this moment is mine, outside, on the swing in the backyard with a little smoke between my fingers, a little smoke in the air, somewhere between junior year and senior year, looking at the clothes pegs each one barely moving, knowing that i'm going to be fucking knackered tomorrow at work, full of smiley people and good mornings, but it's okay for now, there is nothing to be done.

i spoke to ed stoppard today. WOAH

i still dislike a lot of london (yeah i know, bias and ignorance talking), but the art museums are really fucking great. what's just as good as the turners in the tate, are the two amazing, amazing theatre productions i saw today - arcadia & waiting for godot. so glad i managed to see the former in my lifetime, it was electrifying, there were these perfect moments that i just wanted to pause and savour, but then the next one came right along and then the next and the next - aaaaaaaaaah ed stoppard and dan stevens are dreamy dreamy dreamy... i didn't like thomasina, but that might well be jealousy. waiting for godot was very funny (mercifully)! patrick stewart and ian mckellen are so cute together, like an old married couple - nothing to be done. que voulez-vous? (: really want to see arcadia again, so maybe on monday, and perhaps, perhaps, the jude law hamlet on tuesday - but dont know if i can be arsed to get up that early to queue for day tickets

mehhhhhhh, i mean meuh meuh (: i was looking staring at 'bacchus and ariadne' today in the national gallery: the mythology of that painting just sort of fits right now, isn't it ironic...

1. happiness is a choice

2. don't suffer fools

3. si tu ne brûles pas à l'intérieur de toi, comment veux-tu enflammer les autres?

4. just because something's in the window doesn't mean you have to buy it

5. vulgarity is common, and easy, but that doesn't mean it's acceptable

6. fashion over comfort is as good a maxim as any

quick citibank errand, national gallery, saatchi gallery, impromptu coffee with L, random walk, national portrait gallery (ahhh full of wonderful encounters - QE the first! john donne looking very naughty! two portraits of beaky t.s. eliot! ian mcewan with emo dark hair, under martin amis and friends! and i didn't know e.m. forster was a ginger!), guilty but delicious cigarette, chinatown food, as you like it at the globe (i love happy endings, and everything was absolutely wonderful, funny, moving... save for phoebe)... sleepy coach back to cam, and past-midnight cycle home -

shall put up photos tomorrow. oh what a perfect day, and i usually find it so hard to like london! i am happy, and it is bedtime.

The Tourist and the Town

by Adrienne Rich

(San Miniato al Monte)



Those clarities detached us, gave us form,
Made us like architecture. Now no more
Bemused by local mist, our edges blurred,
We knew where we began and ended. There
We were the campanile and the dome,
Alive and separate in that bell-struck air,
Climate whose light reformed our random line,
Edged our intent and sharpened our desire.

Could it be always so: a week of sunlight,
Walks with a guidebook, picking out our way
Through verbs and ruins, yet finding after all
The promised vista, once! - The light has changed
Before we can make it ours. We have no choice:
We are only tourists under that blue sky,
Reading the posters on the station wall:
Come, take a walking-trip through happiness.

There is a mystery that floats between
The tourist and the town. Imagination
Estranges it from her. She need not suffer
Or die here. It is none of her affair,
Its calm heroic vistas make no claim.
Her bargains with disaster have been sealed
In another country. Here she goes untouched,
And this is alienation. Only sometimes
In certain towns she opens certain letters
Forwarded on from bitter origins,
That send her walking, sick and haunted, through
Mysterious and ordinary streets
That are no more than streets to walk and walk -
And then the tourist and the town are one.

To work and suffer is to be at home.
All else is scenery: the Rathaus fountain,
The skaters in the sunset on the lake
At Salzburg, or, emerging after snow,
The singular clear stars at Castellane.
To work and suffer is to come to know
The angles of a room, light in a square,
As convalescents know the face of one
Who has watched beside them. Yours now, every street
The noonday swarm across the bridge, the bells
Bruising the air above the crowded roofs,
The avenue of chestnut-trees, the road
To the post office. Once upon a time
All these for you were fiction. Now, made free
You live among them. Your breath is on this air,
And you are theirs and of their mystery.

i've just watched this on theauteurs.com, (which is mostly rubbish because 95% of the films aren't available in england) and it is really weird. way too intense, especially cos the music climaxes every 10 seconds or so, but some awesome moments of cinematography where females lie inert in the background while the protagonist crawls to his wife...

