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