For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of s...hapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
yet there was a chance in this To see the present as it never had existed,... Clear and shapeless, in an atmosphere like cut glass.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting m...ore novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will ... is a shapeless world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is unjust that Italy should claim musical pre-eminence, even forcing Italian on music as its international language, when Italy...'s genius is so visual. No nation can build towns as beautiful nor claim a better right to regard nature as a shapeless substance to be redeemed by urbifaction. The Italians are not Wordsworthian. Man fulfils himself in the town. There is too much wild nature in music, and it has to be tamed into simple four-square patterns, as in Verdi and Bellini. The tenor does not proclaim Byronically to the woods and hills: he is a kind of sexy politician for the town piazza. The Italians would listen to Aaron, but not to Moses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, dis...tances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now an allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language, which is itself nothing but an abstraction from ...objects of the senses; the principal being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot. On the other hand, a symbol is characterized by a translucence of the special in the individual, or of the general in the special, or of the universal in the general; above all though the translucense of the eternal through and in the temporal. It always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drif...t across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn't dis...cover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Grief, first take on shape! what is shapeless causes fear and torment but when the enemy materializes, half the victory is won.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Conscience ... lacks the power to externalize itself, the power to make itself into a Thing, and to endure being. It lives in drea...d of besmirching the splendour of its inner being by action and an existence; and in order to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with the actual world, and persists in its self-willed impotence to renounce its self which is reduced to the extreme of ultimate abstraction, and to give itself a substantial existence, or to transform its thought into being.... Its activity is a yearning which merely loses itself as consciousness becomes an object devoid of substance, and, rising above this loss, and falling back on itself, finds itself only as a lost soul. In this transparent purity of its moments, an unhappy, so-called 'beautiful soul,' its light dies away within it, and it vanishes like a shapeless vapour that dissolves into thin air.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »