have the arrogant feeling of being witness to the meaninglessness of Being, of revealing the absurdity of bonds and beings. [Julia Kristeva]

Far from being a hidden attack on the other who is thought to be hostile because he is frustrating, sadness would point to a primitive self – wounded, incomplete, empty. Persons thus affected do not consider themselves wronged but afflicted with a fundamental flaw, a congenital deficiency. Their sorrow doesn’t conceal the guilt or the sin felt because of having secretly plotted revenge on the ambivalent object. Their sadness would be rather the most archaic expression of an unsymbolisable, unnameable narcissistic wound, so precocious that no outside agent (subject or agent) can be used as referent. For such narcissistic depressed persons, sadness is really the sole object; more precisely it is a substitute object they become attached to, an object they tame and cherish for lack of another. In such a case, suicide is not a disguised act of war but a merging with sadness and, beyond it, with that impossible love, never reached, always elsewhere, such as the promises of nothingness, of death.

The depressed narcissist mourns not the Object but the Thing. Let me posit the ‘Thing’ as the real that does not lend itself to signification, the centre of attraction and repulsion, seat of the sexuality from which the object of desire will become separated.
Of this Nerval provides a dazzling metaphor that suggests an insistence without presence, a light without representation: the Thing is an imagined sun, bright and black at the same time. ‘It is a well-known fact that one never sees the sun in a dream, although one is often aware of some far brighter light.’
Ever since that archaic attachment the depressed person has the impression of having been deprived of an unnameable, supreme good, of something unrepresentable, that perhaps only devouring might represent, or an invocation might point out, but no word could signify. Consequently, for such a person, no erotic object could replace the irreplaceable perception of a place or pre-object confining the libido or severing the bonds of desire. Knowingly disinherited of the Thing, the depressed person wanders in pursuit of continuously disappointing adventures and loves; or else retreats, disconsolate and aphasic, alone with the unnamed Thing…
I have assumed depressed persons to be atheistic – deprived of meaning, deprived of values. For them, to fear or to ignore the Beyond would be self-deprecating. Nevertheless, and although atheistic, those in despair are mystics – adhering to the pre-object, not believing in Thou, but mute and steadfast devotees of their own inexpressible container. It is to this fringe of strangeness that they devote their tears and joiussance. In the tension of their affects, muscles, mucous membranes, and skin, they experience both their belonging to and distance from an archaic other that still eludes representation and naming, but of whose corporeal emissions, along with their automatism, they still bear the imprint. Unbelieving in language, the depressive persons are affectionate, wounded to be sure, but prisoners of affect. The affect is their thing.
The Thing is inscribed within us without memory, the buried accomplice of our unspeakable anguishes. One can imagine the delights of reunion that a regressive daydream promises itself through the nuptials of suicide.
The looming of the Thing summons up the subject’s life force as that subject is in the process of being set up: the premature being that we all can survive only if it clings to an other, perceived as supplement, artificial extension, protective wrapping. Nevertheless, such a life drive is fully the one that, at the same time, rejects me, isolates me, rejects him (or her). Never is the ambivalence of drive more fearsome than in this beginning of otherness where, lacking the filter of language, I cannot inscribe my violence in ‘no,’ nor in any other sign. I can expel it only by means of gestures, spasms, or shouts. I impel it, I project it. My necessary Thing is also and absolutely my enemy, my foil, the delightful focus of my hatred… the recipient that contains my dejecta and everything that results from cadere – it is a waste with which, in my sadness, I merge. [Julia Kristeva]

But seriously I wonder whether for a person like myself whose most intense moments were those of depression a cure that destroys the depression may not destroy the intensity – a desperate remedy. [Edward Thomas]

What is a hypochondriac, if not one who has no faith in himself, nor, indeed, in anyone else for two hours together? It is a state of being without a sense of security; a perpetual suspense, an expectation, a dread of an inevitable evil. [?]

Body and soul were believed to be affected, for better or worse, by the balance – or temperament – of the four primary humours found in the bloodstream. These primary humours were liquids: blood itself, phlegm, bile (or choler) and black bile – melancholia in Greek, atrabilia in Latin. The ideal temperament would hold these four humours in exactly equal proportions…

Trouble started when a complexion became dominated not by the melancholy humour as such but by ‘burnt’ melancholy…
Melancholy adust, despite its name, could be produced in the body by the burning of any of the four primary humours. While Greek medicine probably restricted it to the corruption of yellow bile, from Avicenna onwards any form of the four humours was held to produce it. Burnt melancholy itself produced melancholy adust, but so did burnt bile (choler), burnt phlegm or burnt blood. No matter what a man’s natural temperament might be, melancholy madness was always a possibility once the balance was upset…

Today the Problems are not the most widely read of Aristotle’s works. Yet two or three pages of them have influenced the interpretation of human genius as much as anything ever written. Few doubted the book’s authority: it was cited as genuine by Plutarch and Cicero…
Book 30 treats matters concerned with thought, intelligence and wisdom. Aristotle was often tentative in his answers but not in the opening question: ‘Why is it that all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, politics, poetry or the arts are melancholic?’ The implications of his answer remained disturbing across the centuries.; the certainty of his assumptions proved irresistible…
Among the great melancholics Aristotle ranged ‘Empedocles, Plato, Socrates and many other well-known men.’ If you were a Renaissance melancholic you might hope to be classed with them. On the other hand, you might be a candidate for chains in Bedlam, since Aristotle took the vital step of explaining the genius of melancholics in terms of that Platonic madness (mania) which the Latins called furor. Such people were ‘furious’…

Expressions such as ‘to keep body and soul together’ go back to a time when the reality of the soul and body as the two major divisions of man dominated thinking, in medicine as in law, in philosophy as in theology. The body and soul can be badly joined or loosely joined. The joints can be strained or come apart. Their final dissolution is death; their temporary severance or loosening can be madness (when due to illness), or ecstatic inspiration (when due to higher causes)…
Death is the separation of body and soul. Philosophers trains their souls to die – to leave, that is, their bodies, so far as they are able – in order to contemplate divine truth and beauty. This detachment from the body is made possible by the soul’s kinship with the changeless world of heaven… When the soul leaves the body – or strives to do so – there is ecstasy or rapture. Rapture, strictly speaking, is an ecstasy in which the soul is caught away to God, but Montaigne and other use ravissement for any ecstasy, even for one brought on by natural causes…
Since wisdom is a god, men might conclude that insanity (mania) is bad, but Socrates denied that this was so. Plain insanity attributable to illness is, of course, bad. But lovers are insane too, so are philosophers, prophets poets. They are insane in that their souls are still striving to leave their bodies. In the case of lovers their souls yearn to merge with the beloved; in the case of philosophers their souls yearn to soar aloft towards divine Truth and Beauty; in the case of prophets and seers their souls are taken over or driven out by spirits. These notions are not simply metaphorical…
When, for whatever reason, the soul was leaving the body or striving to do so, the person concerned was said to be ‘beside himself,’ ‘furious’ or ‘outside himself’…

The fusion of Platonic and Aristotelian doctrines with Renaissance Platonism was made by Ficino in his interpretation of Problems 30.1: a philosopher is a man who seeks truth and beauty where they exist in stable permanence; such beauty as there is is a reflection of beauty as it exists in the mind of God. So too for truth. These doctrines encourage philosophers and artists to seek ideal truth and beauty in ecstatic revelations or from spiritual inspiration. A philosopher, artist or prophet will detach his ’soul,’ ’spirit,’ or ‘mind’ from his body and send it winging its way aloft to the realm of permanence in the mind of God. When he cannot actually do so, he will strive to do so. Great lovers, as a step on the way to this, will have souls which leap ecstatically toward union with the beloved so as to ‘live in him.’
For those who accepted their authority, the sources of these ideas made it impossible to separate melancholy genius from madness. In the Problems, the first example that Aristotle gave of an outstanding melancholic was Hercules (Heracles) and his ’sacred disease’ (epilepsy, considered to be a case of spiritual possession). Aristotle mentioned Hercules’ ‘insane frenzy towards his children’; linked this frenzy with Ajax ‘who went completely mad’ and then recalled the case of Bellerophon who craved for solitude in places where no men were. Without a break he went on to ‘Empedocles, Plato, Socrates and others,’ as examples of geniuses associated with melancholy frenzies.
Aristotle explained these frenzies and inspired madnesses by analogy with men drunk with wine. This was a classical commonplace; it became a Stoic one, then a Christian one. Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Gregory of Nyssa, Erasmus or Montaigne pass just as easily as Rabelais does from questions of drink to questions of ecstasy and melancholy madness.
Melancholics, like men inflamed with wine, may become variously ‘maniacs, clever, amorous or talkative.’ The melancholy humour may become heated. When this heating occurs near the seat of the mind, men become ‘madmen or enthusiasts’; when their condition is not caused by illness or disease, they are the seers, prophets and entheoi – men like Socrates, inspired by a ‘god within’…

The keyword is the ekstasis of the original, as that enabled Aristotle’s view of melancholy genius to be associated with the Latin terms used to translate it, especially with furor, a word which had many meanings, including most of the forms of Platonic mania and embracing the fury of the man who is mad with anger, the frantic bravery of the warrior and the distracted inspiration of seer or poet. Latin versions of the Problems do not underplay the madness. For the ekstasis of Heracles, Theodore Gaza used ‘mental disturbance’ (motion mentis) and Ludovicius Septalius a stronger variant, commotio mentis. Where Aristotle wrote of entheoi (persons with a ‘god within’), Gaza wrote of ‘people who are believed to be goaded on by a divine in-breathing’ (divino spiraculo), and Septalius, more classically, wrote of numine afflati, people ‘breathed on by the godhead.’
These ecstasies may arrive unbidden. Philosophers may encourage them by practising dying; yet even great melancholics may topple over from good ecstasies into genuine insanity – not merely into the high madness of poetic furor affected by the poets of Pléiade, although Ronsard linked his own poetic furor to his melancholy. The madness feared by melancholics led to chains and padded cells…

Astonishment, too, was associated with melancholy. Since estonnement is an ecstasy, it is not explained simply in terms of the soul’s being stunned within the body but as the soul’s striving to leave its body behind. Such men and women ecstatics are ‘beside themselves’ or ‘outside themselves’ for joy or fear or wonder. When they recover they are said to be ‘given back to themselves’ or to ‘come back to themselves’. Many experience ecstasy in the sudden presence of goodness, beauty, truth, bravery or any great-souled action, especially when unexpected…

Many agreed with Du Laurent that it was this third kind of melancholy alone which marked out men of genius. Indeed, cold and earthy melancholy is ‘asinine’; it makes men gross and slow in mind and body. Hot and adust melancholy makes men mad, unfit for any office or responsibility. ‘Only that kind of melancholy which is mixed with a little blood makes men ingenious, excelling all other’…
The genius which Aristotle attributed to melancholics – sanguine melancholics according to Du Laurent and others – makes men ‘outstanding in intellect and exceeding others in sharpness of judgement’ because it clears the mind of waste matter, makes the imagination more subtle and profound and ‘when the melancholy humour is heated by sanguine vapours it excites a kind of holy furor called enthusiasm, bringing out unusual effects in philosophy, poetry and prophecy, so that something divine seems to come forth.’
It is precisely because genius is a drive on the part of the soul to leap ‘outside itself’ and leave the body behind that madness is a constant risk. Anyone whose complexion was sanguine-melancholic would have had cause for worry if he fell victim to an access of melancholy humour. [M.A. Screech]

It is no coincidence that the German Renaissance should have chosen ‘melancholy,’ that is to say, awareness of life’s menace and sufferings, for its most convincing portrait of contemplation, or that in the Camuldulensian Conversations the enthusiastic glorification of the ‘vita speculativa‘ and the acknowledgement of Saturn as patron of contemplation were coupled with the sorrowful belief that grief and weariness are the constant companions of profound speculation. For in so far as the mental sovereignty desired by humanism sought to fulfil itself within the framework of a Christian culture, it meant danger as much has freedom. A position in the ‘centre of the universe,’ such as Pico della Mirandola’s discourse had attributed to man, involved the problem of a choice between innumerable directions, and in his new dignity man appeared in an ambiguous light which was soon to show an inherent danger. For in the measure in which human reason insisted on its ‘god-like’ power, it was bound also to become aware of its natural limits. It is significant that the early Renaissance turned with real concern to the theme of ethical choice, which the previous epoch had either ignored entirely, or left to the province of the theological doctrine of grace; it found visible expression in the picture of Hercules at the Crossroads. Hercules makes an autonomous choice and thereby becomes involed in the problems resulting from his freedom. And it’s equally significant that the early Renaissance began to grasp the problem of astrology as a vital question of the human will affirming its independence even of Providence. The late Middle Ages had slurred over it by compromises such as ‘inclinant astra, non necessitant‘ or ‘sapiens homo dominatur astris.’ Writers of the fourteenth century had already become curiously uneasy about these questions, and in face of the almost continuous triumphal progress of astrology had to a large extent retreated into a pre-Thomist standpoint of marked intransigence. Even when the burning of Cecco d’Ascoli is left out of account, it must be said that even Chaucer’s and Petrarch’s polemics, like Luther’s later on, were far more ‘patristic’ than ‘enlightened’. In the fifteenth century, which now learned to proceed in a really ‘enlightened’ manner towards a new notion of human dignity, we find neighbouring and crossing currents, the discrepancy between which is due to the very loosening of medieval bonds. There were those who, in the full enjoyment of their freshly found liberty, bitterly disputed against all stellar influence. Next to these there were others who, in a sort of ‘horror vacui moralis‘ adopted an almost Islamic fatalism with regard to the stars, or practised the most obscure astral magic. There were those, too, who attempted to find a way between that conviction of freedom which was affirmed in theory but could not quite be realized in practice, and that fear of the stars which had not been wholly banished from practice although it was theoretically repudiated. The ‘bondsman’ of the Middle Ages (so to speak) was on the whole immune from astrology, but the ‘free man’ of Renaissance times was obliged either to fight it or to fall its victim.
The birth of this new humanist awareness took place, therefore, in an atmosphere of intellectual contradiction. As he took up his position, the self-sufficient ‘homo literatus‘ saw himself torn between the extremes of self-affirmation, sometimes rising to hubris, and self-doubt sometimes sinking to despair; and the experience of this dualism roused him to discover the new intellectual pattern, which was a reflection of this tragic and heroic disunity – the intellectual pattern of ‘modern genius.’ At this point we can see how the self-recognition of ‘modern genius’ could only take place under the sign of Saturn and melancholy; and how, on the other hand, a new intellectual distinction now had to be conferred on the accepted notions of Saturn and melancholy. Only the humanism of the Italian Renaissance was able to recognize in Saturn and in the melancholic this polarity, which was, indeed, implicit from the beginning, but which only ‘Aristotle’s’ brilliant intuition, and St. Augustines’s eyes, sharpened by hatred, had really seen. And the Italian humanists not only recognized this polarity: they valued it, because they saw in it the main feature of the newly discovered ‘genius.’ There was therefore a double renaissance: firstly, of the Neoplatonic notion of Saturn, according to which the highest of the planets embodied, and also bestowed, the highest and noblest of faculties of the soul, reason and speculation; and secondly, of the ‘Aristotelian’ doctrine of melancholy, according to which all great men were melancholics (whence it followed logically that not to be melancholy was a sign of insignificance). But this new acknowledgement of a favourable view of Saturn and melancholy was accompanied – or, as we saw, conditioned – by an unprecedented consciousness of their polarity, which lent a tragic colour to the optimistic view, and thus gave a characteristic tension to the feeling of life experienced by the men of the Renaissance. [Klibansky, Saxl and Panofsky]

There is a line of development in the history of the word ‘melancholy’ in which it has become a synonym of ’sadness without cause.’ It has come to mean a temporary state of mind, a feeling of depression independent of any pathological or physiological circumstances, a feeling which Burton (while protesting against this extension of the word) calls a ‘transitory melancholy disposition’ as against the ‘melancholy habit’ or the ‘melancholy disease’.
Thus one could say that someone was ‘melancholy today’ – something unthinkable in the Middle Ages; moreover, the predicate ‘melancholy’ could be transferred from the person to the object that gave rise to his mood, so that one could speak of melancholy spaces, melancholy light, melancholy notes or melancholy landscapes. Naturally this transformation was accomplished not in medical or scientific writings but in the type of literature which tended essentially to observe and represent man’s sensibility as having value in itself – that is in lyric, in narrative poetry, and also in prose romances…

In spite of the wealth of new and magnificent connotations which this poetry imparts to the descriptions (eg when Melancholy is called a daughter of Saturn and Vesta, or when she is compared to the starr’d Ethiope Queen, Cassiopeia), there are a hundred signs which connect his allegory with tradition. As in Alan Chartier, Melancholy is accompanied by personifications of secondary rank and she herself recognizably shares features familiar to us from scientific and medical literature: ‘facies nigra’ (Ore laid with black staid Wisdoms hue), rigidity (Forget thyself to Marble), the leaden eye fixing the ground (With a sad Leaden downward cast), the love of lonely nocturnal studies (Or let my lamp at midnight hour,/ Be seen in some high lonely Tower), the longing for a hermit’s life (And may at last my weary age/ Find out the peacefull hermitage/ The Hairy Gown and Mossy Cell). However, all this is filled with new meaning. The name ‘Penseroso’ (not ‘Melancolico’ or ‘Afflito’) by which her advocate is introduced indicates the positive and, as it were, spiritual value ascribed to Melancholy and – according to the old rule governing poetic disputations that ‘he who has the last word wins’ – Melancholy is shown to be superior to the jovial enjoyment of life. While the ‘Dame Mérencolye’ of the French romances, like Ripa’s ‘Malinconia,’ had been a sort of nightmare, inspiring the reader with even greater fear and repulsion, if that were possible, than her ancestress ‘Dame Tristesse,’ Milton’s Melancholy is called ‘divinest,’ and celebrated as a ‘goddess sage and holy’ and as a ‘Pensive Nun, devout and pure’…
It can also be observed to an astonishing degree in the reinterpretation of Melancholy’s symptoms proper. Her ‘facies nigra’ is only an illusion of our weak senses, which cannot stand the brilliance of her true aspect…
Her ‘Leaden downward cast’ is only the sign of complete absorption – nothing but the reverse side of a condition of ecstatic, visionary trance…
But as well as this, there are echoes of another world, a world of neither prophetic ecstasy nor brooding meditation, but of heightened sensibility where soft notes, sweet perfumes, dreams and landscapes mingle with darkness, solitude and even grief itself, and by this bitter-sweet contradiction serve to heighten self-awareness…
What emerges here is the specifically ‘poetic’ melancholy mood of the modern; a double edged feeling constantly providing its own nourishment, in which the soul enjoys its own loneliness, but by this very pleasure becomes again more conscious of its solitude, ‘the joy in grief,’ ‘the mournful joy,’ or ‘the sad luxury of woe,’ to use the words of Milton’s successors. This modern melancholy mood is essentially an enhanced self-awareness, since the ego is the pivot round which the sphere of joy and grief revolves; and it has also an intimate relationship with music, which is now made subservient to subjective emotions. ‘I can suck melancholy from a song as a weasel sucks egges, says Jaques. For music, which used to be a specific against the melancholic disease, was now felt to soothe and at the same time nourish this ambiguous bitter-sweet mood.
Naturally, the fusion of the characters ‘Melancholy’ and Tristesse’ during the fifteenth century brought about not only a modification of the notion of Melancholy, in the sense of giving it a subjective vagueness, but also, vice versa, of the notion of grief, giving it the connotations of brooding thoughtfulness and quasi-pathological refinements. The outcome of this interpenetration could only be a singularly complex, affective condition of the soul, in which the subjective and transitory emotion of mere ‘grief’ was combined with brooding withdrawal from the world and with the gloom, verging on sickness, of melancholy in the emphatic sense… Moreover, all the ideas originally connected with Melancholy and Saturn – unhappy love, and sickness and death – were added to this mixture, so it is not surprising that the new sentiment of Grief, born of a synthesis of ‘Tristesse’ and ‘Mélancolie,’ was destined to become a special kind of emotion, tragic through a heightened awareness of the Self (for this awareness is but a correlation to the awareness of Death). This new melancholy could either be didactically anatomized or be poured out in lyrical poetry or in music; it could rise to sublime renunciation of the world, or be dissipated in mere sentimentality…

Some hundred years later this consciousness became so much a part of self-awareness that there was scarcely a man of distinction who was not either genuinely melancholic or at least considered as such by himself and others. Even Raphael, whom we like to imagine as, above all, a serenely happy man, was described by a contemporary as ‘inclining to Melancholy, like all men of such exceptional gifts’; while with Michelangelo this feeling is deepened and strengthened to a kind of self-conscious enjoyment, though indeed a bitter one: ‘La mia allegrezz’ è la malincona.’
The point had not yet been reached, however, where anyone could actually revel in the sweet self-sufficiency of the melancholy mood, in the style of Milton’s poem, or even say, like Lessing’s Knight Templar, half sad and half jesting, ‘What if I liked to feel thus melancholy?’ Under the appalling pressure of the religious conflicts that filled the second half of the sixteenth century, the lines of melancholy were not only graven deep in the face of poetry – one has only to mention Tasso or Samuel Daniel – but actually determined the physiognomy of men living then, as we can see in the forbidding, reserved, imperious and yet sad features of ‘mannerist’ portraits. In this transitional period the very strength of the emotional pressure made Melancholia a merciless reality, before whom men trembled as before a ‘cruel plague’ or a ‘melancholy demon,’ and whom they tried in vain to banish by a thousand antidotes and consolatory treatises. It was as yet impossible for the imagination to transfigure it into an ideal condition inherently pleasurable, however painful – a condition which by the continually renewed tension between depression and exaltation, unhappiness and ‘apartness,’ horror of death and increased awareness of life, could impart a new vitality to drama, poetry and art.
This dynamic liberation first occurred in the Baroque period. Significantly enough, it achieved its fullest and most profound results in the countries where the tension which was to bear fruit in artistic achievement was its it most acute – in Cervantes’ Spain, where Baroque developed under the pressure of a particularly harsh Catholicism, and still more in Shakespeare’s and Donne’s England, where it asserted itself in the teeth of a proudly stressed Protestantism. Both countries were and remained the true domain of this specifically modern, consciously cultivated melancholy – for a long time the ‘melancholy Spaniard’ was as proverbial as the ’splenetic Englishman.’ The great poetry in which it found expression was produced during the same period that saw the emergence of the specifically modern type of consciously cultivated humour, an attitude which stands in obvious correlation to melancholy. Melancholic and humorist both feed on the metaphysical contradiction between finite and infinite, time and eternity, or whatever one may choose to call it. Both share the characteristic of achieving at the same time pleasure and sorrow from the consciousness of this contradiction. The melancholic primarily suffers from the contradiction between time and infinity, while at the same time giving a positive value to his own sorrow ‘sub specie aeternitatis,’ since he feels that through his very melancholy he has a share in eternity. The humorist, however, is primarily amused by the same contradiction, while at the same time deprecating his own amusement ’sub specie aeternitatis’ since he recognizes that he himself is fettered once and for all to the temporal. Hence it can be understood how in modern man ‘Humour,’ with its sense of the limitation of the Self, developed alongside that Melancholy which had become a feeling of an enhanced Self. Nay, one could be humorous about Melancholy itself, and by so doing, bring out the tragic element yet more strongly. But it is also understandable that as soon as this new form of Melancholy had become fixed, the shallow worlding should have used it as a cheap means of concealing his own emptiness, and by so doing have exposed himself to the fundamentally equally cheap ridicule of the mere satirists.
Thus alongside the tragic melancholic like Hamlet, there stood from the beginning the comic ‘fashionable melancholic’ like Stephen in ‘Every Man in his Humour,’ who wanted to ‘learn’ Melancholy as one learns a game or a dance – ‘ Have you a stool to be melancholy upon?… Cousin, is it well? Am I melancholy enough?’ But the most perfect synthesis of profound thought and poetic wistfulness is achieved when true melancholy is transfigured by humour – when a man whom at a superficial glance one would judge to be a comic, fashionable melancholic is really a melancholic in the tragic sense, save that he is wise enough to mock at his own Weltschmerz in public and thus to forge an armour for his sensitivity.
Compared with Jaques’s melancholy, the Miltonic ‘Penseroso’ is at once simpler and richer. Simpler, because Milton renounced the profound and ingenious plan of concealing the tragic face beneath a comic mask; richer, because, as we have seen, he combined all the aspects of the melancholic: the ecstatic and the contemplative, the silent and Saturnine no less than the musical and Apollinian, the gloomy prophet and the idyllic lover of nature, and welded their manifoldness into a unified picture, mild on the whole rather than menacing. The portrait could be differentiated further and this process of differentiation was carried out, more especially in eighteenth century English literature, with great speed and consistency. The ‘Odes to Melancholy,’ the ‘Elegies’ and the poetic glorification of the pleasures of melancholy with all its minor forms and varieties like contemplation, solitude and darkness, increased consistently from Gray to Keats; we can follow step by step how in this type of literature new refinements and distinctions of the melancholic sentiment evolved with regard to both quality and object. Corresponding to the old contrast between natural melancholy and melancholic disease, they distinguished ‘black melancholy’ in the sense of a morbid depression from ‘white melancholy’ in the sense of Goethe’s ‘Selig, wer sich vor er Welt ohne Hass verschliesst.’ This latter form was expressed sometimes in philosophic resignation, sometimes in elegiac sadness, sometimes in melodramatic passion, finally drowning in a sea of sensibility. The content of the poems varied according the greater or smaller importance given to the theme of ‘Withdrawal’ or of ‘Death,’ or to the ‘Complaint of Life,’ though on a work like Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard,’ where the basic emotion is so singly and expressively sustained, these three themes could very well be combined. Finally, one can see how, in accordance with the new aesthetic theories of ‘the Sublime,’ Milton’s ’smooth shaven green’ and ‘waters murmuring’ were gradually ousted by a ‘wild and romantic’ landscape with dark forests, caves, abysses and deserts. Thus the Gothic Revival with its love for the Middle Ages enriched the poetic scene with so many Gothic ruins, churchyards, night ravens, cypresses, yew trees, charnel houses and ghosts – mostly of sad virgins – that a certain group of poets was actually described as the ‘Graveyard School.’ The ‘Poetic Calendar’ for 1763 contained an anonymous satire entitled ‘To a Gentleman who Desired Proper Materials for a Monody,’ in which all these ingredients were amusingly catalogued.
This mockery is understandable, for in English literature of the eighteenth century – a curious age, in which rationalism and sensibility at once denied and evoked one another – poetic expression of the melancholy mood did in fact become more and more of a convention, while the feeling itself became more and more emasculated. And yet, in proportion as the traditional form and content lost their significance, either becoming conventionally insipid or degenerating into sentimentality, so did new and untraditional possibilities of expression arise to rescue the serious and real meaning of melancholy. Therefore, true melancholy, while it fled from the painted backcloth of ruins, vaults and cloisters, is now found, eg, in the bitter wit of Lessing’s later letters, or in the deliberately fragmentary style of Sterne, which was but a symbol of the eternal tragicomic incompleteness of existence as such. It can be perceived in those regions of the mind explored by Watteau and Mozart in which reality and fantasy, fulfilment and renunciation, love and loneliness, desire and death bear so close a likeness that the customary expression of sorrow and pain can scarcely be used save in parody.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, a new type of melancholy arose out of this strange dualism of a tradition gone stale and the spontaneous and intensely personal utterance of profound individual sorrow – namely, the ‘romantic’ melancholy. This was essentially ‘boundless’ in the sense both of immeasurable and of indefinable, and for that very reason it was not content to bask in self-contemplation, but sought once more the solidity of direct apprehension and the exactness of a precise language in order to ‘realize’ itself. This harsh and alert melancholy, whose very yearning for the eternal brought it in a new sense nearer to reality, might be called a masculine form of romantic Weltschmerz, in contrast to the far more common feminine type which had become merely pointless sensibility. It is understandable, therefore, that Keats, in his ‘Ode to Melancholy,’ should destroy the whole convention at a blow, rescuing the original meaning of melancholy emotion by discovering it in a sphere where convention had never thought of looking. Just as Shakespeare in his famous sonnet ‘my Mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun…’ routs the hyperbolic comparisons of older love-lyrics to conclude
‘And yet, by Heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.’
So, with an imperious gesture, Keats too scorns the familiar inventory. Restless and ‘wakeful,’ he feeds his melancholy with all his mind and senses, making it embrace all the bright splendour of created things, which he can then truly ‘discover’ and describe in a profusion of rich and varied terms, because the thought of their transitoriness and the feeling of his own pain alone enable him to take possession of their living beauty. It is no coincidence that this new melancholy, which discovers the sanctuary of the Goddess of Melancholy ‘in the very temple of Delight’ returns once more to the antithetic precision and mythological extravagance of the great Elizabethans. [Klibansky, Saxl and Panofsky]

This delight in what has been called ‘English Gothic’ suffuses the work of Robert Burton whose Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621, is a formidable digest on the pleasures and perils of that condition. Samuel Johnson declared that ‘it was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise,’ and Charles Lamb referred to Burton himself as ‘that fantastic great old man.’ Byron acquired all his classical learning from it, and thus became the melancholy Manfred; Keats used the book as a form of personal diary, and thereupon composed an ‘Ode on Melancholy.’ In this compendious volume, too, is the story of Lamia which directly inspired Keats to write his long poem of the same name. The treatise is indeed fantastic. Although Burton disclaims ‘big words, fustian phrases, jingling terms, tropes, strong lines, that like Alcestes’ arrows caught fire as they flew, strains of wit… elogies, hyperbolical exornations, elegancies etc which many so much effect,’ he employs all of these devices in a great phantasmagoria of prose. It is an opera bouffe of paraphrase and quotation, as Burton whispers to the great authors across the centuries or overhears them murmuring in his Oxford library. His own book is ‘a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dung-hills, excrement of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out… thous canst not think worse of me than I do of myself.’ So it is that ‘we weave the same web still, twist the same rope again and again.’ It is a line and a sentiment which more than a humdred years later, in the mid-eighteenth century, Laurence Sterne borrowed for the pages of Tristram Shandy, thus proving the the truth of the dictum in an eminently witty manner. But it is also one of the sources of Burton’s melancholy, this belief that the fine lines of the imagination may become a web or a prison – ‘we skim off the cream of other men’s wits, pick the choice flowers of their tilled gardens to set out our own sterile plots.’ We can write nothing that has not already been written, only rearrange the inheritance in a pleasing pattern.
Burton wrote one book for the rest of his life, expanding it in the course of several editions, and it came to a conclusion only at his death. Yet this melancholy Englishman did not believe that mortality broke the charmed circle of his melancholic imagination. ‘We keep our madness still, play the fools still… we are of the same humours and inclinations as our predecessors were, you shall find us all alike, much at one, we and our sons.’ That is why the melancholy man understands the great globe itself:
‘thou shalt soon perceive that all the world is mad, that is melancholy, doting: that it is (which Epicthonius Cosmpolites expressed not many years since in a map) made like a fool’s head )with that motto, Caput helliboro dignum, a crazed head, cavea stultorum, a fool’s paradise or, as Apollonius, a common prison of gulls, cheaters, flatterers, etcetera.’
This is the closest English prose reaches to abstract learning, this wistful, pedantic, digressive, solicitous and magniloquent style not untouched by irony or condescension. Like John Donne and Francis Bacon, Burton is interested in the ‘new’ philosophy only when it affords him fresh metaphors; but he still prefers the ancient wisdom of ‘Robin Goodfellows‘ or ‘Puck in the night’ as well as the knowledge contained in biographical anecdote. This tendency, too, he inherits from the native genius. Is it a peculiar disposition, also, to feel compelled to include no less than everything – just as Dickens filled his novels with crowds and Shakespeare filled the world with his characters – before concluding that all is vanity and empty striving? Even in the act of reaching out to grasp the world, English writers are troubled by melancholic contemplations. [Peter Ackroyd]

 

MODERNITY

The physicists tell us that if the eye could survive in an oven fired to the point of incandescence, it would see… nothing. There would be no unequal intensities of light left to mark off points in space. That formidable contained energy would produce invisibility, indistinct equality. Now, equality of that kind is nothing else than a perfect state of disorder.
And what made that disorder in the mind of Europe? The free coexistence, in all her cultivated minds, of the most dissimilar ideas, the most contradictory principles of life and learning. That is characteristic of a modern epoch.
I am not averse to generalising the notion of “modern” to designate a certain way of life, rather than making it purely a synonym of contemporary. There are moments and places in history to which we moderns could return without too greatly disturbing the harmony of those times, without seeming objects infinitely curious and conspicuous… creatures shocking, dissonant, and unassimilable. Wherever our entrance would create the least possible sensation, that is where we should feel almost at home. It is clear that Rome in the time of Trajan, or Alexandria under the Ptolemies, would take us in more easily than many places less remote in time but more specialized in a single type of manners and entirely given over to a single race, a single culture, and a single system of life.
Well then! Europe in 1914 had perhaps reached the limit of modernism in this sense. Every mind of any scope was a crossroads for all shades of opinion; every thinker was an international exposition of thought. There were works of the mind in which the wealth of contrasts and contradictory tendencies was like the insane displays of light in the capitals of those days: eyes were fatigued, scorched… How much material wealth, how much labour and planning it took, how many centuries were ransacked, how many heterogeneous lives were combined, to make possible such a carnival, and to set it up as the supreme wisdom and the triumph of humanity? [Paul Valéry]

To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of our souls and the world – and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. [Marshall Berman]

… the Marquis de Sade is the veritable patron of our age. [Kafka]

Risk, bravery, violence, chase, revolution, gold, blood, laxative pills, Charles Chaplin, wrecks on land, sea and in the air, surprise cigars, operetta prima donnas, adventures of all sorts, skating rinks, American boots, horses, struggle, chansonettes, a salto on a bicycle and thousands and thousands of events that make our Today beautiful. [Sergei Yutkevich]

We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched with a new form of beauty, the beauty of speed. A race-automobile adorned with great pipes like serpents with explosive breath.. a race-automobile which seems to rush over exploding powder is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace…
We will sing the great masses agitated by work, pleasure, or revolt; we will sing the multicoloured and polyphonic surf of revolution in modern capitals; the nocturnal vibration of arsenals and docks beneath their glaring electric moons; greedy stations devouring smoking serpents; factories hanging from the clouds by the threads of their smoke; bridges like giant gymnasts stepping over sunny rivers sparkling like diabolical cutlery; adventurous steamers scenting the horizon; large-breasted locomotives bridled with long tubes, and the slippery flight of airplanes whose propellers have flaglike flutterings and applauses of enthusiastic crowds. [Marinetti]

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure. [Aldous Huxley]

The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded. [Edmund Burke]

This is an age without passion: it leaves everything as it is, but cunningly empties it of significance. Instead of culminating in a rebellion, it reduces the outward reality of all relationships to a reflective tension which leaves everything standing but makes the whole of life ambiguous. [Soren Kierkegaard]

Wagner sums up modernity. [Friedrich Nietzsche]

Modernity is sometimes understood as most importantly a rejection of antiquity. (We would probably now call modernity the ‘post-classical’).The end or telos of human life for many classical authors was the peaceful contemplation of the order of the cosmos, and the place of human being within such a cosmos… Given our inescapable finitude, the occurrence of such a life of pure contemplation was wholly a matter of chance. For many modern authors, starting roughly with Machiavelli, this notion was rejected in favour of a different conception of the end of human life – ‘lower’, but given the right techne, achievable – the satisfaction of the passions. Nature was to be mastered, not contemplated; the distinction between theory and techne was collapsed and modern humanism, as a kind of technological self-assertion, was born. The ancients had been dreamers, orienting their reflection from a utopian view of what ought to be. The moderns have awakened from such slumbers; ‘light’ has dawned, and our reflection will henceforth securely, even certainly, be oriented from the way things are…

Modernity’s great problem, as envisioned by a line of thinkers from Baudelaire to Nietzsche, was that it had not been ‘modern’ enough, that the restless, perpetually self-transforming, anomic, transient spirit of modernism had to be affirmed much more honestly and consistently… an aestheticisation of the modern spirit, an emphasis on originality, constant novelty, the ceaseless creation of new forms of life, and so forth, would fulfil its promise…

[For other writers] modernity is a spiritual disaster, a demeaning routinisation of human life, but a kind of necessary fate, so successful in its transformation of life and human desire as to be itself untransformable. In Weber’s famous words, the ‘whole cosmos of the modern economic order’ is an ‘iron cage’, producing its ’specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart,’ and its ‘delusion’ that ‘this nullity… has achieved a level of development never before attained by mankind’…

The Kantian name for that issue, the great, single modernity problem in the German tradition, is ‘autonomy.’ Most generally construed, such an ideal simply expresses the oldest classical philosophical ideal: the possibility that human beings can regulate and evaluate their beliefs by rational self-reflection, that they can free themselves from interest, passion, tradition, prejudice and autonomously ‘rule’ their own thoughts, and that they can determine their actions as a result of self-reflection and rational evaluation, an evaluation the conclusions of which ought to bind any rational agent.
But the classical idea that ignorance is a kind of slavery and knowledge the only true liberation, while continuous with much of the Enlightenment self-understanding, also assumed an ideal that was at odds with emerging modern thought. The assumption that the cosmos was an ordered and purposive whole, and that an individual could be said to be free (truly ‘who he was’) only when functioning purposively in such a whole, began to look like an indefensible anachronism within the modern (non-teleological) view of nature. To be sure, some aspects of the classical ideal survived this transformation in the understanding of nature. Within modern ‘naturalism’ a recognition of our wholly natural status was a precondition of an enlightened (and presumably better) life, a realization that freedom could only be a freedom from external constraints in the satisfaction of wants, and that autonomy was the power to satisfy these wants efficiently, that reason was the ’slave of the passions’. It survived also in the romantic qualification of such views, in the view that one could be ‘estranged’ from or foreign to one’s own wants, that many did not reflect one’s essential or true self. To be free in this sense would be to be true to one’s real, not merely apparent nature, to be able to ‘express’ and realise one’s individual nature…

The very idea of the modern, if we begin there, is, it is safe to say, very much a product of the Western European, Christian tradition, perhaps its most representative or typical product, even though the term itself is literally of Roman origin and pre-dates by some time the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century formulations of an explicit, revolutionary project. It is widely conceded that the term came into existence sometime in the late fifth or early sixth century (derived from the adverb modo, ‘recently’ or ‘of this time’) and that a significant, even problematic distinction between moderni and antiqui can first be noted in the speculations of the Roman historian Cassiodorus about the virtues and practices of the ‘old’ Rome in this ‘new’ time, so much under the influence of the East and the Germans. In that context, the original problem was not, as it was to become, a kind of opposition between ancients and moderns, but a way of ‘translating’ ancient wisdom and practices into a new context.
This, though, was only the beginning of what would later be a very long history of the notion of the modern in Christian Europe. Basically, the story is one of the gradual emergence of modernity as far more than a chronological category, a simple way of marking ‘now’ versus ‘then’. This began to occur when the ‘now’ came to be understood as something other than a continuation or transformation, even a radical transformation, of the ancient ways, and instead as marking an age of genuine novelty, an era with assumptions about the highest or fundamental things incompatible with past assumptions. It was this notion of a new beginning, or of an instauration or founding, that would generate so many philosophical problems and many factors helped to prepare the way for its emergence.
As is often pointed out, Judaism and especially Christianity, by their very nature, helped promote such a general historical or ‘ephocal’, revolutionary consciousness, and this by virtue of their very unGreek notions of eschatological time, a God beyond or outside of nature, involved in the history of a people or mankind, and especially by virtue of the Christian notion of the Incarnation, a decisive, revolutionary moment in time, before and after which all was different. Such a general view of things was bound to make it easier to think in an epochal or revolutionary way, to foster some general sense of the unacceptable or unredeemed nature of the present, of the need for salvation and a hope for the future’s redemption of the present, and to create the intellectual problem of what to say about the period and peoples who lived before this decisive event; especially, for Christians, about the Jews and pagan antiquity. [Robert Pippin]

It is clear, however, that the idea of modernity could be conceived only within the framework of a specific time awareness, namely, that of historical time, linear and irreversible, flowing irresistibly onwards… its main constitutive element is simply a sense of unrepeatable time… It was during the Middle Ages that the word modernus, an adjective and noun, was coined from the adverb modo (meaning ‘recently, just now’)…
[In Rome]The aristocratic analogy is underscored by the explicit opposition between scriptor classicus and (scriptor) proletarius – the antonym of ‘classic’ is ‘vulgar,’ instead of ‘new’ or ‘recent’, as we might have expected…
Such terms as modernitas (modern times’) and moderni (‘men of today’) also became frequent, especially after the tenth century. The distinction between antiquus and modernus seems to have always implied a polemic significance, or a principle of conflict…

The opposition ‘modern/ancient’ took on particularly dramatic aspects in the consciousness of the Renaissance with its sharply contradictory awareness of time in both historical and psychological terms. During the Middle Ages time was conceived along essentially theological lines, as tangible proof of the transient character of human life and as a permanent reminder of death and what lay beyond. This thinking was illustrated by the recurrence of such major themes and motifs as memento mori, fortuna labilis (the instability of fate), the ultimate vanity of all things, and the destructiveness of time. One of the most significant topoi of the Middle Ages, the idea of a theatrum mundi, drew an analogy between this world and a stage, on which humans are actors who unwittingly play the roles assigned to them by the divine Providence. Such conceptions were natural in an economically and culturally static society dominated by the ideal of stability and even quiescence – a society wary of change, in which secular values were considered from an entirely theocentric view of human life. There were also practical reasons for the rather loose and blurred time consciousness of the medieval individual. We must remind ourselves, for instance, that no accurate measurement of time was possible before the invention of the mechanical clock in the late thirteenth century. For all these combined causes, as a recent student of the Renaissance discovery of time has pointed out, the medieval mind ‘could exist in an attitude of temporal ease. Neither time nor change appear[ed] to be critical, and hence there [was] no great worry about controlling the future.’
The situation changed dramatically in the Renaissance. The theological concept of time did not disappear suddenly, but from then on it had to coexist in a state of growing tension with a new awareness of the preciousness of practical time – the time of action, creation, discovery, and transformation. To cite again Ricardo Quinones’s study of The Renaissance Discovery of Time, ‘Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio share their society’s sense of energy and rejuvenation, as well as its most practical concerns with time. In them we find aroused energy and love of variety. They themselves were something of pioneers and acutely aware of living in a new time, a time of poetic revival. But they also could regard time as a precious commodity, an object worthy of scrupulous attention.’
It has been convincingly demonstrated that the division of Western history into three era – antiquity, Middle Ages, and modernity – dates from the early Renaissance. More interesting than this periodisation per se are the value judgements passed on each of these three eras, expressed by the metaphors of light and darkness, day and night, wakefulness and sleep. Classical antiquity came to be associated with resplendent light, the Middle Ages became the nocturnal and oblivious ‘Dark Ages’, while modernity was conceived of as a time of emergence from darkness, a time of awakening and ‘renascence’, heralding a luminous future…
Mommsen writes: ‘The fact that we are able to associate this conception of the ‘Dark Ages’ with Petrarch means more than merely the fixation of a date. For the whole idea of the Italian ‘rinascita’ is inescapably connected with the notion of the preceding era as an age of obscurity. The people living in that ‘renascence’ though of it as a time of revolution. They wanted to break away from traditions and they were convinced that they had effected such a break.’
But Petrarch’s dream of ancient Rome’s glory and of its impending restoration at the end of a long period of forgetfulness was not without the realization that he himself had been doomed to live ‘amid varied and confusing storms’, and that he was still the son of the hated age of darkness…
To Petrarch and then to the next generation of humanists, history no longer appeared as a continuum but rather as a succession of sharply distinct ages, black and white, dark and bright. History seemed to proceed by dramatic ruptures, alternating periods of enlightened grandeur with dark periods of decay and chaos. Here we are faced with an obvious paradox, namely, that the Renaissance’s much discussed activist optimism and cult of energy emanate from a vision of world history that is essentially catastrophic.
To speak of the immediate past – the past that naturally structures the present – as ‘dark’ and at the same time posit the certainty of a ‘luminous’ future – even if it be the revival of a previous Golden Age – involves a revolutionary way of thinking, for which we would try in vain to find coherent precedents before the Renaissance. Is it necessary to stress that revolution is more than, and qualitatively distinct from, a simple expression of dissatisfaction or rebellion? Revolution is distinguished from any form of spontaneous or even conscious rebellion because it implies, besides the essential moment of negation or rejection, a specific consciousness of time and an alliance with it. Here again etymology is revealing. ‘Revolution,’ in its original and still primary meaning, is a progressive movement around an orbit, and also the time necessary for the completion of one such movement. Most historical revolutions have conceived of themselves as returns to a purer initial state, and any consistent theory of revolution implies a cyclical view of history – whether successive cycles are seen as alternating (light, darkness) or as forming a symbolic ascending spiral, in accordance with a more systematic doctrine of progress.
Insofar as the Renaissance was self-conscious and saw itself as the beginning of a new cycle in history, it accomplished an ideologically revolutionary alliance with time. Its whole philosophy of time was based on the conviction that history had a specific direction, expressive not of a transcendental, predetermined pattern, but of the necessary interaction of immanent forces. Man was therefore to participate consciously in the creation of the future: a high premium was put on becoming an agent of change in an incessantly dynamic world…

The old and lingering quarrel between the ancients and the moderns did not gain momentum until rationalism and the doctrine of progress won the battle against authority in philosophy and the sciences. The Querelle proper started when some modern-minded French authors, led by Charles Perrault, though fit to apply the scientific concept of progress to literature and art…
Taste, the seventeenth-century moderns believed, developed along with other aspects of civilization, becoming more demanding and refined. The concept of progress is explicitly applied to the area of civility, mores, and cultural conventions. Antiquity was therefore more primitive than modern times, and, worse, it went so far as to tolerate the reflection in poetry of rude and barbaric customs, which cannot help offending the taste of the civilized reader…
Perrault’s vocal nonconformism was in fact little more than a disguise of deep conformism and consciousness of fashion. We should not forget that the Querelle was indeed highly fashionable… Actually all the arguments brought forth by Perrault to demostrate the superiority of the moderns over the ancients are purely neoclassical. Throughout the whole dispute there were practically no theoretical disagreements among ther participants… both factions show a complete lack of historical sense, and both agree that the values involved in their discussion are absolute and changeless…
What makes Perrault and his followers no less neoclassic than their enemies, beyond the questions at issue, is their common belief in a transcendent and unique model of beauty… The progressivists think that the advancement of learning, the develoopment of civilizatio, and the enlightening influence of reason contribute to a better, more effective understanding of those perennial and universal values, which were no less real in older times but only less clearly discerned…