BDS: 813/1110. almost three-quarters through! and it's becoming really tragic, des renversements de la fortune, and all that =x poor didi. new words today: amadouer, horripiler, ventouse, gaver, hargne, s'epoumoner, dédommager, envoûter, escroquer, volutes, fioritures, dégingandée, étalon, truchement, sangler, strabisme etc - so educational haha

sigh, time for swinburne, on d g rossetti - and i don't even care for the pre-raphaelites very much - but last essay of the year, so hard to write... let me demonstrate why; this is what swinburne writes:

Clothed in soft white garments, she draws out through a comb the heavy mass of hair like thick spun gold to fullest length; her head leans back half sleepily, superb and satiate with its own beauty; the eyes are languid, without love in them or hate; the sweet luxurious mouth has the patience of pleasure fulfilled and complete, the warm repose of passion sure of its delight. Outside, as seen in the glimmering mirror, there is full summer; the deep and glowing leaves have drunk in the whole strength of the sun. the sleepy splendour of the picture is a fit raiment for the idea incarnate of faultless fleshly beauty and peril of pleasure unavoidable. For this serene and sublime sorceress there is no life but of the body; with spirit (if spirit there be) she can dispense. Were it worth her while for any word to divide those terrible tender lips, she too might say with the hero of the most perfect and exquisite book of modern times - Mademoiselle de Maupin - Je trouve la terre aussi belle que le ciel, et je pense que la correction de la forme est la vertu. Of evil desire or evil impulse she has nothing; and nothing of good. She is indifferent, equable, magnetic; she charms and draws down the souls of men by pure force of absorption, in no wise wilful or malignant; outside herself she cannot live, she cannot even see: because of this she attracts and subdues all men at once in body and in spirit. Beyond the mirror she cares not to look, and could not.

... seriously? 'faultless fleshly beauty', 'peril of pleasure unavoidable','terrible tender lips'? BARFFFFFFFF

