"To take upon us the mystery of things"—what King Lear so wistfully says for himself and for Cordelia—this is also my suggestion for everyone who takes art seriously. A poor man is robbed of his overcoat (Gogol's "The Greatcoat," or more correctly "The Carrick"); another poor fellow is turned into a beetle (Kafka's "The Metamorphosis")—so what? There is no rational answer to "so what." We can take the story apart, we can find out how the bits fit, how one part of the pattern responds to the other; but you have to have in you some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations that you can neither define, nor dismiss. Beauty plus pity—that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.—Vladimir Nabokov, lecture on Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," Lectures on Literature (1980)
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Beauty plus pity—
'refuge in movement'
"What a quiet life our family has been leading," said Gregor to himself, and as he sat there motionless staring into the darkness he felt great pride in the fact that he had been able to provide such a life for his parents and sister in such a fine flat. But what if all the quiet, the comfort, the contentment were now to end in horror? To keep himself from being lost in such thoughts Gregor took refuge in movement and crawled up and down the room.—Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1915) (trans. Willa & Edwin Muir 1948)
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
'the inseparableness of two together'
(Hark close, and still, what I now whisper to you,
I love you, O you entirely possess me,
O that you and I escape from the rest and go utterly off, free and
lawless,
Two hawks in the air, two fishes swimming in the sea not more
lawless than we;)
The furious storm through me careering, I passionately trembling,
The oath of the inseparableness of two together, of the woman
that loves me, and whom I love more than my life, that oath
swearing,
(O I willingly stake all for you,
O let me be lost if it must be so!
O you and I! what is it to us what the rest do or think?
What is all else to us? only that we enjoy each other and exhaust
each other if it must be so;)
—Walt Whitman, "From Pent-up Aching Rivers," lines 27-36 (1860/81)
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
'We have seen the best of our time'
—William Shakespeare, King Lear (I.ii) (1606)GLOUCESTERThese late eclipses in the sun and moon portend
no good to us. Though the wisdom of nature can
reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself
scourged by the sequent effects. Love cools,
friendship falls off, brothers divide; in
cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in
palaces, treason; and the bond cracked twixt son
and father. ...
... We have seen the best of our time.
Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all
ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our
graves.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Every Desire for the Beautiful...
And so every desire for the Beautiful which draws us on in this ascent is intensified by the soul’s very progress towards it. And this is the real meaning of seeing God: never to have this desire satisfied. But fixing our eyes on those things which help us to see, we must ever keep alive in us the desire to see more and more. And so no limit can be set to our progress towards God: first of all, because no limitation can be put on upon the Beautiful, and secondly because the increase in our desire for the Beautiful cannot be stopped by any sense of satisfaction.—St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses (390)
Friday, March 25, 2011
The Erotic Aspect of Gift
In simple human terms, a love that is inseparable from an interest in the other is always more commendable, more truly selfless, than the airless purity of disinterested expenditure, because it recognizes the otherness and delights in the splendor of the other. The Christian thought of God’s creative agape has nothing to do with the sublime and sublimely disinterested abyss of the One, but belongs to the thought of the Trinity: it is a love always of recognition and delight, desiring all and giving all at once, giving to receive and receiving to give, generous not in thoughtlessly squandering itself, but in truly wanting the other.—David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (2003)
Thursday, March 24, 2011
The Revelation of God
But the word that has reached its highest point in the cry [on the Cross], and so is no longer articulated, breaks through and demolishes the last wall of separation, the heart of Jesus himself, and—as in a parable—externally, the curtain between God and man: blood and water flow outwards, God himself pours himself out….Where the word falls silent, the true message is proclaimed loudly: the message of the heart of God, broken open. And if the real ‘place’ of the Christian event at first lets man hear no word, since the place lies in man’s death, yet it more importantly makes visible an event of God (in the most literal sense of the word: ‘the look on him whom they have pierced’). In this death, the ‘heart of God’ breaks open, the last realities in God’s heart, beyond which there is nothing more, so that in death, and only in death, that which remains unutterable in life becomes speech...—Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, Vol. 7: The New Covenant (1969)
Labels:
beauty,
crucifixion,
death,
heart,
love,
revelation
Friday, March 18, 2011
...like being seasick on dry land.
"Of course I can guess, of course I guessed the first time I saw you, what kind of state you are in. I've had some experience, and I don't mean it as a joke when I tell you it's like being seasick on dry land. It's a condition in which you can't remember the real names of things and so in a great hurry you fling temporary names at them. You do it as fast as you can. But you've hardly turned your back on them before you've forgotten what you called them. A poplar in the fields which you called 'the tower of Babel,' since you either didn't or wouldn't know that it was a poplar, stands waving anonymously again, and so you have to call it 'Noah in his cups.'"
—Franz Kafka, "Conversation with the Supplicant" (1909) (trans. Willa & Edwin Muir 1948)
...a fugitive awareness...
The young man standing opposite me smiled. Then he dropped on his knees and with a dreamy look on his face told me: "There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me. I feel that then they were calm and beautiful. It must be so, for I often hear people talking about them as though they were."
—Franz Kafka, "Conversation with the Supplicant" (1909) (trans. Willa & Edwin Muir 1948)
Thursday, March 10, 2011
'A real woman!'
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, "The Bear" (1888) (trans. Elisaveta Fen 1954)SMIRNOVThat's a woman for you! That's the kind I appreciate! A real woman! Not one of these soft weak females, but a creature of fire, gunpowder, fireworks! I'm almost sorry to have to kill her!
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
'It has taken me thirty years to come to simplicity.'
It has taken me thirty years to come to simplicity. Earlier, I made a lot of what I thought were beautiful shots with much backlighting and many effects, absolutely none of which were motivated by anything in the film at all. As soon as we had a painting on the wall, we thought it should have a glow around it. It was terrible and I can hardly stand to see my own films on television anymore. I look for two minutes and then I thank God that there is a word called simplicity.—Sven Nykvist, quoted in "Shooting With Ingmar Bergman: A Conversation with Sven Nykvist" (AFI 1984)
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
...a subtle change that relaxes the statement...
Clashes between New Yorker poets and facts have been constant. "The checking department says it should be 'strait' not straits,'" Katharine S. White wrote to Elizabeth Bishop in 1945, about the first line of "Large Bad Picture." "But if you prefer the sound of the latter I don't think we need to be too literal." Bishop, we learn in the new volume of correspondence between the poet and The New Yorker, yielded to most editorial requests, and this time was no different.—Michael H. Miller, "Whose Line Is It, Anyway?" The New York Observer, Daily Transom (Feb. 16, 2011)
"It's good to have a standard," said Alice Quinn, formerly the poetry editor at The New Yorker and the caretaker of the Bishop legacy. "Accuracy was one of the three qualities Bishop strove for: accuracy, mystery and spontaneity."
It was copy editors, though, who made their mark on Bishop's most famous poem, changing a colon to a semi-colon in Bishop's "One Art" ("The art of losing isn't hard to master;"), a subtle change that relaxes the statement rather than making it a declaration. In general, grammatical mistakes—whether intentional or accidental—are tolerated far less than unfounded facts.
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