From a letter Walker Percy wrote to a friend:
‘P.S. Shakespeare had it easy; he had a language, a new language, busting out all around him, and he didn’t even have to make up stories: the stories were around him too. We have to do it all, including the impossible or all but impossible task: make up a language as you go along. All you have to do to be a good novelist now is to be like God on the first day.’
Ugly and futile: lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail’s bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother’s prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.
Ulysses, Joyce
There is a relatively simple and painless eye-operation which, nonetheless, involves a very unpleasant experience: under local anesthesia, i.e., with the patient’s full awareness, the eye is taken out of the socket and turned a little bit around in the air (in order to correct the way the eye-ball is attached to the brain) – at this moment, the patient can for a brief moment see (parts of) himself from outside, from an “objective” viewpoint, as a strange object, the way he “really is” as an object in the world, not the way one usually experiences oneself as fully embedded “in” one’s body. There is something divine in this (very unpleasant) experience: one sees oneself as if from a divine viewpoint, somehow realizing the mystical motto according to which, the eye through which I see God is the eye through which God sees himself. Something homologous to this weird experience, applied to God himself, occurs in the Incarnation.
Zizek, Only a Suffering God Can Save Us
Boethius in the 6th Century writing in prison and imagining the good lady Philosophy helping his soul out after he was deluded by the Muses of Poetry:
“Who,” she demanded, her piercing eyes alight with firs, “has allowed these hysterical sluts to approach this sick man’s bedside? These are the very women who kill the rich and fruitful harvest of Reason with the barren thorns of Passion.”
Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel after speaking about the progression of the serious novel in the modern era from Cervantes onwards says the following:
‘Once upon a time I thought the future was the only competent judge of our works and actions. Later on I understood that chasing after the future is the worst conformism of all, a craven flattery of the mighty. For the future is always mightier than the present. It will pass judgement on us, of course. And without any competence.
But if the future is not a value for me, then to what am I attached? To God? Country? The people? The individual?
My answer is as ridiculous as it is sincere: I am attached to nothing but the depreciated legacy of Cervantes.’
‘An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.’
Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
More from Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche is talking about the differences in Spirit between the Southern and Northern European and, in particular, in relation to music…
“…a Southerner not by origin but by BELIEF, if he should dream of the future of music, must also dream of it being freed from the influence of the North; and must have in his ears the prelude to a deeper, mightier, and perhaps more perverse and mysterious music, a super-German music, which does not fade, pale, and die away, as all German music does, at the sight of the blue, wanton sea and the Mediterranean clearness of sky—a super-European music, which holds its own even in presence of the brown sunsets of the desert…”
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