Thomas Browne too was often distracted from his investigations into the isomorphic line of the quincunx by singular phenomena that fired his curiosity, and by work on a comprehensive pathology. He is said to have long kept a bittern in his study in order to find out how this peculiar bird could produce from the depths of its throat such a strange bassoon-like sound, unique in the whole of Nature; and in the Pseudodoxia Epidemica, in which he dispels popular errors and legends, he deals with beings both real and imaginary, such as the chameleon, the salamander, the ostrich, the gryphon and the phoenix, the basilisk, the unicorn, and the amphisbaena, the serpent with two heads. In most cases, Browne refutes the existence of the fabled creatures, but the astonishing monsters that we know to be properly part of the natural world leave us with a suspicion that even the most fantastical beasts might not be mere inventions. At all events, it is clear from Browne’s account that the endless mutations of Nature, which go far beyond any rational limit, and equally the fascination to him as they were, three-hundred years later, to Jorge Luis Borges, whose Libro de los seres imaginarios was published in Buenos Aires in 1967. recently I realized that the imaginary beings listed alphabetically in that compendium include the creature Baldanders, whom Simplicius Simpicissimus encounters in the sixth book of Grimmelhausen’s narrative. There, Baldanders is first seen as a stone sculpture lying in a forest, resembling a big Swabian bib. Baldanders claims to have come from Paradise, to have always been in Simplicius’s company, unbeknownst to him, and to be unable to quit his side until Simplicius shall have reverted to the clay he is made of. Then, before the very eyes of Simplicius, Baldanders changes into a scribe who writes these lines, [black and white photograph of passage of ancient German manuscript] and then into a mighty oak, a sow, a sausage, a piece of excrement, a field of clover, a white flower, a mulberry tree, and a silk carpet. Much as in this continuous process of consuming and being consumed, nothing endures, in Thomas Browne’s view. On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation. For the history of every individual, of every social order, indeed of the whole world, does not describe an ever-widening, more and more wonderful arc, but rather follows a course which, once the meridian is reached, leads without fail down into the dark. Knowledge of that descent into the dark, for Browne, is inseparable from his belief in the day of resurrection, when, as in a theatre, the last revolutions are ended and the actors appear once more on stage, to complete and make up the catastrophe of this great piece. As a doctor, who saw disease growing and raging in bodies, he understood mortality better than the flowering of life. To him it seems a miracle that we should last so much as a single day. There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. Indeed, old families last not three oaks. To set one’s name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer’s day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten. These are the circles Browne’s thoughts describe, most unremittingly perhaps in the Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial of 1658, a discourse on sepulchral urns found in a field near Walsingham in Norfolk. Drawing upon the most varied of historical and natural historical sources, he expatiates upon the rites we enact when one from our midst sets out on his last journey. Beginning with some examples of sepulture in elephants, cranes, the sepulchral cells of pismires and practice of bees; which civil society carrieth out their dead, and hath exequies, if not interments, he describes the funeral rites of numerous peoples before coming to the Christian religion, which buries the sinful body whole and thus extinguishes the fires once and for all. The almost universal practice of cremation in pre-Christian times should not lead one to conclude, as is often done, that the heathen were ignorant of life beyond death, to show which Browne observes that the funeral pyres were built of sweet fuel, cypress, fir, yew, and other trees perpetually verdant as silent expressions of their surviving hopes. Browne also remarks that, contrary to general belief, it is not difficult to burn a human body: a piece of old boat burnt Pompey, and the King of Castile burnt large numbers of Saracens with next to no fuel, the fire being visible far and wide. Indeed, he adds, if the burden of Isaac were sufficient for a holocaust, a man may carry his own pyre. Browne then turns to the strange vessels unearthed from the field near Walsingham. It is astounding, he says, how long these thin-walled clay urns remained intact a yard underground, while the sword and ploughshare passed above them and great buildings, palaces and cloud-high towers crumbled and collapsed. The cremated remains in the urns are examined closely: the ash, the loose teeth, some long roots of quitch, or dog’s grass wreathed about the bones, and the coin intended for the Elysian ferryman. Browne records other objects known to have been placed with the dead, whether as ornament of utensil. His catalogue includes a variety of curiosities: the circumcision knives of Joshua, the ring which belonged to the mistress of Propertius, an ape of agate, a grasshopper, three-hundred golden bees, a blue opal, silver belt buckles and clasps, combs, iron pins, brass plates and brazen nippers to pull away hair, and a brass jew’s-harp that last sounded on the crossing over the black water. The most marvelous item, however, from a Roman urn preserved by Cardinal Fernese, is a drinking glass, so bright it might have been newly blown. For Browne, things of this kind, unspoiled by the passage of time, are symbols of the indestructibility of the human soul assured by scripture, which the physician, firm though he may be in his Christian faith, perhaps secretly doubts. And since the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man is to tell him he is at the end of his nature, Browne scrutinizes that which escaped annihilation for any sign of the mysterious capacity for transmigration he has so often observed in caterpillars and moths. That purple piece of silk he refers to, then, in the urn of Patroclus – what does it mean? (22-6)

w g sebald, the rings of saturn


...


when i first read the passage i read 'hour upon hour is added to the sun' i thought that was so beautiful, and then i read it again and realised it was 'sum' instead of 'sun', but it doesn't matter anyway (:

i love that i hear about the paris weather from fbook friends' statuses.

today was a good day, despite the absence of bedder and my now having to put back my week-old sheets and a dead fly very oddly dropping into my eye during hurley supervision - because FINALLY DONE WITH THE LARKIN DISSERTATION, and it's not perfect, but it'll have to do, cos i'm FED UP. woop woop. and then cocktails with d, who is funny, and talks a lot, and can't even use a lighter, and coughs - ahaha. je fume trop.

tonight on BDS: didi takes an early train back cos he's hard up for rianounette! ô what a farce, or should i say, marche triomphale de l'amour. 676/1110.

every time someone comes into the library there's a momentary draught of cool air. therefore we need more people in the library, or at least, more people coming and going. and coming better than going, of course, i mean, then i won't feel so bummed out about sitting in the library working. i am writing an essay on 'having a coke with you' and this is going to take me a while. as usual

i spent the afternoon at indigo, they were playing cesaria evora (ha! totally remember listening to her in 2004, that's ages ago), i sat in the window, pretended to work while people-watching and watching the indigo staff screw up orders as usual. i sat there for a good two and a half hours and had a bagel (oh lord, please send me my usual toasted everything with lowfat veggie cream cheese from pinnacle, sigh) and a diet coke, then ingfak, where j'ai fumé une clope in the courtyard while reading frank o'hara on jackson pollock. aaah. cancer stix. but my last one was on thursday though, so not terrible. right? one every three days is positively virtuous. anyway. i love it when poets write about the visual arts, vice versa is rarely as successful... okay anyway, this is not interesting to anyone but myself, i will resume essay now, if only it were like firefox

o o o and i am at 648/1110 on belle du seigneur, i think i might finish the livre before leaving cambridge after all! and then maybe i will donate it to the robinson library or something, haha, i don't know if they take random books? it would be nice to bring it back to sg, along with my camus and le clézio and the other cohen though i don't know how i would manage that considering all the barang barang i already have, probaby 100 kg worth eurgghhhh

with less than a month left in cambridge, i am determined to remember. some pictures off my phone, the colours are wrong, but that's okay, i've got the same pictures inside my head:

monday, walking back through the gardens after brief showers:




how perfect it was, that mild post-supervision euphoria, and listening to the national, thinking "with my green gloves/get inside their heads/love their loves"

...

yesterday we picnicked off bridge street, hahah substituting 'twilight along the seine' for mid-afternoon glare along the cam.




i love S&S. and subway sandwiches with honey mustard heh. then, walking back through king's (what a great feeling, bypassing the tourists with my little blue university card):



spot the tower of the UL, topped with a flag like a cherry atop a cake

...

and today, wanting to finish my book, i stumbled into the michaelhouse cafe. so beautiful:





i love that there was no ridiculous tinkly cafe music; instead i'm pretty sure someone broke a plate- i heard the wonderful crash. and the cafe has long teaspoons, the first i've seen in cambridge!

in any case, i finished my book - sebald's austerlitz, so elegiac, i don't feel like we belong in the same century, or at least, i'm spun round in a different direction. and the echoes in the book, so affecting, so knowing of other books (w, chabert) and rooms and reactions (the BNF! ha), and the photographs, wittgenstein's eyes, the rucksack, the not unpacking, is it acceptable to say that i understand? and the cold european cities and towns, that i know i will return to someday:


In this room, which as Austerlitz commented was ideal for its purpose, I was surprised by the simple beauty of the wooden flooring, made of planks of different widths, and by the unusually tall windows, each divided into a hundred and twenty-two lead-framed square glass panes, through which long telescopes were once turned on eclipses of the sun and the moon, on the intersection of the orbits of the stars with the line of meridian, on the Leonid meteorite showers and the long-tailed comets flying through space. In accordance with his usual custom, Austerlitz took a few photographs, some of them of the snow-white stucco roses in the frieze of flowers running round the ceiling, others of the panorama of the city to the north and north-west on the far side of the park, shot through the leaded window-panes, and while he was still busy with his camera he embarked on a disquisition of some length on time, much of which has remained clear in my memory. Time, said Austerlitz in the observation room in Greenwich, was by far the most artificial of all our inventions, and in being bound to the planet turning on its own axis was no less arbitrary than would be, say, a calculation based on the growth of trees or the duration required for a piece of limestone to disintegrate, quite apart from the fact that the solar day which we take as our guideline does not provide any precise measurement, so that in order to reckon time we have to devise an imaginary, average sun which has an invariable speed of movement and does not incline towards the equator in its orbit. If Newton thought, said Austerlitz, pointing through the window and down to the curve of the water around the Isle of Dogs glistening in the last of the daylight, if Newton really thought that time was a river like the Thames, then where is its source and into what sea does it finally flow? Every river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so where, seen in those terms, where are the banks of time? What would be this river’s qualities, qualities perhaps corresponding to those of water, which is fluid, rather heavy and translucent? In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it? Why do we show the hours of light and darkness in the same circle? Why does time stand eternally still and motionless in one place, and rush headlong by in another? Could we not claim, said Austerlitz, that time itself has been non-concurrent over the centuries and the millennia? It is not so long ago, after all, that it began spreading out over everything. And is not human life in many parts of the earth governed to this day less by time than by the weather, and thus by an unquantifiable dimension which disregards linear regularity, does not progress constantly forward but moves in eddies, is marked by episodes of congestion and irruption, recurs in ever-changing form, and evolves in no one knows what direction? Even in a metropolis ruled by time like London, said Austerlitz, it is still possible to be outside time, a state of affairs which until recently was almost as common in backward and forgotten areas of our country as it used to be in the undiscovered continents overseas. The dead are outside time, the dying and all the sick at home or in hospitals, and they are not the only ones, for a certain degree of personal misfortune is enough to cut us off from the past and future. In fact, said Austerlitz, I have never owned a clock of any kind, a bedside alarm or a pocket watch, let alone a wristwatch. A clock has always struck me as something ridiculous, a thoroughly mendacious object, perhaps because I have always resisted the power of time out of some internal compulsion which I myself have never understood, keeping myself apart from so-called current events in the hope, as I now think, said Austerlitz, that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was, or more precisely I shall find that all moments of time have co-existed simultaneously, in which case none of what history tells us would be true, past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them, although that, of course, opens up the bleak prospect of ever-lasting misery and never-ending anguish. (141-4)

fuck this, or rather, fuck diss! have rewritten 4 times, and finally formatted, and compiled bibliography - am so ready to give up. plus working through the night always makes me stress eat, which is never good.

speaking of food - i love pomegranates. such a classical fruit. never peeled one til yesterday, that was fun. i like pretending to be persephone i guess, come to think of it, am fascinated by these helen-type figures. they must be pretty vapid, but if you're so desired, why look a gift horse in the mouth? ahahah last week f told me antigone reminded him of me - i wonder why he thinks i'm so stubborn...

In the morning they came up out of the ravine and took to the road again. He’d carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves. (81)

…


Back in the house he chopped at the wood around the haspstaple and finally jammed the blade under the staple and pried it up. It was bolted through the wood and the whole thing came up lock and all. He kicked the blade of the shovel under the edge of the boards and stopped and got his lighter out. Then he stood on the tang of the shovel and raised the edge of the hatch and leaned and got hold of it. Papa, the boy whispered.

He stopped. Listen to me, he said. Just stop it. We’re starving. Do you understand? Then he raised the hatch door and swung it over and let it down on the floor behind.
Just wait here, he said.
I’m going with you.
I thought you were scared.
I am scared.
Okay. Just stay close behind me.

He started down the rough wooden steps. He ducked his head and then flicked the lighter and swung the flame out over the darkness like an offering. Coldness and damp. An ungodly stench. The boy clutched at his coat. He could see part of a stone wall. Clay floor. An old mattress darkly stained. He crouched and stepped down again and held out the light. Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous.
Jesus, he whispered. Then one by one they turned and blinked in the pitiful light. Help us, they whispered. Please help us.
Christ, he said. Oh Christ.
He turned and grabbed the boy. Hurry, he said. Hurry. He’d dropped the lighter. No time to look. He pushed the boy up the stairs. Help us, they called.
Hurry.
A bearded face appeared blinking at the foot of the stairs. Please, he called. Please.
Hurry. For God’s sake hurry.
He shoved the boy through the hatch and sent him sprawling. He stood and got hold of the door and swung it over and let it slam down and he turned to grab the boy but the boy had gotten up and was doing his little dance of terror. For the love of God will you come on, he hissed. But the boy was pointing out the window and when he looked he went cold all over. Coming across the field toward the house were four bearded men and two women. He grabbed the boy by the hand. Christ, he said. Run. Run. (115-7)


…

His dreams brightened. The vanished world returned. Kin long dead washed up and cast fey sidewise looks upon him. He thought of his life. So long ago. A gray day in a foreign city where he stood in a window and watched the street below. Behind him on a wooden table a small lamp burned. On the table books and papers. It had begun to rain and a cat at the corner turned and crossed the sidewalk and sat beneath the café awning. There was a woman at a table there with her head in her hands. Years later he’d stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He’d not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. He let the book fall and took a last look around and made his way out into the cold gray light. (199)



cormac mccarthy, the road (2006)




this book was fucking terrifying. and the horror is extra sharp when it's late and quiet so don't read it at 2 in the morning, like i did, unless you don't feel like sleeping at all; i don't ever want to be that scared again. and i have this urge to stockpile tins of food now, and water... if i were in a post-apocalyptic world faced with the possibility of being raped and killed and eaten, not even necessarily in that order, i don't know if i'd be strong-willed enough to do anything, even kill myself. jesus.

Thomasina: Oh, Septimus! – can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides - thousands of poems – Aristotle's own library brought to Egypt by the noodle’s ancestors? How can we sleep for grief?

Septimus: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. (50-1)

...

Bernard: If knowledge isn’t self-knowledge it isn’t doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing ‘When Father Painted the Parlour?’ Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. ‘She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.’ There you are, he wrote it after coming home from a party. (81)

...

Hannah: It’s all trivial – your grouse, my hermit, Bernard’s Byron. Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter. (100)

The state of wonder is more hospitable than awe, which has the capacity to trouble or disturb us, and it is less engrossing than rapture, which seems to swallow up all sense of self. wonder has a residue of comfort or safety, a bolt-hole for when things get too far away from the possibility of understanding. It is distinct from surprise, which may nevertheless often accompany a sense of wonder, act as a prompt or prelude to it. The big difference here is that I can remain in wonder, be in it, whereas the structural formation of surprise requires that the feeling die away almost as soon as it comes upon me. Wonder has an identifiable architecture; it comprises a variety of rooms we inhabit, moving from fascination and curiosity through admiration toward, at the lowest levels below ground, as it were, stupor or stupefaction. That is when wonder runs out, when all the energy of the spell-binding has been exhausting.

[...]

Wonder is an aesthetic state, it engrosses the mind only to lead it to a kind of distraction. Being in breathless wonder is a form of inattention. When I find myself in wonder I try to remain there, poised in this state, deliberate holding off the onset of expectation or the moment of release. I feel absorbed but unable to touch the source of that absorption, keenly aware, in a heightened state of perception yet at the same time lacking focus. It is almost as if my self lacks consistency, or precision. Being in wonder is a kind of contemplation without object, a suspension in attentive inattention; I am at the same time both completely absorbed and distracted. Such dumbfounderment may cause a sense of inadequacy in the face of the object that prompted the wonder, as if I am forced to recognize the limits of my perceptual powers. But this feeling is also often replaced by an intensification of self-presence. The state of wonder, then, may be both compelling and disabling at the same time: it leaves me wanting more but also slightly relieved when the moment has passed. I am certain that our fascination with great works of art derives from this push-me-pull-me state of knowing. We both want or seek out the mysterious powers of aesthetic contemplation and at the same time feel slightly apprehensive about what might be revealed in the moment of wonder. Or, to put it another way, we are certain that with time and effort (or sometimes just plain luck) we will be able to penetrate to the core of our cherished works of art but know that they are cherished to the extent that they will never, completely, give up what they know.

What makes aesthetic experience distinct from other forms of experience is its absolute divorce from the ordinary or everyday. Yet, in a strange way, the inattentiveness of the habitual is a correlate of affective experience; wonder is, as I have said, a kind of distraction. It also feels as if it comes, as it were, before knowledge, since, as Socrates remarked, the primary motivation of wonder is the recognition of ignorance. Wonder requires us to acknowledge what we do not know or may never know, to acknowledge the limits of knowledge. It is, then, a different species of knowledge, a way of knowing that does not lead to certainties or truths about the world or the way things are. It is a state of mind, of being with the world and oneself that, like being in love, colours all that we know we know. and that can, on occasion, certainly appear to be like thaumatology: the science or knowing, or wonders and miracles.

(141-3)

peter de bolla, art matters

Literary theory could neglect moral philosophy and still show keen interest in the ethical – though I shall later offer, tentatively, some reasons why a turn to philosophy can offer valuable illumination here. But in the midst of all this busy concern with other types of philosophy, the absence of moral philosophy seems a significant sign. And in fact it signals a further striking absence: the absence , from literary theory, of the organizing questions of moral philosophy, and of moral philosophy’s sense of urgency about these questions. The sense that we are social beings puzzling out, in times of great moral difficult, what might be, for us, the best way to live – this sense of practical importance, which animates contemporary ethical theory and has always animated much of great literature, is absent from the writings of many of our leading literary theorists. One can have no clearer single measure of this absence than to have the experience of reading Jacques Derrida’s Éperons after reading Nietzsche. Once one has worked through and been suitable (I think) impressed by Derrida’s perceptive and witty analysis of Nietzsche’s style, one feels, at the end of all the urbanity, an empty longing amounting to a hunger, a longing for the sense of difficulty and risk and practical urgency that are inseparable from Zarathustra’s dance. A longing for some acknowledgement of the face that Nietzsche saw a crisis at hand for Europe, for all of human life; that he thought it mattered deeply whether one lived as a Christian or in some other as yet unspecified way; and that he dedicated his career to imagining that way. Nietzsche’s work is profoundly critical of existing ethical theory, clearly; but it is, inter alia, a response to the original Socratic question, “How should one live?” Derrida does not touch on that question. “Of all that is written,” says Zarathustra, “I love only what a man has written with his blood.” After reading Derrida, and not Derrida alone, I feel a certain hunger for blood; for, that is, writing about literature that talks of human lives and choices as if they matter to us all.

This is, after all, the spirit in which much of great literature has been and is written and read. We do approach literature for play and for delight, for the exhilaration of following the dance of form and unraveling webs of textual connection. (Though even here I would not be quick to grant that there is any coherence to an account of aesthetic pleasure that abstracts altogether from our practical human interest and desires.) But one of the things that makes literature something deeper and more central for us than a complex game, deeper even than those games, for example chess and tennis, that move us to wonder by their complex beauty, is that it speaks like Strether. It speaks about us, about our lives and choices and emotions, about our social existence and the totality of our connections. As Aristotle observed, it is deep, and conducive to our inquiry about how to live, because it does not simply (as history does) record that this or that event happened; it searches for patterns of possibility – of choice, and circumstance, and the interaction between choice and circumstance – that turn up in human lives with such a persistence that they must be regarded as our possibilities. And so our interest in literature becomes (like Strether’s in Chad) cognitive: an interest in finding out (by seeing and feeling the otherwise perceiving) what possibilities (and tragic impossibilities) life offers to us, what hopes and fears for ourselves it underwrites or subverts.(170-1)


Martha C. Nussbaum, “Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory”, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature

...

sigh, nussbaum, if i could be ever so brilliant in so many ways. also, in 'plato and the commensurability of desire' she writes about phaedra and bagels- MORE POWER!

currently reading michael wood's literature and the taste of knowledge and it makes me think that maybe, just maybe, i will write my senior thesis on henry james. i do so love henry james, but lord knows i don't want to be nick guest, so let's see, i have all summer to decide.

also excited about the summer, internship and all. more importantly, parents planning to visit, for the first time - though i suppose that's due more to my freshman year obstinacy at striking out alone - cambridge, paris, london, please don't spoil it all please swine flu.

(a little voice whispers, less than a month til venice again, tee hee hee)

last night: marvell, larkin, mowers, blunt instruments, piggeries, emailing my mother. i love my lovely mother- PIGGERIES is a word!

today: haircut, random guy skateboarding down burrell's walk looking freaken AWESOME, chatting with hurley about said awesome skateboarder, heart-shaped sunglasses. and then lucian freud class, so much fun, i wish i were an art history major. 'class' was just sitting around on the floor, the room warm and sunny, with two beautiful women (hahah), heavy art books strewn on the floor, looking at naked portraiture and thinking and talking about paint texture and disingenuity. and art. (schiele forever, still) and then i came back to college and i had dindins and i went to lie down for a while on the grass beneath the tree beyond the bridge and i fell asleep somewhere between the national's 'guest room' and 'mistaken for strangers'. happiness can be many things.

euphoria makes me nauseous.