Reverie of a Solitary Walker

As evening approached, I came down from the heights of the island, and I liked then to go and sit on the shingle in some secluded spot by the edge of the lake; there the noise of the waves and the movement of the water, taking hold of my senses and driving all other agitation from my soul, would plunge me into a delicious reverie in which night often stole upon me unawares. The ebb and flow of the water, its continuous yet undulating noise, kept lapping against my ears and my eyes, taking the place of all the inward movements which my reverie had calmed within me, and it was enough to make me pleasurably aware of my existence, without troubling myself with thought. From time to time some brief and insubstantial reflection arose concerning the instability of the things of this world, whose image I saw in the surface of the water, but soon these fragile impressions gave way before the unchanging and ceaseless movement which lulled me and without any active effort on my part occupied me so completely that even when time and the habitual signal called me home I could hardly bring myself to go.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Fifth Walk, Reveries of  Solitary Walker

Image: Parc de Saint-Cloud, bassin de la Petite Gerbe, 1904, Eugene Atget

An Overwhelming Brightness

I often stood, it now comes back to me, watching the light fade, experiencing the long drawn out withdrawal of the wood into darkness. But while then, the trees, their twisted limbs and fissured boles, became lost in shadow and night, now, my memory, as if in emulation of a photographic negative, reverses this process, and instead of being absorbed in darkness, in my mind's eye the silhouettes of the trees are gradually obscured by an overwhelming brightness.

Andrei Selyenin: Flashing Water, Silent Earth.

Cures for Melancholy, Part One

Happy he, in that he is freed from the tumults of the world, he seeks no honours, gapes after no preferment, flatters not, envies not, temporizeth not, but lives privately, and well contented with his estate;

      Nec spes corde avidas, nec curam pascit inanem,
      Securus quo fata cadant.

      [He is not troubled with ambition nor vexed with care;
       indifferent to the fate of kingdoms.]

He is not troubled with state matters, whether kingdoms thrive better by succession or election; whether monarchies should be mixed, temperate, or absolute; the house of Ottomon's and Austria is all one to him; he inquires not after colonies or new discoveries; whether Peter were at Rome, or Constantine's donation be of force; what comets or new stars signify, whether the earth stand or move, there be a new world in the moon, or infinite worlds, etc. He is not touched with fear of invasions, factions, or emulations.

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

Burning like Maples

If men could only disintegrate like autumn leaves, fret away, dropping their substance like chlorophyll, would not our attitude toward death be different? Suppose we saw ourselves burning like maples in a golden autumn.

Loren Eiseley

Disorders of the Intellect

Disorders of the intellect happen much more often than superficial observers will easily believe. Perhaps, if we speak with rigorous exactness, no human mind is in its right state. There is no man whose imagination does not sometimes predominate over his reason, who can regulate his attention wholly by his will, and whose ideas will come and go at his command. No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannise, and force him to hope or fear beyond limits of sober probability. All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity; but while this power is such as we can control and repress, it is not visible to others, nor considered as any depravation of the mental faculties: it is not pronounced madness but when it comes ungovernable, and apparently influences speech or action.

Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

Images: Vampyr dir. Carl Theodore Dreyer

Second Spring

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

Albert Camus

Spy Stories

 

The man who lives apart, not to others but alone, is exposed to obvious psychological dangers. In itself, the practice of deception is not particularly exacting; it is a matter of experience, of professional expertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire. But while a confidence trickster, a play-actor or a gambler can return from his performance to the ranks of his admirers, the secret agent knows no such relief. For him, deception is first a matter of self-defence. He must protect himself not only from without but from within, and against the most natural of impulses; though he earn a fortune, his role may forbid him the purchase of a razor, though he be erudite, it can befall him to mumble nothing but banalities; though he be an affectionate husband and father, he must under all circumstances withhold himself from those in whom he should naturally confide.

John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.

Images:  The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, directed by Paul Ritter

Windows

Windows pampered like princes behold always
what on occasion deigns to draw our gaze:
the city that over and over, where a shimmer
of sky strikes a feeling of flood tide,

takes shape without yet agreeing to be.

Rilke, Venetian Morning (translated by Edward Snow)

A Simulated Life

My whole life has been a pretense, I told myself in the wing chair - the life I live isn't real, it's a simulated life, a simulated existence. My whole life, my whole existence has always been simulated - my life has always been pretense, never reality, I told myself. And I pursued this idea to the point at which I finally believed it. I drew a deep breath and said to myself, in such a way that the people in the music room were bound to hear it: You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life - a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.

Thomas Bernhard, Woodcutters (Translated by David McLintock)

Image: André Kertész

The Ground of all Transformation

 

Yesterday, while I was admiring the dissolving brightness of autumn here, you were walking through that other autumn back home, which is painted on red wood, as this one's painted on silk. And the one reaches us as much as the other; that's how deeply we are placed on the ground of all transformation, we most changeable ones who walk about with the urge to comprehend everything and (because we're unable to grasp it) reduce immensity to the action of our heart, for fear that it might destroy us.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne

Tree : True

As it happens, the etymology of the word true takes us back to the Old English word for a "tree": a truth, to the Anglo-Saxons, was nothing more than a deeply rooted idea.

Michael Pollan, Second Nature