MR. BLAKE,--I received your letter just as I was rushing to Fire Island beach to recover what remained of Margaret Fuller, and rea...d it on the way. That event and its train, as much as anything, have prevented my answering it before. It is wisest to speak when you are spoken to. I will now endeavor to reply, at the risk of having nothing to say. I find that actual events, notwithstanding the singular prominence which we all allow them, are far less real than the creations of my imagination. They are truly visionary and insignificant,--all that we commonly call life and death,--and affect me less than my dreams. This petty stream which from time to time swells and carries away the mills and bridges of our habitual life, and that mightier stream or ocean on which we securely float,--what makes the difference between them? I have in my pocket a button which I ripped off the coat of the Marquis of Ossoli, on the seashore, the other day. Held up, it intercepts the light,--an actual button,--and yet all the life that it is connected with is less substantial to me, and interests me less, than my faintest dream. Our thoughts are the epochs in our lives: all else is but as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Weep not for little Leonie, Abducted by a French Marquis!... Though loss of honour was a wrench, Just think how it's improved her French.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pornography is not objectionable simply because it arouses sexual desire or lust or prurience in the mind of the reader or spectat...or; this is a silly Victorian notion. A great many nonpornographic works--including some parts of the Bible--excite sexual desire very successfully. What is distinctive about pornography is that, in the words of D.H. Lawrence, it attempts "to do dirt on [sex].... [It is an] insult to a vital human relationship." In other words, pornography differs from erotic art in that its whole purpose is to treat human beings obscenely, to deprive human beings of their specifically human dimension. That is what obscenity is all about. It is light years removed from any kind of carefree sensuality--there is no continuum between Fielding's Tom Jones and the Marquis de Sade's Justine. These works have quite opposite intentions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice ...to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Grace is always natural, though that does not prevent its being often used to hide a lie. The rude shocks and uncomfortably constr...aining influences of life disappear among graceful women and poetical men; they are the most deceptive beings in creation; distrust and doubt cannot stand before them; they create what they imagine; if they do not lie to others, they do to their own hearts; for illusion is their element, fiction their vocation, and pleasures in appearance their happiness. Beware of grace in woman, and poetry in man--weapons the more dangerous because the least dreaded!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The love of their country is with them only a mode of flattering its master; as soon as they think that master can no longer hear,... they speak of everything with a frankness which is the more startling because those who listen to it become responsible.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In Russia, whatever be the appearance of things, violence and arbitrary rule is at the bottom of them all. Tyranny rendered calm b...y the influence of terror is the only kind of happiness which this government is able to afford its people.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »