Fragment 3010

He seemed to me then the very archetype of a romantic. His appearance, his blazing, indeed fanatical artistic zeal, his intensity, his grotesque humour all struck me as the incarnation of one of ETA Hoffmann's fantasy figures. His incomparably passionate concentration while rehearsing and conducting, forever reminding me of his fantastical forerunner, Kreisler, made such an impression that I wholly forgot that he made room in his life for other activities and that his name had first struck me as a composer....

Bruno Walter on Mahler...

Kapelmeister Kreisler

Drawing by Hoffman

Gustav Mahler

Silhouette by Otto Bohler

Correspondence # 12

There is a goal, but no way. What we call the way is hesitation.
Kafka

The Way moves on by contra-motion.
Dao Der Jing 40.1

Correspondence #11

Whatever our literature may be, it has greater significance for us than may appear: in it and it alone, is contained the whole of our intellectual life and all the poetry of our life.

Belinsky 1840s

We obtained literature by our own efforts, it is a product of our own life, and that is why we love it so much and hold it so dear, why we pin our hopes on it.

Dostoevsky 1860s

Correspondence #10

Gregorian chant early Medieval period:



Timelines by Laurence Sterne 1759:



Timeline by E.T.A. Hoffmann 1796:



Quartet for the End of Time by Messiaen 1941:



Signifier without the signified by Roland Barthes 1975:

Correspondence #9

Among Soviet people the thirst for reading is really unimaginable. Newspapers, journals, books, all this is absorbed without quenching the thirst to the tiniest degree. Reading is one of the main activities of daily life. But for the reader in the Soviet Union there are, as it were, no clear divisions between the reality in which he lives, and the world he reads about in books. The reader treats the heroes of his books as if they are actual people. He argues with them, denounces them, and he even reads realities into the events of the story and its characters.

Leon Feuchtwanger
Moscow

If we made ethical choices, they were based not so much on immediate reality as on moral standards derived from fiction. We were avid readers and we fell into a dependence on what we read. Books, perhaps because of their formal element of finality, held us in their absolute power. Dickens was more real than Stalin or Beria…Books became the first and only reality, whereas reality was regarded as either nonsense or nuisance.

Joseph Brodsky
Less than one

Oh literature is a wonderful thing, Varenka, a very wonderful thing: I discovered that from being with those people the day before yesterday. It is a profound thing. It strengthens people’s hearts and instructs them,… Literature is a picture, or rather in a certain sense both a picture and a mirror; it is an expression of emotion, a subtle form of criticism, a didactic lesson and a document…

Dostoevsky
Poor Folk

Correspondence #8

And let your soul taste each days pleasure, spite of griefs.

Aeschylus
The Persians


Let not your days without pleasure expire;
Honour's but empty, and when youth is ended,
All men will praise you, but none will desire.
Let not youth fly away without contenting
Age will come, time enough for your repenting.

Dryden
King Arthur

Correspondence #7

Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we knock out tunes for dancing bears, when we wish to conjure pity from the stars.

Flaubert
Madame Bovary

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

Conrad
Under Western Eyes

Only very simple things can be said without falsehood. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.

Iris Murdoch
Under the Net

Language is a virus from outer space.

William Burroughs

Correspondence #6

Thou from the first
Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread
Dovelike sat'st brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant.

John Milton
Paradise Lost

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods, with warm breast, and with Ah! bright Wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
God's Grandeur

Correspondence #5

In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in.

Charles Dickens
Our Mutual Friend

The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.
The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness

The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala

T.S.Eliot
The Wasteland

Correspondence #4

It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, how wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.

Joseph Conrad
Lord Jim


One never knows a human being, but one occasionally ceases to feel that one does not know him.

Andre Malraux
Man's Fate

Correspondence #3

People at birth,
Are naturally good.
Their natures are similar,
Their habits make them different.

Three Character Classic
Song Dynasty

The wise and simple and the upright and the vicious, all agree in nature, radically resembling each other, without any difference, But when their knowledge has expanded, their dispositions and endowments all vary, thus perverting the correct principle of their virtuous nature. The superior man alone has the virtue of supporting rectitude.>

15th Century commentary on the Three Character Classic

The truly great person develops and expands upon the best, the greatest of the capacities of his original nature. All restraints and restrictions are cast aside by the great motive power that is contained in his original nature…all obstacles dissolve before him…

Mao Ze Dong

Correspondence #2

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

Genesis 1.2-4

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

Virginia Woolf
The Waves

Correspondence #1

When I heard the learned astronomer
When the proofs, the figures were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture- room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars.

Walt Whitman 1865

…knowledge as non-conceptual objects

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