Philip

“The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Man asks himself: what is this solitary thing that remains to me—my life, my disillusioned life? How has it come to being nothing but this? And the answer is the discovery of man's trajectory, of the dialectical series of his experiences, which, I repeat, though it might have been different, has been what it has been, and which must be known because it is...the transcendent reality.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, History as a System and other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History

“                    ...shores seldom silent
from which heart naked swam
out to the dear unintelligible ocean.”
― Basil Bunting, Complete Poems

“Here, then, awaiting our study, lies man's authentic "being"—stretching the whole length of his past. Man is what has happened to him, what he has done. Other things might have happened to him or have been done by him, but what did in fact happen to him and was done by him, this constitutes a relentless trajectory of experiences that he carries on his back as the vagabond his bundle of all he possesses. Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, History as a System and other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History