ponder

 

"Under the pretext of study we spent our hours in the happiness of love, and learning held out to us the secret opportunities that our passion craved. Our speech was more of love than of the books which lay open before us; our kisses far outnumbered our reasoned words."

— Peter Abelard

ponder

The modern American version of the Roman Forum is the parking lot in a strip mall.

ars poetica

I love my own lost self, my faulty stuff,
my silver wound, and my eternal loss.
—Pablo Neruda, from “Sonata and Destructions”

ponder

"There’s no prayer like desire."

- Tom Waits

ponder

 

"Even in the midst of the most remarkable experiences, we still do the same; we fabricate the greater part of the experience, and can hardly be made to contemplate any event, except as ‘inventors’ thereof. All this goes to prove that from our fundamental nature and from remote ages we have been—accustomed to lying."

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

ponder

- Entre le chagrin et le néant, je choisis le chagrin. Et toi, tu choisirais quoi ?
- Le chagrin c’est idiot, je choisis le néant. C’est pas mieux, mais le chagrin c’est un compromis. Faut tout ou rien. Puis maintenant, je le sais.
(À Bout De Souffle, Jean-Luc Godard, 1959)

ponder

 

"from the fact that there is no place (in the Thing which is Auguste Rodin’s torso of Apollo) which does not gaze back at you, the call somehow follows that you (the viewer of the statue) must change your life—how?"

Sloterdijk illustrates how the torso regards or concerns me, addresses me, how the object returns the gaze—this gaze returned by the object is the “aura,” the minimum of “religiosity,” this ability to be affected by the Other/Thing’s gaze, to “see it as seeing.”
- SLAVOJ ZIZEK

ponder

 
Alexandre Leupin describes this surplus in language or in the body as the quality of meaning Lacan called the jouissance
~Ellie Ragland

ponder

"The presence of a thought is like the presence of a lover."

- Arthur Schopenhauer, Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

ponder

"To the child it is self-evident that what delights him in his favorite village is found only there, there alone and nowhere else. He is mistaken; but his mistake creates the model of experience."

- Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, p. 373.

ponder

“You are more than I wanted,
this is new, this greed for the real.”

—   Margaret Atwood, from Selected Poems: 1965-1975

ponder

 

 

"on ne peut pas, même quand on a repris le sens du réel, mesurer le temps. Et donc la question revient combien de fois : combien de temps? combien de temps? combien de temps?

One cannot, even when one has recovered a sense of the real, measure time. And thus the question returns, how many times: how much time? how much time? how much time?"
— Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony

ponder

 

Even the smallest bodies / are one day translated to stars.

ponder

 

"We are surrounded by curtains. We only perceive the world behind a curtain of semblance. At the same time, an object needs to be covered in order to be recognized at all."

- René Magritte

ars poetica

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

~W.B. Yeats, “When You Are Old”

ars poetica

"Let me begin again as a speck
of dust caught in the night winds
sweeping out to sea. Let me begin
this time knowing the world is
salt water and dark clouds, the world
is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn
comes slowly, and changes nothing."

— Philip Levine, “Let Me Begin Again”

ponderous

"The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves.
We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror."
~Thomas Ligotti

ponder

The eyes see only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

ponder

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”

Oscar Wilde

ponder

“To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due.”
- Neil Gaiman, ‘The Sandman, Vol. 4’

ponder

"First proposition of civilization. Among barbarous peoples there exists a species of customs whose purpose appears to be custom in general: minute and fundamentally superfluous stipulations (as for example those among the Kamshadales forbidding the scraping of snow from the shoes with a knife, the impaling of a coal on a knife, the placing of an iron in the fire – and he who contravenes them meets death!) which, however, keep continually in the consciousness the constant proximity of custom, the perpetual compulsion to practice customs: so as to strengthen the mighty proposition with which civilization begins: any custom is better than no custom."

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, I, 16.

http://baiatev.tumblr.com/post/108828437231

ponder

While you live… you have a duty to life…. The fey wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them…. Otherwise they fade away.

~Charles de Lint

ponder

“How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?”
— Don DeLillo