“And each walk moves through space like a thread through fabric, sewing it together into a continuous experience - so unlike the way air travel chops up time and space and even cars and trains do. This continuity is one of the things I think we lost in the industrial age - but we can choose to reclaim it, again and again, and some do.”
“In Mountains and Rivers Without End, says Snyder, “I translate space from its physical sense to the spiritual sense of space as emptiness - spiritual transparency - in Mahayana Buddhist philosophy.” The book opens with at first seems to be a long description of landscape but it is in fact a description of a Chinese painting, and Snyder travels through all kinds of space - paintings, cities, wildernesses - in the same spirit.”
Jan-Hendrik Bakker, In stilte, een filosofie van de afzondering:
“In de figuur Zarathoestra heeft Nietzsche de resultaten van zijn eigen kluizenaarschap samengebald, of misschien moeten we zeggen: afgedwongen. Het moet een enorme krachttoer zijn geweest omdat het bijna onmogelijke tot stand moet worden gebracht. In een wereld waarin waarden niet meer bestaan, of relatief zijn geworden, en er ook geen waarheid meer is, moet een individu zijn eigen absolute waarden scheppen die boven zichzelf uitgaan en waar hij zich door kan laten inspireren. De mens kortom is de kunstenaar die vol overgave gelooft in het kunstwerk dat hij nog tot stand kan brengen; dit kunstwerk is hijzelf.”
“Merton meent dat die idee van een terugkeer naar je diepste zelf in diverse religies en filosofieën te vinden is. ‘Gewoon worden’ is loskomen van alles wat anderen je aanreiken of opdringen, in de eenzaamheid kun je je niet anders voordoen dan wie je bent. Het is een vorm van hergeboorte, spirituele vernieuwing.
“Kaczynski gelooft dat het vertrek van de mens uit zijn natuurlijke habitat, dat het gevolg was van de Industriële Revoltutie, en het daarop volgend uiteenvallen van de natuurlijke kleinschalige gemeenschappen, zoals de grootfamilie, het dorp en de stam, de mens onzeker en bang heeft gemaakt. Er is geen vast kader meer. De dichtbevolkte wereld waarin hij leeft verandert razendsnel onder invloed van de technologie, die steeds nieuwe sociale constellaties schept. Het wegvallen van het energieproces veroorzaakt bovendien gevoelens van minderwaardigheid, verveling, schuld, onverzadigbare wellust, zedeloosheid, kinder- en vrouwenmisbruik, slaapstoornissen et cetera.”
“Omdat de mens van nature kunstmatig is, is de tegenstander namelijk niet ‘de techniek’ maar de mens zelf. Kaczynsky externaliseert in zijn voorstelling van zaken het conflict waarin wij met onszelf gewikkelt zijn door een vreemde macht in het leven te roepen: de industrieel - technologische samenleving. De mens is niet alleen afhankelijk van de werktuigen die hij zelf ontwikkeld heeft, hij is ook altijd gericht op het verbeteren van zijn eigen situatie. Hij neemt geen genoegen met genoeg, maar kent een utopische gerichtheid die hem altijd verder brengt dan waar hij is. Maar let op: ‘verder’ hoeft geen verbetering te zijn, het betekent niet meer dan ‘ergens anders’. De mens is altijd bezig met zich voorstellingen te maken hoe het ergens anders zou zijn dan waar hij is.”
Genesis 1 verse 2
“The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters”
Kunst van hemel en aarde, Wessel Stoker
“Spiritualiteit is een geestelijke levenshouding en betreft levensorientatie. In spiritualiteit zoekt men naar transformatie van het innerlijk en van de relaties met mens, wereld en (meestal ook) met God of het goddelijke. Zij is niet aan een religie voorkomen als seculiere spiritualiteit”
“Mensen hebben ondanks hun vervreemding een onmiddelijk besef van het absolute. In het overwinnen van de vervreemding ontdekt de mens iets wat verwant is met zichzelf, hoewel het hem oneidigtranscendeert, Iets waarvan de mens is vervreemd, maar waarvan hij nooit gescheiden kan zijn. Deze verhouding tussen God en mens noem ik Immanente transcendentie: de beide werkelijkheden worden voorgesteld als nauw op elkiaar betrokken: het absolute wordt ervaren in en door de aarde werkelijkheid”
“De esthetische kwaliteit van een werk moeten we niet losmaken van de existentiële inhoud, van hetgeen het wil uitdrukken. Kijken naar schilderijen is een spel waarin excistentiële waarheid kan gebeuren. Het spel is erop gericht dat het wordt gespeeld. Dat ligt bij toneel- of een muziekstuk voor de hand, maar geldt ook voor het kijken naar de schilderijen die besproken zijn, Dat kijken is niet een vluchtig blik werpen op een schilderij, maar een verwijlen, een vertoeven bij en een op je laten inwerken van hetgeen getoond wordt.”
“Het transcendente wordt ervaren in een chaotische oneindigheid die niet in een beeld of begrip is te vatten. Moeten we zo’n huiveringwekkende ervaring dan maar proberen te vergeten? Ze ontsnapt ons, ook al omdat ze ‘te veel’ voor ons is. Toch zijn er momenten waarop we ons kunnen herinneren dat we vergeten, waardoor we indirect verbonden zijn met de ontsnappende transcendentie.”
Sonnets, 146 Shakespeare
“Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, Fooled by those rebel powers that thee array, Why dost thou pine within, and suffer dearth, Painting thy outward walls so costly gay? Why so large cost, having so short a lease, Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend? Shall worms, inheritors of his excess, Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end? Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss. And let that pine to aggravate thy store; Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross; Within be fed, without be rich no more;- So shalt thou feed on Death, That feeds on men, And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.”
Kandinsky, Über die Fromfrage
“De wereld klinkt. Zij is een kosmos van geestelijk werkende wezens. Zo is de dode materie levende geest”
Meister Eckhart, Deutsche Predigten
“De ziel heeft twee ogen, een innerlijk en een uiterlijk. Het innerlijk oog van de ziel is dat, wat in het Zijn aanschouwt en zijn Zijn onmiddelijk van God ontvangt: dit is zijn eerste werk. Het uiterlijk oog van de ziel is dat wat zich op alle schepselen richt en bij wijze van beeld en door middel van een kracht waarneemt. De mens echter die tot zichzelf gekeerd wordt, zodat hij God zelf smaakt en Hem in zijn grond kent, zo’n mens is bevrijd van alle geschapen dingen en is in zichzelf gekeerd in een waarachtig slot van de waarheid.”
Edgar Degas Henri-Frédéric Amiel
“A landscape is a state of mind”
The unpainted landscape
A Ward Singing of Country David Reason
“ ‘Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about me was the whole hoop of the world and while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw, for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being… And I saw that it was holy.’ Black Elk’s vision as he stood at the summit of Harney Peak…”
Het boek der oneindigheid, Antonio Lamúa
“Voor Hegel ligt het oneindige dus niet voorbij het eindige en is het niet iets leegs en onbepaalds: het oneindige bevat het eindige in zich. Het oneindig is niet transcendent, maar immanent aan het eindige. Individuele wezens - het eindige - zijn daarom niets anders dan momenten van het oneindige. Het oneindige is het Al of de totaliteit van het reële.”
“Pascals eerste concept van oneindigheid heeft betrekking op het universum, dat hij opvat als een ‘oneindige bol, waarvan het centrum in alle delen is en zijn omtrek is geen enkel’. Pascal wil ons het universum laten beschouwen in zijn immensiteit, zodat we ons bewust worden van de beperktheid van onszelf.
Maar er is nog een ander oneindige, het oneindig kleine, een andere afgrond, die ons ook overweldigd omdat hij ons begripsvermogen ver te boven gaat en al even onmetelijk is. Het individu zit gevangen tussen het oneindig grote en het oneindig kleine, die beiden even onbegrijpelijk zijn.’
“Voor Schopenhauer wordt de realiteit van dingen vertegenwoordigd door een metafysisch principe; de wil (Wille). De wil is een irrationele kracht die alle natuur en het universum doordringt, en alle dingen en wezens daarin.
…
"De wil is een oneindig streven, een onbegrensde impuls, die nooit bevrediging vindt of een staat van rust. Geluk is slechts een tijdelijk stoppen van het verlangen. Het verlangen als expressie van de behoefte en van het gevoel van gebrek, is een vorm van lijden.”
Open Sky, Paul Verilio
“The path’s being defines the subject’s perception through the object’s mass. The falling body suddenly becomes the body of the fall”
“‘For what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his only soul?’ Let’s not forget that to gain means to reach, to get to, as much as to conquer or possess. Losing one’s soul, anima, means losing the very being of movement.”
“On a constricted planet that is becoming just one vast floor, the lack of collective resentment over dromospheric pollution stems from our forgetting the essence of the path, the journey.”
“‘The individual of the scientific age is losing his capacity to experience himself as a centre of energy,’ observed Paul Valéry, applying his intuition to a little-eplored area, that of the animate, of the movement that drives the human being.”
“Indeed, as Gustave Flaubert wrote, ’The better telescopes become, the more stars there will be.’ But Flaubert forgot to mention the fallout from this sudden optical expansion; the more perception of the other world develops, the less there will be of the world, of a whole earth.”
“The being of the path of the movement involved in the conquest of space finally established its credentials in that very peculiar inertia of the Sea of Tranquility.”
Wordsworth
“Thus did I steal along the silent road
My body from the stillness drinking in
A restoration like the calm of sleep
But sweeter far. Above, before, behind,
Around me , all was peace and solitude.”
Het lijden van de jonge Werther, Goethe
“...hoe sloot ik dat alles dan niet in mijn brandend hart en voelde me een god in die overborrelende veelheid, en de leven brengende pracht van de oneindige wereld ging in al zijn gedaantes door mijn ziel. Ontzaglijke bergen stonden om mij heen, afgronden lagen aan mijn voeten, en onweersbeken storten omlaag, rivieren stroomden onder mij voorbij, en bos en gebergte weergalmden.”
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement
“Consider bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piling up in the sky and moving about accompanied by lightning and thunderclaps, volcanoes with all their destructive power, hurricanes with all the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean heaved up, the high waterfall of a mighty River, and so on. Compared to the might of any of these, our ability to resist becomes an insignificant trifle. Yet the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe space. And we like to call these objects sublime because they raise the soul’s fortitude above its usual middle range and allow us to discover in ourselves an ability to resist that is of a quite different kind, and that gives us the courage to believe that we could be a match for nature’s seeming omnipotence.”
Message found in a bottle, E. A. Poe
“A feeling for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul - a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lesson of bygone time are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key.”
John Dryden
“I am free as Nature first made man,
Ere the base of servitude began
When whild in woods the Noble Savage ran.”
F. Beerling, Het cultuur protest van Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Niemand kan de eigen standplaats wegcijferen van waaruit hij het verleden oproept en de tijd, die tussen die twee punten verlopen is, ongedaan maken. Het voorbije kan alleen van het nabije uit benaderd worden.”
The reenchantment of art (quote of Rober Jognson)
“All my experience as a psychologist leads me to the conclusion that a sense of reverence is necessary for psychological health. If a person has no sense of reverence, no feeling that there is anyone or anything that inspires awe, it cuts the conscious personality off completely from the nourishing springs of the unconcious. It is ironic, then, that of much or our modern culture is aimed at eredicating all reverence, all respect for the high truths and qualities that inspire a feeling of awe and worship in the human soul.”
Giuseppe Penone
“We possess the landscape which surrounds us within this protective box. It is the landscape within which we think.
It is the landscape which envelopes us. A landscape to be traced, touched, to learn about with the touch, to be drawn point by point.”
“Weight of the body - lightness of the spirit. The spirit frees itself by losing the weight. Thought does not survive without experience of the force of gravity. The spirit does not think; it is the body that thinks.”
“When we close our eyes, our contact with the world is limited to the wrapping of our body. With them open, the identity of our wrapping arrives as far as we can see.”
“There is a moment when one divests oneself of the acquired conventions and knowledge to redefine one’s identity and a personal space of thoughts and so rediscover the true essence which learning has made one forget. One’s personal identity is a space, the space contained by one’s body which only later becomes the space of one’s ideas, the space in which the person projects himself. The first identity is that of the body, a cellular identity, a flesh identity.”
“The condition of dreaming is blindness. One can imagine better with one’s eyes closed. Light invades the mind. With eyes open, one absorbs light. With the eyes open, one absorbs light. With the eyes closed, images from one’s mind are projected onto the vault of the cranium, on the inside of our skin, a division, a definition of the body and the container of our thoughts The wrapping is important as it is the definition of the individual.”
Zapdansen, Roel van der Berg
“Die nacht droomde is van regenbogen en stenen cirkels en het zou nog een kwart eeuw duren voordat ik de schilderijen zou zien die onze gastheer van toen had willen maken, misschien zelfs wel had kúnnen maken als hij maar de goede kant op had gekeken. Niet veel verder, aan de horizon voorbij, naar het buitenste buiten, de rand van het zichtbare, waar kleuren geen vormen meer nodig hebben om inhoud te krijgen - naar binnen, waar de diepte vandaan komt.”
“Hades “smiled grimly and did not disobey the commands of king Zeus.” He tells Persephone to return to her mother, but first he secretly puts a pomegranate seed in her mouth, ensuring that she will never be completely free of his realm. She will spend one-third of her time with him, and the rest with her mother.
A student once pointed out to me that these are the proportions of sleeping and waking. Internal images and emotion of the night can be difficult in quality from those of the day; they may be particularly vivid and disturbing. We get a glimpse sometimes in our pleasurable night dreams of the lovely hundred-headed narcissus which has a beauty beyond what is natural; but we may also feel the terrors of the dark underground of Hades. At least a third of life, too, seems to belong to the lord of death, as we feel the pain of lost relationships, fading hopes, and failed endeavors.”
“The image of “underworld” in these stories has a relation to actual death, but it also represents the invisible, mysterious, unfathomable depths of a person or a society. The Persephone myth informs us that sometimes one discovers soul and the underworld against one’s will. Certain attractive things in the world may act as lures, setting us up for a challenging fall into the depths of self.”
“When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.”
“To the soul, memory is more important than planning, art more compelling than reason, and love more fulfilling than understanding.”
“The basic intention in any caring, physical or psychological, is to alleviate suffering. But in relation to the symptom itself, observance means first of all listening and looking carefully at what is being revealed in the suffering. An intent to heal can get in the way of seeing.”
“As the poets and painters of centuries have tried to tell us, art is not about the expression of talent or the making of pretty things. It is about the preservation and containment of soul. It is about arresting life and making it available for contemplation. Art captures the eternal in the everyday, and it is the eternal that feeds soul—the whole world in a grain of sand. Leonardo”
“Care of the soul begins with observance of how the soul manifests itself and how it operates. We can’t care for the soul unless we are familiar with its ways. Observance is a word from ritual and religion. It means to watch out for but also to keep and honor, as in the observance of a holiday.”
“For the soul, depression is an initiation, a rite of passage. If we think that depression, so empty and dull, is void of imagination, we may overlook its initiatory aspects. We may be imagining imagination itself from a point of view foreign to Saturn; emptiness can be rife with feeling-tone, images of catharsis, and emotions of regret and loss. As a shade of mood, gray can be as interesting and as variegated as it is in black-and-white photography. If”
“There is nothing neutral about the soul. It is the seat and the source of life. Either we respond to what the soul presents in its fantasies and desires, or we suffer from this neglect of ourselves. The power of the soul can hurl a person into ecstasy or into depression. It can be creative or destructive, gentle or aggressive. Power incubates within the soul and then makes its influential move into life as the expression of soul. If there is no soulfulness, then there is no true power, and if there is no power, then there can be no true soulfulness. Sadomasochism”
Oceans, Matt Crocker, Joel Houston& Salomon Ligthelm
You call me out upon the waters The great unknown where feet may fail And there I find You in the mystery In oceans deep, My faith will stand And I will call upon Your name And keep my eyes above the waves When oceans rise My soul will rest in Your embrace For I am Yours and You are mine Your grace abounds in deepest waters Your sovereign hand will be my guide Where feet may fail and fear surrounds me You've never failed and You won't start now So I will call upon Your name And keep my eyes above the waves When oceans rise My soul will rest in Your embrace For I am Yours and You are mine Spirit lead me where my trust is without borders Let me walk upon the waters Wherever You would call me Take me deeper than my feet could ever wander And my faith will be made stronger In the presence of my Savior [x6] I will call upon Your Name Keep my eyes above the waves My soul will rest in Your embrace I am Yours and You are mine
Friedrich Nietszche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
“You say 'I' and you are proud of this word. But greater than this- although you will not believe in it - is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say 'I' but performs 'I'.”
Now I am nimble, now I fly, now I see myself under myself, now a god dances within me.”
“I and me are always too deeply in conversation: how could I endure it, if there were not a friend? The friend of the hermit is always the third one: the third one is the float which prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the depth.”
“But in the loneliest desert happens the second metamorphosis: here the spirit becomes a lion; he will seize his freedom and be master in his own wilderness.”
Emmanuel Levinas
“Faith is not a question of the existence or non-existence of God. It is believing that love without reward is valuable.”
“To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced.”
“I will say this quite plainly, what truly human is -and don't be afraid of this word- love. And I mean it even with everything that burdens love or, i could say it better, responsibility is actually love, as Pascal said: 'without concupiscence' [without lust]... love exists without worrying being loved.”
“For others, in spite of myself, from myself.”
“Love remains a relation with the Other that turns into need, transcendent exteriority of the other, of the beloved. But love goes beyond the beloved... The possibility of the Other appearing as an object of a need while retaining his alterity, or again,the possibility of enjoying the Other... this simultaneity of need and desire, or concupiscence and transcendence,... constitutes the originality of the erotic which, in this sense, is the equivocal par excellence.”
“the "small goodness" from one person to his fellowman is lost and deformed as soon as it seeks organization and universality and system, as soon as it opts for doctrine, a treatise of politics and theology, a party, a state, and even a church. Yet it remains the sole refuge of the good in being. Unbeaten, it undergoes the violence of evil, which, as small goodness, it can neither vanquish nor drive out. A little kindness going only from man to man, not crossing distances to get to the places where events and forces unfold! A remarkable utopia of the good or the secret of its beyond.”
“This world, in which reason is more and more at home, is not habitable. It is hard and cold like those depots in which are piled up goods that cannot satisfy: neither clothe those who are naked, nor feed those who are hungry; it is as impersonal as factory hangars and industrial cities in which manufactured things remain abstract, true with statistical truth and borne on the anonymous circuit of the economy, resulting from skilful planning decisions which cannot prevent, but prepare disasters. There it is, the mind in its masculine essence, living on the outside, exposed to the violent, blinding sun, to the trade winds that beat against it and beat it down, on a land without folds, rootless, solitary and wandering and thus already alienated by the very things which it caused to be produced and which remain untameable and hostile.”
“The true life is absent.' But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and is maintained in this alibi.”
“A fine risk is always something to be taken in philosophy. ... Philosophy thus arouses a drama between philosophers and an intersubjective movement which does not resemble the dialogue of teamworkers in science, nor even the Platonic dialogue which is the reminiscence of a drama rather than a drama itself. It is sketched out in a different structure; empirically it is realized as the history of philosophy in which new interlocutors always enter who have to restate, but in which the former ones take up the floor to answer in the interpretations they arouse, and in which, nonetheless, despite a lack of "certainty in one's movements" or because of it, no one is allowed a relaxation of attention or a lack of strictness.”
“To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught.”
― Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority”
Claude Debussy, As quoted in Claude Debussy: His Life and Works (1933) by Léon Vallas, p. 225
“I do not practise religion in accordance with the sacred rites. I have made mysterious Nature my religion. I do not believe that a man is any nearer to God for being clad in priestly garments, nor that one place in a town is better adapted to meditation than another. When I gaze at a sunset sky and spend hours contemplating its marvelous ever-changing beauty, an extraordinary emotion overwhelms me. Nature in all its vastness is truthfully reflected in my sincere though feeble soul. Around me are the trees stretching up their branches to the skies, the perfumed flowers gladdening the meadow, the gentle grass-carpetted earth, … and my hands unconsciously assume an attitude of adoration. … To feel the supreme and moving beauty of the spectacle to which Nature invites her ephemeral guests! … that is what I call prayer.”