ponder

"Virtute duce comite fortuna"

(Under the guidance of valor, accompanied by good fortune)

~ Motto of Institut d'études politiques de Lyon, also motto of the Accorretti family

ponder

"I know the solitude that gets too much. It doesn’t drug me, but I get fantastic and uncivilized."

- Robert Lowell, from a letter to Elizabeth Bishop

ponder

Cultivate your restlessness

— Maggie Nelson

ponder

Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes, upon one double string.

— John Donne  

ponder

 

The antelope are strange people … they are beautiful to look at, and yet they are tricky. We do not trust them. They appear and disappear; they are like shadows on the plains. Because of their great beauty, young men sometimes follow the antelope and are lost forever. Even if those foolish ones find themselves and return, they are never again right in their heads.

— Pretty Shield, Medicine Woman of the Crows

ponder

 

The antelope are strange people … they are beautiful to look at, and yet they are tricky. We do not trust them. They appear and disappear; they are like shadows on the plains. Because of their great beauty, young men sometimes follow the antelope and are lost forever. Even if those foolish ones find themselves and return, they are never again right in their heads.

— Pretty Shield, Medicine Woman of the Crows

ponder

But whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn’t all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again–not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.
-Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

ares poetica

"To speak humanly from the height or from the depth
Of human things, that is acutest speech."

 

- Wallace Stevens, from Selected Poems

quoth the madman

“I am afraid of getting older. I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free… I want, I want to think, to be omniscient.”

—   Sylvia Plath written in 1949 at age 17.

quoth the madman

“And to this world, to this scene of tormented and agonised beings, who only continue to exist by devouring each other, in which, therefore, every ravenous beast is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of painful deaths; and in which the capacity for feeling pain increases with knowledge, and therefore reaches its highest degree in man, a degree which is the higher the more intelligent the man is; to this world it has been sought to apply the system of optimism, and demonstrate to us that it is the best of all possible worlds. The absurdity is glaring.”

—   Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol 1

ponder

 

When we mourn, we mourn for progress and duration, we say: no, do not progress beyond these limits; do not become stars without me; do not become more than my own limits will allow me to follow.

ars poetica

“We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.”

—   T. S. Eliot,

ponder

“It is a past that’s never over.
A past not even past.”

—   Jill Alexander Essbaum

literacki

Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand.

— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

ponderous

The first blush of love, when the self has lost its mooring, and, half-drowning, succumbs to a fearful tide.

— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

 

ponder

“Haven’t people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?”

— Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

quoth the madman

“I am obsessed at nights with the idea of my own worthlessness, and if it were only to turn a light on to save my life I think I would not do it. These are the last footprints of a headache I suppose. Do you ever feel that? - like an old weed in a stream. What do you feel, lying in bed?”

— Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West dated 18 August 1929.

ponder

"On ne peut penser et ecrire qu'assis [One cannot think and write except when seated] (G. Flaubert). There I have caught you, nihilist! The sedentary life is the very sin against the Holy Spirit. Only thoughts reached by walking have value."

— Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

ponder

In society, the excess of immorality breeds decadence; the excess of moral purity, sterility. Neither state is desirable or of any interest what so ever after even a short length of time.

ponder

“what is falling, we should still push.” – Zarathustra

ponder

"Although Dante virtually invented the category of the Neutrals who are neither damned nor redeemed, and created a Limbo going far beyond its counterparts in the Christian tradition, nothing in his world made possible  a redemption apart from the Church, and thus no pagan as pagan can ever be saved. This despite the fact that Virgil is the primary source of wisdom in the Commedia, just as the Classical world was the primary source of knowledge in the medieval world, and even as Virgil himself is Dante’s prime poetic inspiration. Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that here the Roman Empire is the source and ground of the new Christian Empire, and the Roman Empire is not simply the providential instrument of God, but also the gracious embodiment of the law and justice of God, so that even the Crucifixion was executed according to God’s justice (Paradiso, VII, 40-50)."

— Thomas Altizer, History as Apocalypse

ponder

"The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward."

— Engels, “The Magyar Struggle”

ponder

"A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion."

— Francis Bacon, Of Atheism

ponder

Understanding that the self is a product of communal, culture specific linguistics, ethics can for the first time be identified as the attempt to implement a meta-language through which the communal use of linguistic utterances is controlled.

ponder

"The task of modern idealists indeed is made much too easy for them by the fact that they are always taught that if a thing has been defeated it has been disproved. Logically, the case is quite clearly the other way. The lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world."

— G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong With the World

pondering

"But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain: But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body. All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds. There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit."