It was during the eighteenth century tht the idea of beauty began to undergo the process through which it lost its aspects of transcendence and finally became a purely historical category…
The Quarrel offered the pattern for a broader distinction between two autonomous world views and scales of value, both of them equally legitimate historically: the genius of antiquity and the modern genius. Of a great many examples available, there is one that clearly anticipates the late eighteenth-century distinction between classic and romantic: I am referring to the ‘classic/gothic’ aninomy as it occurs in English criticisn, and more precisely in Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivary and Romance (1762). Hurd speaks of classic and gothic as two perfectly autonomous worlds, neither of which can be considered superior to the other. Quite naturally, one who approaches the gothic with classical criteria will be unable to discover in it anything except irregularity and ugliness. But this, obviously, does not mean that the gothic has no rules or goals of its own by which its achievemnts should be judged…
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the word ‘romantic’, a synonym for ‘modern’ in the broadest conception, designated all the aesthetically relevant aspects of Christian civilization, seen as a distinct period in world history… The medieval legends, epics, and romances, the poetry of the troubadours, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Shakespeare, Tasso, Milton, etc., were all included in the sphere of romanticism thus understood. It was only later that the meaning of the term was narrowed down to designate primarily the literary and artistic schools that reacted against the neoclassical system of values during the first decades of the nineteenth century.
For the romantics (in the limited historical sense of our contemporary notion) the aspiration toward universality, the desire to make the work of art resemble as closely as possible the transcendent model of beauty, belonged to the classical past. The new type of beauty was based on the ‘characteristic’, on the various possibilities offered by the synthesis of the ‘grotesque’ and the ’sublime’, on the ‘interesting,’ and on other such related categories that had replaced the ideal of classical perfection. The pursuit of perfection came to be regarded as an attempt to escape history and the shortest way to ‘academicism’… To be of one’s own time, to try to respond to its problems became more than an aesthetic – it became almost a moral obligation…
Stendhal is probably the first major European writer to term himself a romantic and to understand by romanticism not a particular period (longer or shorter), nor a specific style, but an awareness of contemporary life, of modernity in its immediate sense…

It is impossible to say precisely when one can begin to speak of the existence of two distinct and bitterly conflicting modernities. What is certain is that at some point during the first half of the nineteenth century an irreversible split occurred between modernity as a stage in the history of Western civilization – a product of scientific and technological progress, of the industrial revolution, of the sweeping economic and social changes brought about by capitalism – and modernity as an aesthetic concept. Since then, the relations between the two modernities have been irreducibly hostile, but not without allowing and even stimulating a variety of mutual influences in their rage for each other’s destruction.
With regard to the first, bourgeois idea of modernity, we may say that it has by and large continued the outstanding traditions of earlier periods in the history of the modern idea. The doctrine of progress, the confidence in the beneficial possiblities of science and technology, the concern with time (a measurable time, a time that can be bought and sold and therefore has,like any other commodity, a calculable equivalent in money), the cult of reason, and the ideal of freedom defined within the framework of an abstract humanism, but also the orientation toward pragmatism and the cult of action and success – all have been associated in various degrees with the battle for the modern and were kept alive and promoted as key values in the triumphant civilization established by the middle class.
By contrast, the other modernity, the one that was to bring into being the avant-gardes, was from its romantic beginnings inclined toward radical antibourgeois attitudes. It was disgusted with the middle-class scale of values and expressed its disgust through the most diverse means, ranging from rebellion, anarchy, and apocalypticism to aristocratic self-exile. So, more than its positive aspirations (which often have very little in common), what defines cultural modernity is its outright rejection of bourgeois modernity, its consuming negative passion. [Matei Calinescu]

 

MOMENT

Pleasure exists only in the moment and there is nothing more individual, more uncertain, more incommunicable. [Paul Valéry]

The present moment is a powerful goddess. [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]

We do not remember days, we remember moments. [Cesare Pavese]

… the flash that crystallises
trees and walls surprises them in that
eternity of an instant. [Eugenio Montale]

Sometimes there come those quiet meditative moments in which one stands above one’s life with mixed feelings of joy and sadness, like those lovely summer days which spread themselves expansively and comfortable across the hills, as Emerson so excellently describes them. Then nature becomes perfect, as he says, and we ourselves too … [Friedrich Nietzsche]

There are moments in life when the sensuous perception of the present and our environment reaches a rare and higher degree of clearness without any special external cause, but rather through an enhanced susceptibility coming from within and explainable only physiologically. In this way, such moments remain indelibly impressed on the memory and are preserved in their entire individuality. We do not know why it should be just these moments out of so many thousands like them. On the contrary, they seem to be quite as accidental as are the solitary specimens of complete extinct animal species which are preserved in layers of rock, or the insects that were once accidentally crushed between the pages of a book when it was shut. However, memories of this nature are always delightful and pleasant. [Arthur Schopenhauer]

There are days, which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the yea, wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when every thing that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather, which we distinguish by the name of the Indian Summer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

The disappearance of the values of the past and the future explains why our contemporaries embrace the instant so frantically. They are not aware that they are embracing a phantom; in this respect they are different from both the Epicureans and the Romantics. In the past, worship of the instant was a form of ‘wisdom’ or an act of despair. In Greco-Roman antiquity, it was a philosophy enabling man to confront death; in the Romantic era, it is the passion that transforms the instant into a unique act. The instant represented not only the transitory but the exceptional, what happened to us only once and forever more: the ‘fatal instant,’ that of death or love, the moment of truth. It was not only exceptional and fateful; it was also a personal experience. The new rebellion turns the instant into an everyday occurrence and thus robs it of its greatest attraction: surprise. It is no longer something that will happen to us the day we least expect it; it is what happens all the time. It is a promiscuous cult: it encompasses all classes, ages, and sexes. For our forebears the instant was a synonym of separation, a line drawn between before and after; today it designates the indiscriminate mixture of one thing with another. Not fusion: confusion. The notion of a group, something apart from and opposed to society, is giving way to that of a ‘wave’ that comes to the surface and then immediately disappears again in the liquid mass. [Octavio Paz]

I think it was at Rolle, where we arrived early, that, drunk with happiness from reading La Nouvelle Heloïse and from the thought of visiting Vevey, possibly mistaking Rolle for Vevey, I suddenly heard a full peal of majestic bells ring out from a church standing on the hillside a quarter of a league above Rolle or Nijon, and I climbed up to it. I saw the beautiful lake spread out before my eyes, the sound of the bells was an enchanting music which accompanied my ideas and made them seem sublime.
I believe this was my nearest approach to perfect happiness.
Such a moment as this makes life worth living.
Later on I shall tell of similar moments, when the basis of happiness was perhaps more real; but was the sensation as keen, the rapture of happiness as perfect?
What can one say of such a moment without lying, without lapsing into fiction?…
My heart still throbs as I write this, thirty-six years afterwards. I lay down my paper, I roam about my room and then return to write. [Stendhal]

Those lovely morning instants when all personal things seem trivial and insignificant; when one feels within oneself the pride of the laws one is seeking. [Elias Canetti]

… a sunrise that, in a flash, depicts all at once the form of a new world. [?]

The crisis, sudden thunder in a calm heaven, is announced by the very beauty of the sky. The epileptic isn’t necessarily looking for the crisis as a factor of pleasure, but he has been warned of its coming by a very special state of happiness, a juvenile exhilaration. ‘Sublime,’ says Dostoyevsky,’ for that moment you’d give your whole life.’ He is literally ‘ravished,’ before returning, to be there again, often afflicted as he is by more or less severe lesions provoked by his fall or the sheer suddenness of the onset. The inexplicable enthusiasm precedes the accident, the shipwreck of the senses that of the body. But facilitating factors can also be of the order of distraction, the sleepiness provoked by the repetition of certain themes, or, on the contrary, by intense intellectual efforts, connected, for example, with the moment of invention, of basic discovery, as with Champollion, or with creative activity…
A mourning, an impression of profound unhappiness can, according to Bachelard, give us the feeling of the moment. They can, in any case, favour absence. We’re afflicted and here we are visited by some tenacious sensation, affecting indifferently one of our organs of perception: in the olfactory domain, someone will sense, often for several days, a characteristic odour, connected to a far-off memory; another, seated in a garden, will see one flower among others, become suddenly photogenic. The strange phenomenon lasts sometimes for a long while before everything seems ordinary again. You might think of Marcel Proust’s reflection on the subject of the Marquise de Sévigné: ‘She does not present things in a logical, causal order, she first presents the illusion that strikes us.’ In the sequence of the arrival of information, Proust designates for us the stimulus of art as the fastest, since here nothing yields to sentiment, but on the contrary, everything begins with it.
In short, turned casual by its excessive speed, the sensation overtakes the logical order. Proust confirms the Sophist idea of apate, the suddenness of this possible entry into another logic which dissolves the concepts of truth and illusion, of reality and appearance and which is given by the kairos that one might call ‘opportunity.’
What escapes from the universal and gives difference a context is the epieikes – that which pertains to a moment that is singular and, by definition, different. [Paul Virilio]

Incapable of living in the moment, only in the future and the past, in anxiety and regret! Now theologians are categorical on the subject: this is the condition and the very definition of the sinner. A man without a present tense. [E.M. Cioran]

 

MONEY

It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money. [Albert Camus]

People say I wasted my money. I say 90 per cent went on women, fast cars and booze. The rest I wasted. [George Best]

Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient. [Sydney Smith]

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor. [James Baldwin]

Certainly there are things in life that money can’t buy, but it’s very funny
Did you ever try buying then without money? [Ogden Nash]

I don’t know much about being a millionaire, but I’ll bet I’d be a darling at it. [Dorothy Parker]

If you want to see what God thinks of money, just look at all the people He gave it to. [Dorothy Parker]

He who wishes to become invisible has only to lose all his money. [Spanish proverb]

I cannot afford to waste my time making money. [Louis Agassiz]

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other. [Chinese proverb]

He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year. [Leonardo da Vinci]

Once he has stolen his 100,000 talers a rogue can walk through the world an honest man. [Georg Lichtenberg]

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. [Ursula K. Le Guin]

The only thing that consoles one for being poor is extravagance. The only thing that can console one for being rich is economy. [Oscar Wilde]

To have money is to be virtuous, honest, beautiful and witty. And to be without is to be ugly and boring and stupid and useless. [Jean Giraudoux]

Little by little, the pimps have taken over the world. They don’t do anything, they don’t make anything – they just stand there and take their cut. [Jean Giraudoux]

Our incomes are like our shoes; if too small, they gall and pinch us; but if too large, they cause us to stumble and to trip. [John Locke]

I finally know what distinguishes man from the other beasts: financial worries. [Jules Renard]

You, O money, are the cause of a restless life! Because of you we journey toward a premature death; you provide cruel nourishment for the evils of men; the seed of our cares sprouts from your head. [Propertius]

That’s a large part of what economics is—people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful. [Kim Stanley Robinson]

I’m living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart. [Saki]

To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave the way the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and stay sober. [L.P. Smith]

When I think of all the sorrow and the barrenness that has been wrought in my life by want of a few more pounds per annum than I was able to earn, I stand aghast at money’s significance. [George Gissing]

My future financial prospects are so black that I groan to gaze into the abyss. I feel irreparably shallow. [Harold Nicholson]

I’m not interested in money – I just want to be wonderful! [Marilyn Monroe]

According to F.Scott Fitzgerald the rich “are different from you and me”. To which Hemingway replied, “yes, they have more money.”

Money is human happiness in abstracto; and so the man who is no longer capable of enjoying such happiness in concreto, sets his whole heart on money. [Arthur Schopenhauer]

… that sort of moral death always brought about by an obsession in regard to money. [Simone Weil]

What increases the evil of poverty is contempt, which cannot be completely overcome even by merits, at least not before common eyes. [Kant]

 

MORALISM

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo. [H.G. Wells]

Never let your sense of morals keep you from doing what is right. [Isaac Asimov]

We know of no spectacle so ridiculous, as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality. [Thomas Babbington Macaulay]

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things. [G.K. Chesterton]

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy, that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. [John Kenneth Galbraith]

 

MUSIC

Music is a secret and unconscious mathematical problem of the soul. [Leibniz]

Without music, life would be a mistake. [Friedrich Nietzsche]

Music is the art of thinking with sounds. [Jules Combarieu]

Who hears music, feels his solitude
Peopled at once. [Robert Browning]

In its linear progressions and comparable tonal events, music mirrors the human soul in all its metamorphoses and moods. [Heinrich Schenker]

Music is essentially useless, as life is. [George Santayana]

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings without attaching them to events or objects in the world. [George Santayana]

Music… is the outward and audible significance of inward and spiritual realities. [Peter Warlock]

The greatest music is begotten through the unison of pure fantasy and mathematics. [Cecil Gray]

Music can noble hints impart
Engender fury, kindle love;
With unsuspected eloquence can move,
And manage all the man with secret art. [Joseph Addison]

To know whether you are enjoying a piece of music or not you must see whether you find yourself looking at the advertisments of Pears’ soap at the end of the programme. [Samuel Butler]

When I don’t like a piece of music, I make a point of listening to it more closely. [attributed to Florent Schmitt]

… music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret. [Oscar Wilde]

If man were better, he wouldn’t need music. It is also the wickedness in people that makes them like music so much. What might they think of themselves if they didn’t have music? A murderer would manage to comfort himself if he got to listen to the right music. During music, all values and judgements are different, erased, raised, refilled, fulfilled, whatever we think signifies less or more; above all, new connections are possible, and under such auspices they seem everlasting. [Elias Canetti]

Is there such a thing as cheerful music? I don’t know of any. [Franz Schubert]

The whole problem may be stated quite simply by asking, ‘Is there a meaning to music?’ My answer to that would be, ‘Yes’. And ‘Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?’ My answer to that would be, ‘No’. [Aaron Copland]

Good music makes me think with greater intensity and clarity about what’s on my mind. [Stendhal]

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony. [Benjamin Britten on Mahler’s Abschied]

The reactions music evokes are not feelings, but they are the images, memories of feelings. [Paul Hindemith]

The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music. [Aaron Copland]

Emotion is specific, individual, and conscious; music goes deeper than this, to the energies which animate our psychic life, and out of these creates a pattern which has an existence, laws, and human significance of its own. It reproduces for us the most intimate essence, the tempo and the energy, of our spiritual being; our tranquillity and our restlessness, our animation and our discouragement, our vitality and our weakness – all, in fact, of the fine shades of dynamic variation of our inner life. It reporduces these far more directly and more specifically than is possible through any other medium of huma communication. [Roger Sessions]

If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music. It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture on earth. [Sydney Smith]

[Music] is an enemy to melancholy and dejection of the mind, which St. Chrysostom truly called the Devil’s bath… [Henry Peacham]

… the profound meaning of music and its essential aim… is to promote a communion, a union of man with his fellow man and with the Supreme Being. [Igor Stravinsky]

Music is powerless to express anything at all. [Igor Stravinsky]

When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have. [Edgar Watson Howe]

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress. [Claude Lévi-Strauss]

Through musical interaction, two people create forms that are greater than the sum of their parts, and make for themselves experiences of empathy that would be unlikely to occur in ordinary social intercourse. [John Blacking]

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. [Leonard Bernstein]

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of ”culture.” [John Cage]

Singing and dancing serve to draw groups together, direct the emotions of the people, and prepare them for joint action. [E.O. Wilson]

Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune. [Thomas Fuller]

Music is a roaring-meg against melancholy, to rear and revive the languishing soul; affecting not only the ears, but the very arteries, the vital and animal spirits, it erects the mind and makes it nimble. [Robert Burton]

A musical experience needs three human beings at least. It requires a composer, a performer, and a listener; and unless these three take part together there is no musical experience… Music demands more from the listener than simply the possession of a tape-machine or a transistor radio. It demands some preparation, some effort, a journey to a special place, saving up for a ticket, some homework on the programme perhaps, some clarification of the ears and sharpening of the instincts. It demands as much effort on the listener’s part as the other two corners of the triangle, this holy triangle of composer, performer and listener. [Benjamin Britten]

All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music, because, in its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression… [Walter Pater]

The key to the understanding of contemporary music lies in repeated hearing: one must hear it till it sounds familiar. [Roger Sessions]

The basic ingredient of musc is not so much sound as movement… I would even go a step further, and say that music is significant for us as human beings principally because it embodies movement of a specifically human type that goes to the roots of our being and takes shape in the inner gestures which embody our deepest and most intimate responses. [Roger Sessions]

For the first time in musical history, music is interrogating itself about the reasons for its existence and about its nature. [Hans Werner Henze]

A new piece of music is a new reality. [Igor Stravinsky]

Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection. [Alban Berg]

Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good, just and beautiful, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless dazzling, passionate, and eternal form. [Plato]

It is proportion that beautifies everything, the whole universe consists of it, and music is measured by it. [Orlando Gibbons]

Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time. [Igor Stravinsky]

Where there’s music, there can be no evil. [Miguel De Cervantes]

[Music] does not express a particular and definite joy, sorrow, anguish, horror, delight or mood of peace, but joy, sorrow, anguish, horror, delight, peace of mind themselves, in the abstract, in their essential nature, without accessories, and therefore without their customary motives. Yet it enables us to grasp and to share them fully in this quintessence. [Arthur Schopenhauer]

Party allegiance cannot be expressed in music. [Zoltan Kodaly]

Learn a little music, so you’ll know what discipline really is. [Elizabeth Moon]

Without music we shall surely perish of drink, morphia, and all sorts of the artificial exaggerations of the cruder delights of the senses. [George Bernard Shaw]

Do not take up music unless you would rather die than not do so. [Nadia Boulanger]

Had I learned to fiddle, I should have done nothing else. [Samuel Johnson]

I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations. [Oscar Wilde]

Music is the best means we have of digesting time. [W.H. Auden]

I consider that music, by its very nature, is essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc… expresion has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion, and not a reality. [Igor Stravinsky]

Music is a cooperative art, organic by definition, social. It may be the noblest form of social behavior we’re capable of. It’s certainly one of the noblest jobs an individual can undertake. And by its nature, by the nature of any art, it’s a sharing. The artist shares, it’s the essence of his act. [Ursula K. Le Guin]

Music revives the recollections it would appease. [Mme de Stael]

Music is so naturally united with us that we cannot be free from it even if we so desired. [Boethius]

Music is the medicine of a troubled mind. [Walter Haddon]

See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it. [Thomas Carlyle]

For changing peoples’ manners and altering their customs there is nothing better than music. [Shu Ching]

Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without. [Confucius]

Some of the oldest physical artifacts found in human and protohuman excavation sites are musical instruments: bone flutes and animal skins stretched over tree stumps to make drums. Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there: weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting events, a night on the town, prayer, a romantic dinner, mothers rocking their infants to sleep, and college students studying with music as a background. Even more so in nonindustrialized cultures than in modern Western societies, music is and was part of the fabric of everyday life. Only relatively recently in our own culture, five hundred years or so ago, did a distinction arise that cut society in two, forming separate classes of music performers and music listeners. Throughout most of the world and for most of human history, music making was as natural an activity as breathing and walking, and everyone participated. Concert halls, dedicated to the perfomance of music, arsose only in the last several centuries. [Daniel J. Levitin]

Even songs, as a rule, are not composed simply to be listened to for pleasure. They have work to do, to serve as funeral dirges, as accompaniments to dancing, or to serenade a lover. [Raymond Firth]

The suspicion does not appear improbable that the progenitors of man, either the males or the females, or both sexes, before they had acquired the power of expressing their mutual love in articulate language, endeavoured to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm. The impassioned orator, bard, or musician, when with his various tones and cadences he excites the strongest emotions in his hearers, little suspects that he uses the same means by which, at an extremely remote period, his half-human ancestors aroused each other’s ardent passions during their mutual courtship and rivalry. [Charles Darwin]

Music, and in fact, art in general, is the process of consciously communicating an emotional judgment or point of view in terms of abstract symbology. [Jack Vance]

Music can transcend time and culture. Music that was exciting to the contemporares of Mozart and Beethoven is still exciting, although we do not share teir culture and society… Many of us are thrilled by koto music from Japan, sitar music from India, Chopi xylophone music, and so on. I do not say that we receive the music in exactly the same way as the players (and I have already suggested that even the members of a single society do not receive their own music in the same ways), but our own expreinces sggest that there are some possibilities of cross-cultural communication. I am convinced that the explanantion for this is to be found in the fact that at the level of deep structures in muisc there are elements that are common to the human psyche, although they may not appear in the surface structures.
Consider the matter of ‘feeling in music,’ which is often invoked to distinguish two technically correct performances of the same piece. This doctrine of feeling is in fact based on the recognition of the existence and importance of deep structures in music. It asserts that music stands or falls by virtue of what is heard and how people respond to what they hear ‘in the notes’, but it assumes that the surface relationships between tones which may be perceived as ‘sonic objects’ are only part of other systems of relationships. Because the assumptions are not clearly stated and are only dimly understood, the assertions become all the more dogmatic and are often clothed in the language of an elitist sect. The effect of this confusion on musically committed people can be traumatic, and the musically inclined may be discouraged altogether.
When, as a boy, I mastered a technically difficult piece of piano musc, I was sometimes told that I played without feeling. As a result of this I tended to play more loudly or aggressively, or to fold up altogether. It seemed as if an assault was being made on my integrity as a person, rather than on my technical ability. In fact, my ‘unfeeling’ performance was the result of inadequate, hit-or-miss techniques of teaching in a society whose educational theory was founded on a confused doctrine relating success to a combination of superior intelligence, hard work, and moral integrity. A snobbish distaste for technical expertise, technology, and ‘mere’ craftsmanship discouraged attention to basic mechanical problems unless they were wrapped up in an aura of morality – as was the diligent practice of scales and arpeggios. The Venda attitude toward playing well is essentially technical and not ego-deflating. When the rhythm of an alto drum in domba is not quite right, the player will be told to move in such a way that her beat is part of a total body movement: she plays with feeling precisely because she is shown how to experience the physical feeling of moving with her instrument and in harmony with the other drummers and dancers. There is no suggestion that she is an insensitive or inadequate person. What is a commonplace of Venda musical instruction seems to be a rarity in ‘my’ society.
So often, the expressive purpose of a piece of music is to be found through identification with the body movements that generated it, and these in turn have had their origins in culture as much as in the peculiarities of an individual. There are so many different tempi in the world of nature and the body of man that music has endless possibilities of physical cordination with any one of them, or several of them together. Without this kind of coordination, which can be learned only by endless experimentation, or more quickly by direct aural transmission, there is little possibility that music will be felt… It may be necessary to slow down one’s breathing in order to ‘feel’ a piece of Korean music, whose unique elegance and refinement are hard for a European to appreciate. A similar control of the body makes it easier to catch the innigster empfindung of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, Op.109, last movement. Just breath slowly, relax the body completely and play – and the empfindung comes through the body. It is no longer an elusive, mysterious Teutonic quality!
Obviously the most deeply felt performance of any piece of music will be that which approaches the feeling of its creator when he began to capture the force of his individual experience with musical form. Since this experience may often begin as a rhythmical stirring of the body, it may be possible for a performer to recapture the right feeling by finding the right movement. Is it surprising, then, that many people abandon music because they cannot play what they feel, or cannot feel what they play? By creating a false dichotomy between the deep and surface structures of music, many industrial societies have taken away from people much of the practice and pleasure of music making. What is the use of teaching a pianist to play scales and arpeggios according to some didactic system, and then expecting him to feel the piano music of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and Ravel by a separate effort of the will, or the employment of some mysterious spiritual attribute? Exercise of the finger muscles is one thing, but the scales and arpeggios of a composer’s music will perhaps be felt most deeply when they are played according to his system. That is, if you find out by feeling for it how Debussy might have held his hands and body when he played the piano, you might get a better feeling for his music. You might find that you could play the music with feeling without having to be immensely ‘deep’.
In fact you would be profoundly deep, because you would be sharing the most important thing about music, that which is in the human body and which is universal to all men. It would be mysterious only in so far that we do not understand what happens in the remarkable bodies all human beings possess. It would not be mysterious in the sense of being something for only a chosen few.
Perhaps there is a hope of cross-cultural understanding after all. I do not say that we can experience exactly the same thoughts associated with bodily experience; but to feel with the body is probably as close as ayone can ever get to resonating with another person. [John Blacking]

In the beginning there was rhythm. [Hans von Bulow]

What most people relish is hardly music; it is rather a drowsy reverie relieved by nervous thrills. [George Santayana]

Most people use music as a couch… But serious music was never meant to be used as a soporific. [Aaron Copland]

To the devil with all those who have seen in our sublime art nothing but an innocent tickling of the ear. [Georges Bizet]

Finally, a story about a Special Needs School in the Greater Manchester area. I am visiting the school as representative of the sponsors (Sainsbury’s) of a series of musical workshops and therapy sessions run by the Hallé Orchestra’s percussion department.
The children are severaly mentally and physically handicapped, with one carer per child. Some of the children make no identifiable response at all. There is the usual special school atmosphere of affectionate firmness, and the percussion man proceeds with his turn, which involves much clowning and banging around. The kids are enjoying it enormously.
The climax to the workshop, which lasts about twenty minutes, is where the percussion man, joined now by guitar man, hands out a percussion instrument to every single child and carer. He teaches everyone a rhythm to contribute to the overall orchestra of crashes and bangs, and those that can move do a sort of Brazilian carnival conga around the room with their guiros, maracas, cabasas and tambourines.
During this joyous cacophony I am wathcing a little boy of five or six, who can barely hold the drum he has been given – his carer keeps picking up the beater off the floor for him – but has, after considerable effort, mastered the simple rhythm everyone is whacking out. He isn’t smiling or watching the other children, he’s too autistic to focus his eyes, but he is hitting the drum rat-tat-tat in unison with everyone else. Not particularly remarkable, a child playing a drum, you might say. My gaze wanders to his right and I notice that his carer has tears streaming down her face. As she is embarrassed to be caught weeping, I look away.At the end of the session, though, I seek her out, telling her that I couldn’t help noticing she had been crying and was there anything wrong?
She says, ‘You don’t understand. I have been working with this little boy since he came here four years ago/ When he imitated the rhythm of the music just then it was the first time ever he had resonded to something another human being had done. It is his first communication with another person. I was overcome by it. that’s all.’
A child reaches out across the abyss separating him from the rest of humanity – a journey for him as awesome and terrifying as you or I crossing the North Pole in winter. His lifeline not a word, not a glance, not a cuddle, not a smile, not a kiss, not a book, not a painting, not a film, not a TV programme, not a play, not a computer, not a person even, but a nusical rhythm. This is the alchemy of music. It is deep, deep within us and always has been since the African bush and the Nile delta. It is a tiny indication, in the high-tech modern world, of ‘where we are coming from’, us homo sapiens.” [Howard Goodall]

When a Hollywood film mogul wanted to give him a contract to write some background music and greeted him with a compliment about his ‘lovely music’, Schoenberg is said to have shouted at him in fury, ‘My music is not lovely’. He was not given the contract.
The aggression in which the new music directs against the established norms even now, after thirty years, an aggression in which something of the violence of surrealist onslaughts still survives, has its own specific tone; it is a tone of menace. It has ceased to be the tone which expresses individual feeling. On the contrary, it has been brought about by bracketing out the subject. It is not for nothing that indignant readers’ letters associate many compositions with catastrophes and panic. Among the more advanced scores today there are a number which sound literally as if they were ‘out of this world’ as the Americans would say. This aggressive tone intensifies with the rigour with which an integrated construction refuses to communicate the homely traces of the humane. It stems from a correct perception of the reified alienation and depersonlaisation of the destiny imposed on mankind and of the inability of the human sensibility to modify that destiny…

Whenever it follows the phrasemongers and sets out to serve mankind, perhaps by allowing man to speak directly, it puts a false gloss on the existing state of affairs and debases itself. Only with this mute utterance can it articulate itself. Only by taking the odium of dehumanization upon itself can it redeem the precept of autonomy, of the pure elaboration of the material in hand in all its aspects which has accompanied music throughout its subjective phase ever since it liberated itself from ritual. Only be ceasing to be ‘lovely’ can it provide an intimation of beauty. Its gesture of menace is unmistakable when it discards its internal logic as a mere semblance and throws itself on the mercy of chance. John Cage’s Piano Concerto, whose only meaning and internal coherence is to be found in its rejection of every notion of coherent meaning, presents us with catastrophe music at its most extreme.
This change in social function has utterly transformed the nature of music. Bourgeois music was decorative, even in its greatest achievements. It made itself pleasant to people, not just directly, to its listeners, but objectively, going far beyond them by virtue of its affirmation of the ideas of humanism. It was given notice to quit because it had degenerated into ideology, because its reflection of the world in a positive light, its call for a better world became a lie which legitimated evil. The effect of cancelling its contract reverberates in the most sensitive sublimations of musical form. Hence the right to speak of new music. [Theodor Adorno]

Let us take a particular evening – say the one on which Beethoven was to baptise a newly completed march in a four-handed ceremony. The once-insulted Ferdinand Ries is to join him for the performance. The pair take their places at the grand piano, open the music (on which the ink is not quite dry) and begin. The aristocracy of Vienna is transformed into an audience with the exception of two guests: a young count talks to a beautiful woman, standing by the door to the next room… Perhaps the count is speaking loudly, thinking to himself, well, how else am I to make myself understood with the noise these two musicians are making, much less have any hope of being heard by her?
More likely he thought nothing of it at all. For what was music for the surviving aristocracy around 1800 but table music, a foil for conversation, a melodic mise en scene? And, above all, a balm to soothe the nerves of the card-player…
That irritated feeling of being inconvenienced must have been foremost in the mind of the young count who went so far as to raise his voice. What happened then was not in the least musical: it was a revolutionary act, a verbal guillotine. Beethoven swept the hands of his young accompanist Ries from the keyboard, sprang up from the isntrument and shouted at the festive company: ‘I do not play for such swine!’
For seconds there was utter silence: the piano was mute, the chatterer struck dumb. According to Ries, the audience kept their nerve and tried to appease Beethoven: ‘All attempts to being him back to the piano were in vain, and he would not even allow me to play the sonata’ – the next item on the programme. ‘So on a note of general discord the music stopped.’
I do not play for such swine! A statement of impassioned rage, spoken in fury, yet also, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a political protest, not just in the sene of an expression of revolt aimed at princes and nobility, but also as a bid for autonomy on behalf of music and music-makers. Music, having long since come of age, now expected to command the full attention of society. She was no longer content to be mere decoration, divertimento, accompaniment, ‘aural ornament, donned by a room’, as Blaukopf put it. She demanded that society be all ears and respectfully silent. Music would no longer frame a social event; she insisted on being the event itself.
But it was not just a question of denying princes their divertissements. Music now refused to serve any social function whatsoever… Music no longer wnated to serve a text, a liturgy, a message of any kind. She no longer wanted to be mass or oratorio, song or wedding hymn, chorale or dance; she wanted to throw off this ballast of speech and words and piety, and her greatest adversary around 1800 was no prince, no cultural revolutionary, no dogmatic priest – it was the human voice. It was that voice that would go on speaking words, singing songs, telling stories, saying prayers, describing scenes, assigning meaning. The autonomy of music meant: liberation from song, which meant: instrumental music. [Dieter Hildebrandt[

What's the use of frequenting Plato, when a saxophone can just as well offer a glimpse of another world? [E.M. Cioran]

 

MYTH

… we have no trust in oracles, mysteries, soothsayings, and dreams; we do not pray at sunrise and sunset, before we drink, at departure and homecoming. We make no libations of bread and wine, no sacrifice to the souls of our dead; we do not give the god his share at each success in battle, in the games, in the theatre, in the work of our hands. [W. Kranz]

… the hunting, the fighting, or what not, the thing done, is never religious; the thing re-done with heightened emotion is on the way to become so. The element of action re-done, imitated… is, I think essential… Not the attempt to deceive, a desire to re-live, to re-present. [Jane Harrison]

Now let us turn to human acts – those, of course, which do not arise from pure automatism. Their meaning, their value, are not connected with their crude physical datum but with their propety of reproducing a primordial act, of repeating a mythical example. Nutrition is not a simple physiological operation; it renews a communion. Marriage and the collective orgy echo mythical archrtypes; they are repeated because they were consecrated in the beginning (‘in those days,’ in illo tempore, ab origine) by gods, ancestors, or heroes.
In the particulars of his conscious behaviour, the ‘primitive,’ the archaic man, acknowledges no act which has not been previously posited and lived by someone else, some other being who was not a man. What he does has been done before. His life is the ceaseless repetition of gestures initiated by others.
This conscious repetition of given paradigmatic gestures reveals an original ontology. The crude product of nature, the object fashioned by the industry of man, acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality. The gesture acquires meaning, reality, solely to the extent to which it repeats a primordial act…

A sacrifice, for example, not only exactly reproduces the initial sacrifice revealed by a god ab origine, at the beginning of time, it also takes place at that same primordial mythical moment; in other words, every sacrifice repeats the initial sacrifice and coincides with it. All sacrifices are performed at the same mythical instant of the beginning: through the paradox of rite, profane time and duration are suspended. And the same holds true for all repetition, ie. all imitations of archetypes; through such imitation, man is projected into the mythical epoch in which the archetypes were first revealed. Thus we perceive a second aspect of primitive ontology: insofar as an act (or an object) acquires a certain reality through the repetition of certain paradigmatic gestures, and acquires it through that alone, there is an implicit abolition of profane time, of duration, of ‘history’; and he who reproduces the exemplary gesture thus finds himself transported into the mythical epoch in which its revelation took place.
The abolition of profane time and the individual’s projection into mythical time do not occur, of course, except at essential periods – those, that is, when the individual is truly himself: on the occasion of rituals or of important acts (alimentation, generation, ceremonies, hunting, fishing, war, work). The rest of his life is passed in profane time, which is without meaning: in the state of ‘becoming.’ [Mircea Eliade]

Much was implicit in the Greek myths that has been lost to us today. When we look at the night sky, our first impression is one of amazement before a random profusion scattered across a dark background. Plato could still recognise ‘the friezes in the sky.’ And he maintained that those friezes were the ‘most beautiful and exact’ images in the visible order. But when we see a sash of fraying white, the Milky Way, girdle of some giantess, we are incapable of perceiving any order, let alone a movement within that order. No, we immediately start to think of distances, of the inconceivable light-years. We have lost the capacity, the optical capacity even, to place myths in the sky. Yet, despite being reduced to just their fragrant rind of stories, we still feel the Greek myths are cohesive and interconnected, right down to the humblest variant, as if we knew why they were so. And we don’t know. A trait of Hermes, or Artemis, or Aphrodite, or Athena forms a part of the figure, as though the pattern of the original material were emerging in the random scatter of the surviving rags.
We shouldn’t be too concerned about having lost many of the secrets of the myths, although we must learn to sense their absence, the vastness of what remains undeciphered. To be nostalgic would be like wanting to see, on raising our eyes to the sky, seven Sirens, each intoning a different note around each of the seven heavens. Not only do we not see the Sirens but we can’t even make out the heavens any more. And yet we can still draw that tattered cloth around us, still immerse ourselves in the mutilated stories of the gods. And in the world, as in our minds, the same cloth is still being woven. [Roberto Calasso]

The ancient Ego and its awareness of itself was different from ours, less exclusive, less sharply defined. It was, so to speak, open to rearward, absorbing a great deal of the past in its experience, and repeating it in the present, so that it became ‘there again.’ The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset expresses this idea by saying that ancient man, before he does anything, takes a step backwards, like the bullfighter drawing himself back for the death stroke. He looks into the past for a prototype, into which he slips as into a diving bell before plunging, at the same time protected and disfigured, into the present problem. Thus his life is in a sort of way a revival, a form of ‘archaising’ behaviour. But this life as revival is just what the life in myth is. Alexander walked in the footsteps of Miltiades, and in the case of Caesar his ancient biographers were rightly or wrongly convinced that he intended to imitate Alexander. This ‘imitation,’ however, is much more than is conveyed by the word today. It is mythical identification, a procedure which was specially familiar to the ancient world but has retained its efficacy right into modern times and, spiritually speaking, is open to anyone at any time. Attention has often been drawn to the archaic traits in the figure assumed by Napoleon. He regretted that the modern consciousness did not allow him to give himself out as the son of Jupiter-Ammon, as Alexander had done. But we need not doubt that he confounded himself mythically with Alexander at the time of his expedition to the East, and later when he had decided on an Empire of the West, he declared, ‘I am Charlemagne.’ Be it noted that he did not say, ‘I recall Charlemagne,’ nor ‘my position is like Charlemagne’s,’ nor even ‘I am as Charlemagne,’ but simply ‘I am he.’ This is the mythical formula.[Thomas Mann]

The continuity between the hunt and sacrificial ritual appears most forcibly in the ritual details that leave no tangible archaeological trace; these have been set out on detail by Meuli. The correspondences extend from the preparations, with their purifications and abstinences, to the closing rites, involving bones, skulls, and skins. In hunting societies accessible to ethnological study, hunters are said to have expressed clear feelings of guilt with regard to the slaughtered animal. The ritual provides forgiveness and reparation, though frequently taking on a scurrilous character which prompted Meuli to coin the phrase ‘the comedy of innocence.’ The ritual betrays an underlying anxiety about the continuation of life in the face of death. The bloody ‘act’ was necessary for the continuance of life, but it is just as necessary for new life to be able to start again. Thus, the gathering of bones, the raising of a skull or stretching of a skin is to be understood as an attempt at restoration, a resurrection in the most concrete sense. The hope that the sources of nourishment will continue to exit, and the fear that they will not, determine the action of the hunter, killing to live.
These customs are more than mere curiosities, for the hunt of the Paleolithic hunter is not just one activity among many. The transition to the hunt is, rather, one of the most decisive ecological changes between man and the other primates. Man can virtually be defined as ‘the hunting ape’ (even if ‘the naked ape’ makes a more appealing title). This statement leads to a second indisputable fact, namely, that the age of the hunter, the Paleolithic, comprises by far the largest part of human history. No matter that estimates range between 95 and 99 percent: it is clear that man’s biological evolution was accomplished during this time. By comparison, the period since the invention of agriculture – 10,000 years, at most – is a drop in the bucket. From this perspective, then, we can understand man’s terrifying violence as deriving from the behaviour of the predatory animal, whose characteristics he came to acquire in the course of becoming man.
Our conception of primitive man and his society will always be a tentative construct; still, there are some social and psychological preconditions that cannot have been absent from the situation of the early hunters. The primate’s biological makeup was not fit for this new way of life. Man had to compensate for this deficiency by a tour de force of ingenious technology and institutions, that is to say, by his culture, although that culture itself quickly became a means of selection. Of primary importance was the use of weapons, without which man poses virtually no threat to beasts. The earliest weapon that was effective at a distance was the wooden spear hardened by fire. This presupposes the use of fire; earlier, bones had served as clubs. Man’s upright posture facilitated the use of weapons. But perhaps more important than all this was the development of a social order leading to sharp sexual differentiation, which has even become a part of our inherited biological constitution. Among human beings, hunting is man’s work – in contrast to all animal predators – requiring both speed and strength; hence the male’s long, slender thigh. By contrast, since women must bear chilren with ever larger skulls, they develop round, soft forms. Man’s extraordinarily protracted youth, his neoteny, which permits the development of the mind through learning and the transmission of a complicated culture, requires long years of security. This is basically provided by the mother at home. The man assumes the role of the family breadwinner – an institution universal to human civilizations but contrary to the behaviour of all other mammals.
The success of the ‘hunting ape’ was due to his ability to work cooperatively, to unite with other men in a communal hunt. Thus, man ever since the development of hunting has belonged to two overlapping social structures, the family and the Männerbund; his world falls into pairs of categories: indoors and out, security and adventure, women’s work and men’s work, love and death. At the core of this new type of male community, which is biologically analogous to a pack of wolves, are the acts of killing and eating. The men must constantly move between the two realms, and their male children must one day take the difficult step from the women’s world to the world of men. Fathers must accept their sons, educating and looking after them – this, too, has no parallel among mammals. When a boy finally enters the world of men, he does so by confronting death.
What an experience it must have been when man, the relative of the chimpanzee, succeeded in seizing the power of his deadly enemy, the leopard, in assuming the traits of the wolf, forsaking the role of the hunted for that of the hunter! But success brought its own dangers. The earliest technology created the tools for killing. Even the wooden spear and wedge provided man with weapons more dangerous than his instincts could cope with. His rudimentary killing inhibitions were insufficient as soon as he could kill at a distance; and males were even educated to suppress these inhibitions for the sake of the hunt. Moreover, it is as easy, or even easier, to kill a man as it is to kill a fleeing beast, so from earliest times men slipped repeatedly into cannibalism. Thus from the very start, self-destruction was a threat to the human race.
If man nonetheless survived and with unprecedented success even enlarged his sphere of influence, it was because in place of his natural instincts he developed the rules of cultural tradition, thus artificially forming and differentiating his basic inborn behaviour. Biological selection rather than conscious planning determined the educational processes that helped form man, so that he could best adapt himself to his role. A man had to be courageous to take part in the hunt; therefore, courage is always included in the conception of an ideal man. A man had to be reliable, able to wait, to resist a momentary impulse for the sake of a long-range goal. He had to have endurance and keep to his word. In these matters men developed behaviour patterns that were lacking in anthropoid apes and were more closely analogous to the behaviour of beasts of prey. Above all, the use of weapons was controlled by the strictest – if also artificial – rules: what was allowed and necessary in one realm was absolutely forbiden in the other. A brilliant accomplishment in one was murder in the other. The decisive point is the very possibility that man may submit to laws curbing his individual intelligence and adaptability for the sake of societal predictability. The educative power of tradition attempts to bind him in an irreversible process analogous to biological ‘imprinting.’
On a psychological level, hunting behaviour was mainly determined by the peculiar interplay of the aggressive and sexual complexes, which thus gave form to some of the foundations of human society. Whereas research on biological behaviour, at least in predatory animals, carefully distinguishes intraspecific aggression from the behaviour of hunting and eating, this distinction obviously does not hold for man. Rather, these two became superimposed at the time when man unexpectedly assumed the behaviour of predatory animals. Man had to outdo himself in his transition to the hunt, a transition requiring implementation of all his spiritual reserves. And because this sort of behaviour became specific to the male sex, that is to say, ‘men’s work,’ males could more easily adapt themselves to the intraspecific aggression programmed for courtship fights and the impulses of sexual frustration.
It is not easy for adult males to cooperate, and especially the ‘naked ape,’ whose sexuality clearly grew out of proportion in order to bind men to women and thus insure that the family would be supported. The heightened aggresiveness thus aroused could be turned to the service of the community by means of redirection, as has been described by Konrad Lorenz; for it is precisely group demonstration of aggression toward outsiders, that creates a sense of close personal community. The Männerbund becomes a closed, conspiratorial group through the explosive potential of aggression stored internally. This aggression was released in the dangerous and bloody hunt. The internal and external effects of aggression mutually enhanced the chances of success. Community is defined by participation in the bloody work of men. The early hunter soon subdued the world.
Because the hunter’s activity was reinforced by behaviour aimed originally at a human partner – that is, through intra-specific aggression – in place of a biologically fixed relationship of beast and quarry, something curious occurred: the quarry became a quasi-human adversary, experienced as human and treated accordingly. Hunting concentrated on the great mammals, which conspicuously resembled men in their body structure and movements, their eyes and their ‘faces,’ their breath and voices, in fleeing and in fear, in attacking and in rage. Most of all, this similarity with man was to be recognized in killing and slaughtering; the flesh was like flesh, bones like bones, phallus like phallus, and heart like heart, and most important of, the warm running blood was the same. One could, perhaps, most clearly grasp the animal’s resemblance to man when it died. Thus, the quarry turned into a sacrificial victim. Many observers have told of the almost brotherly bond that hunters felt for their game, and the exchangeability of man and animal in sacrifice recurs as a mythological theme in many cultures besides the Greek.
In the shock caused by the sight of flowing blood we clearly experience the remnant of a biological life-preserving inhibition. But that is precisely what must be overcome, for men, at least, could not afford ‘to see no blood,’ and they were educated accordingly. Feelings of fear and guilt are the necessary consequences of overstepping one’s inhibitions; yet human tradition, in the form of religion, clearly does not aim at removing or settling these tensions. On the contrary, they are purposefully heightened. Peace must reign within the group, for what is called for outside, offends within. Order has to be observed inside, the extraordinary finds release without. Outside, something utterly different, beyond the norm, frightening but fascinating, confronts the ordinary citizen living within the limits of the everyday world. It is surrounded by barriers to be broken down in a complicated, set way corresponding to the ambivalence of the event: sacralization and desacralization around a central point where weapons, blood, and death establish a sense of human community. The irreversible event becomes a formative experience for all participants, provoking feelings of fear and guilt and increasing desire to make reparation, the groping attempt at restoration. For the barriers that had been broken before are now all the more willingly recognized. The rules are confirmed precisely in their antithetical tension. As an order embracing its opposite, always endangered yet capable of adaptation and development, this fluctuating balance entered the tradition of human culture. The power to kill and respect for life illuminate each other.
With remarkable consistency, myths tell of the origins of man in a fall, a crime that is often a bloody act of violence. The Greeks speculated that this was preceded by a golden age of modest vegetarianism, ending in the ‘murder’ of the plow-ox. Accordingly, anthropologists once saw the peaceful gatherers, or even the planters, as the original form of human civilization. The study of prehistory has changed this picture: man became man through the hunt, through the act of killing. ‘The greatest danger to life is the fact that man’s food consists entirely of souls,’ said an Eskimo shaman, just as Porphyrios characterized the state of mankind, divorced from the gods and dependent on food, by quoting Empedocles: ’such are the conflicts and groanings from which you have been born.’ As one of the Old Testament myths seem to tell us, men are the children of Cain. Yet killing, if it was a crime, was salvation at the same time. ‘You saved us by shedding blood,’ the Mithraists address their saviour-god, Mithras the bull-slayer. What has become a mystic paradox had been just fact in the beginning.” [Walter Burkert]