July 2002 * Web version
Edgar Allan Poe, The philosophy of composition
CHARLES
DICKENS, in a note now lying before me, alluding to an examination I once
made of the mechanism of "Barnaby Rudge," says- "By the way, are you aware
that Godwin wrote his 'Caleb Williams' backwards? He first involved his hero
in a web of difficulties, forming the second volume, and then, for the
first, cast about him for some mode of accounting for what had been done." ...
I
prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality
always in view- for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so
obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest- I say to myself, in
the first place, "Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the
heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one
shall I, on the present occasion, select?" Having chosen a novel, first, and
secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by
incident or tone- whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the
converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone- afterward looking
about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as
shall best aid me in the construction of the effect. ...
A rewriting of Papatsonis' poem, into German - by Ayye^os
Dostoevsky, Conversations of Father Zossima
IF you had been a light, you would
have lightened the path for others too, and the evil-doer might perhaps have
been saved by your light from his sin. And even though your light was shining,
yet you see men were not saved by it, hold firm and doubt not the power of the
heavenly light. Believe that if they were not saved, they will be saved
hereafter. And if they are not saved hereafter, then their sons will be saved,
for your light will not die even when you are dead. ...
Fear not the great nor the mighty, but be wise and ever serene. Know the
measure, know the times, study that. When you are left alone, pray. Love to
throw yourself on the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it with an
unceasing, consuming love. Love all men, love everything...
|
A short introduction to Meister Eckhart Where I read that "in this [20th] century has the bull In agro domini, in which Eckhart was severely attacked on a number of mystical issues expressed in his sermons, been officially withdrawn". - I'll try to check this out. If you happen to know more, please send a message. [Editor's note: check done, and the information is not correct. Read more in August's issue.]
Minimalism often took to an extreme credos pioneered by previous waves of abstract art. Those artists were tired of art as an illusion, a trick by which one object represents something else. They wanted the work to be stripped of such artifice, pared down to the bare essentials so that the viewer looks only at the thing itself (rather than a picture or sculpture of something). |
One doctor has stated that "anyone over sixty-five should not be resuscitated if his heart stopped." (But Schoenberg dramatized his own resuscitation by a needle directly into the heart, at an age well beyond that, in his String Trio.) And another doctor has argued that our already overstrained medical resources should not be wasted on anyone over eighty and very ill. (But I was both when I wrote my Variations and Canticles, and they are superior, I think, to some of the music I was writing in my early seventies.) |
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Consistency is the highest obligation of a philosopher, and yet the most rarely found. The ancient Greek schools give us more examples of it than we find in our syncretistic age, in which a certain shallow and dishonest system of compromise of contradictory principles is devised, because it commends itself better to a public which is content to know something of everything and nothing thoroughly, so as to please every party. - Kant, Critique of practical reason
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