— St. Paul, I Corinthians, fifteenth chapter

ponder

"Everything toward which you cherish any respect or reverence
deserves the name of sacred; you yourselves, too, say that you would
feel a ‘sacred dread ’ of laying hands on it. And you give this tinge even to the unholy (gallows, crime, etc.). You have a horror of touching it. There lies in it something uncanny, that is, unfamiliar or not your own."

— Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

quoth the madman

"I was in the death struggle with self: God and Satan fought for my soul those three long hours. God conquered — now I have only one doubt left — which of the twain was God?"

— Aleister Crowley, Aceldama : A Place To Bury Strangers In

ponder

 

 

 

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language."

— Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

ponder

"Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges."
— Sri Aurobindo, Thoughts and Aphorisms

ponder

Orpheus ..loses Euridice intentionally in order to regain her as the object of sublime poetic inspiration.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK

ponder

    It is very rare to be able to endure one’s condition
There is always a need for intoxication…
Perhaps love is above all the means to free oneself from fate.

ANDRE MALRAUX

literacki

Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor all these kings; nor in the future shall any of us cease to be.
~Bhagavad Gita

ponder

"We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly."
E.M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

ponder

I seek a foreign fastness.

— Ezra Pound (adapted from “The Seafarer”)

ponder

Sometimes the name I cry
into the darkness is my own.

— Traci Brimhall, from “Requiem for the Firstborn”

 

literacki

Life is a capricious business.

— Stephen King, The Green Mile

pondering

Here is the torment only the scorned heart knows:
One side withers. The other side grows, and grows.

— Jessica Piazza, “Asymmetriphobia”

 

pondering

Destiny. To believe that a life is meant for a single purpose, one must also believe in a common fate. Father to daughter, brother to sister, mother to child. Blood ties can be as unyielding as they are eternal. But it is our bonds of choice that truly light the road we travel. Love versus hatred. Loyalty against betrayal. A person’s true destiny can only be revealed at the end of his journey, and the story I have to tell is far from over.

— Emily Thorne

 

ars poetica

Silence
and a deeper silence
when the crickets
hesitate …

—  Leonard Cohen, “Summer Haiku" The Spice-Box of Earth

the Play's the thing

…who could refrain,
That had a heart to love, and in that heart
Courage to make ’s love known?

— William Shakespeare, Macbeth: Act II Scene iii

 

The Play's the thing

Tell me,
How does it feel with my teeth in your heart?

— Euripides, Medea

ponder

…and love, as an act, lacks a verb.

— Joseph Brodsky

 

ars poetica

This is the essence of my being,
that never was. And this is my heart
that used to run breathlessly
over the waves to dwell inside storms.
It has become a burning silence,

— Maysun Saqr al-Qasimi

ponder

"You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way."

Marvin Minsky

pondering

“Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that’s all.”

— Gilles Deleuze

ponder

“I am in chains. Don’t touch my chains.”

— Franz Kafka

ponder

"…people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth— and indeed, no church—can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakeable"

- James Baldwin ~ The Fire Next Time

quoth the mdman

"I fall in love with everything. I also hate everything. It’s very hard to be a misanthrope and a romantic."

  Marilyn Manson

quoth the madman

"…and they don’t feel anything. They are the sane men of the universe. They have nothing to do with their time except watch it die. They are goldfish. I’m not sane."

  Charles Bukowski, from More Notes Of A Dirty Old Man: The Uncollected Columns

quoth the madman

In time there is no present,
In eternity no future,
In eternity no past.

— Alfred Lord Tennyson

ponder

I enjoy controlled loneliness. I like wandering around the city alone. I’m not afraid of coming back to an empty flat and lying down in an empty bed. I’m afraid of having no one to miss, of having no one to love.

— Kuba Wojewodzki, Polish journalist and comedian.

ponder

And to live only once–
What if that’s not enough?

— Gregory Orr, from Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved

 

literacki

“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”

— Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By Philip K. Dick

pondering

“Silence is something that comes from your heart, not from outside. Silence doesn’t mean not talking and not doing things; it means that you are not disturbed inside. If you’re truly silent, then no matter what situation you find yourself in you can enjoy the silence.”

— Thich Nhat Hanh

ponder

“We are not idealized wild things.

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”

— Joan Didion, from The Year of Magical Thinking

ponder

If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.  
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

ponder

"Infatuation is when you find somebody who you think is absolutely perfect.
Love is when you realize that they aren’t and it doesn’t matter."
~Miz Hyacinth, my grandmother

ponderous

"A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is."
Bertrand Russell