God’s noblest work? Man. Who found it out? Man.
- Mark Twain
Life’s noblest work? Science. Who found it out? Scientists.
- me
Filed by billy at 2:08 pm under consciousness,culture,quotes
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For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.
- Joseph Glanvill
(Just one of those random samples from a Suns of Arqa track that has been bothering me for years that I have been meaning to look up. The guy who reads it (and more) has an amazing voice. Apparently Glanvill was “the leading propagandist for the English natural philosophers of the late 17th Century”. A longer version of the quote appears at the start of Edgar Allan Poe’s story Ligeia.)
Today’s post brought to you by sleep deprivation and old tapes in the car.
Filed by billy at 6:30 pm under consciousness,quotes
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Came across a copy of Pilgermann by Russell Hoban in a second hand store. Opened it at random. Read the following paragraph.
No. We assume always too much, we assume what cannot be assumed. We see dots so we connect them with lines and we claim to know what the lines and dots signify. There is a marching, there is a galloping, there is a hissing of arrows, a clashing of swords; or it may be that there is simply a stretching forth of the neck to the sword, there is a wrapping in the Torah scroll, there is a burning alive and we assume (always the assumptions) that these things are happening to different people. We assume that the Frank is distinct from the Jew who is distinct from the Turk but I cannot now think of it as being like that. It seems to me now that that busy line, that motion in the circuitry, did not leap from one dot to another: from the leap of its original impulse its being continued on its way to flash into Christian, Jew, Muslim, fortresses, rivers, dawns, full moons, battles, crows, the wind in the trees, anything you like. Mountains in the dawn; the shock of Thing-in-Itself, the enormity of Now. So it is that although my being is in one way or another continuous I cannot present to you Pilgermann as continuous, only flashes here and there.
That book, man. That book.
Filed by billy at 2:27 am under quotes,reading
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“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, magic and power in it.
Begin it now.”
- Goethe
In my own language and writings, this sentiment appears as “the way appears as you walk it.” Funny how sometimes we need to be reminded of what we already know.
Filed by billy at 1:54 pm under quotes,the moose
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“How does one fashion a book of resistance, a book of truth in an empire of falsehood, ora book of rectitude in an empire of vicious lies? How does one do this right in front of the enemy?
Not through the old-fashioned ways of writing while you’re in the bathroom, but how does one do that in a truly future technological state? Is it possible for freedom and independence to arise in new ways under new conditions? That is, will new tyrannies abolish these protests? Or will there be new responses by the spirit that we can’t anticipate?”
- Philip K Dick, in interview, 1974
“The basic premise dominating my stories is that if I ever met an extraterrestrial intelligence (more commonly called a “creature from outer space”) I would find I had more to say to it than to my next-door neighbor. What the people on my block do is bring in their newspaper and mail and drive off in their cars. They have no other outdoor habits except mowing their lawns. I went next door one time to check into the indoor habits. They were watching TV. Could you, in writing a sf novel, postulate a culture on these premises? Surely such a society doesn’t exist, except maybe in my imagination. And there isn’t much imagination involved.
The way out of living in the middle of an under-imaginative figment is to make contact, in your own mind, with other civilisations as yet unborn.”
- from ‘afterthought by the author’, the best of philip k dick
Filed by billy at 2:10 pm under culture,quotes,reading,the world
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Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities – the political, the religious, the educational authorities – who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing and forming our minds to their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability, to inform yourself.
- Timothy Leary
Filed by billy at 12:51 pm under consciousness,culture,quotes
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“Changing the world is as easy, and as hard, as just changing the way everyone thinks about their world. The really tough thing is figuring out that no-one really gives a shit.”
- Doktor Sleepless, Warren Ellis.
(Every now and again Ellis really nails something. First time since a couple of lines in Transmetropolitan; that I’ve noticed, anyway.)
Filed by billy at 1:42 am under consciousness,quotes
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What exactly you believe, and how much, and why, is a question Tibet asks you more searchingly than any place I know. It’s part of what travel involves everywhere – the stepping out of the bounds of what you know, and into the realm of wishfulness and illusion and real marvel – but in Tibet it comes with centuries of legends, and a self-consciousness, on both sides, you don’t find in other cultures. We go to Tibet, often, to be transported, and so, inevitably, we are (as we might not be if we saw and heard the same things in Wisconsin); “Tibet” is the name we give to whatever we wish to believe, or can’t quite credit.
- Pico Iyer, Sun After Dark
The real reality, the flickering of seen and unseen actualities, the moment under the moment, can’t be put into words: the most that a writer can do – and this is only rarely achieved – is to write in such a way that the reader finds himself in a place where the unwordable happens off the page.
- Russell Hoban
While I have been disappointed with the past few (admittedly masterful) efforts in his canon, when he is on he is light years beyond his contemporaries. Today was saved by walking along the shore, plucking away at his collection The Moment Under the Moment, short stories and essays and oddities from his earlier years, and rediscovering how much I love his genius.
Most of Hoban’s early-middle period are singular works of genius comparable to nothing but themselves. In particular, read Pilgermann someday. I still don’t know what that book was. But it definitely propels the reader into wondrous unwordable places.
Filed by billy at 7:04 pm under language,quotes,reading
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The universe is but a partial manifestation of your limitless capacity to become – Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am That by Nisargadatta arrived in the mailbox todayu. Not sure if I have mentioned it on here before, but it is pretty staggering. Nisargadatta was an Indian sage. Uneducated, ran a small shop and hung out at his house, he was universally acknowledged to be freaking amazing.
I Am That is questions and answers with people who came and visited him over the years. He gives pretty much the most straightforward and lucid presentation of spiritual stuff ever.
Filed by billy at 4:00 pm under consciousness,quotes,reading
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