My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River f...or the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everything ... and t...hat the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of this or that definite object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all. It i...s precisely Nothingness that makes itself present and felt as the object of our dread.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hebraism contains no eternal realm of essence, which Greek philosophy was to fabricate, through Plato, as affording the intellectu...al deliverance from the evil of time. Such a realm of eternal essences is possible only for a detached intellect, one who, in Plato's phrase, becomes a "spectator of all time and all existence." This ideal of the philosopher as the highest human type--the theoretical intellect who from the vantage point of eternity can survey all time and existence--is altogether foreign to the Hebraic concept of the man of faith who is passionately committed to his own mortal being. Detachment was for the Hebrew an impermissible state of mind, a vice rather than a virtue; or rather it was something that Biblical man was not yet even able to conceive, since he had not reached the level of rational abstraction of the Greek. His existence was too earth-bound, too laden with oppressive images of mortality, to permit him to experience the philosopher's detachment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What was he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the river?... Spreading ruin and scattering ban, Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat, And breaking the golden lilies afloat With the dragon-fly on the river.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nay, if there's room for poets in this world A little overgrown (I think there is),... Their sole work is to represent the age, Their age, not Charlemagne's,--this live, throbbing age. That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires, And spends more passion, more heroic heat, Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms, Than Roland with his knights.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good neighbour, even in this, Is fatal sometimes, cuts your morning up... To mince-meat of the very smallest talk, Then helps to sugar her bohea at night With your reputation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »