More specifically concerning: fear
Locus Classicus
I am trying to find a way to explain this place, and failing completely. It’s not because the place is inconstant, or over-large, or complicated, or anything like that, but just that it is, in fact, so very simple that there is no way to explain it without making it seem more complicated than it […]
Of Academics
For the words and facts of the ancients are as bricks, from which we build the fortresses of our arguments, ever quarreling over the lines of the walls. These walls are torn down and rebuilt with such haste and such fury, that it does not seem strange when they are torn down again, or prove […]
Citation (13)
notions and scruples.
you may
Now although this elegant ordination of vegetables, hath found coincidence or imitation in sundry works of Art, yet is it not also destitute of naturall examples, and, though overlooked by all, was elegantly observable, in severall works of nature. – from the Garden of Cyrus I dreamt I was made to sit an examination on […]
Citation (20)
a love-song, a love-song.
to the dogs
Artemis.
Citation (21)
…for certainly Life is so Pretious, as it ought not to be Ventured, where there is no Honour to be Gain’d in the Hazard, for Death seems Terrible, I am sure it doth to Me, there is nothing I Dread more than Death, I do not mean the Strokes of Death, nor the Pains, but […]
Snow
a Turkish winter
they say it’s May
cf. She schools the flighty pupils of her eyes, With levell’d lashes stilling their disquiet; And puts in leash her pair’d lips lest surprise Bare the condition of a realm at riot. If he suspect that she has ought to sigh at His injury she’ll avenge with raging shame. She kept her love-thoughts on most […]
ghost pain
My bookshelves look like a fighter’s mouth, full of painful and surprising gaps. Even books I thought I could not do without, books that shaped my taste and who I am, are gone. Let me explain. When we decided to move abroad I knew, of course, that most1 of the books would have to be […]
affected
There are books which are too powerful, or which are too powerfully effective. I was reading such a book just a few minutes ago – but I won’t name it – about miserable people, leading miserable aimless lives in a gray and dismal country thousands of miles away. It is sunny here, and warm, as […]
The Gutenberg Elegies
Sven Birkerts. The Gutenberg Elegies. New York: faber & faber, 2006 (1994). Dean Blobaum’s review cogently summarizes many of the problems with Birkerts’ book, most notably: Birkerts’s musings on reading were quite different; they were apparently the product of intense introspection, vibrant with experience and reflection. He got at what he wanted to get at […]
Montaigne 1.18
They who have had a good drubbing in a fight may be led back to the charge on the morrow, though still wounded and bleeding; but if they have been given a good fright by the enemy, you will not induce them even to look at them. – Montaigne (Essays, ‘Of Fear’) The consideration of […]
Citation (66)
Socrates. One has to choose between being a man and being a mind. Man can act only because he can ignore, and content himself with a part of this knowledge which is his peculiar extravagance, a knowledge that is somewhat more extensive than is necessary! Phaedrus. Yet it is this slight excess that makes us […]