Simone Gherbe

“My course is set for an uncharted sea.”
― Dante Alighieri

“when i was a boy
a god often rescued me
from the shouts and the rods of men
and i played among trees and flowers
secure in their kindness
and the breezes of heaven
were playing there too.

and as you delight
the hearts of plants
when they stretch towards you
with little strength

so you delighted the heart in me
father Helios, and like Endymion
i was your favourite,
Moon. o all

you friendly
and faithful gods
i wish you could know
how my soul has loved you.

even though when i called to you then
it was not yet with names, and you
never named me as people do
as though they knew one another

i knew you better
than i have ever known them.
i understood the stillness above the sky
but never the words of men.

trees were my teachers
melodious trees
and i learned to love
among flowers.

i grew up in the arms of the gods.”
― Friedrich Holderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments

“We do not escape our boundaries or our innermost being. We do not change. It is true we may be transformed, but we always walk within our boundaries, within the marked-off circle.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees

“The outstanding characteristic of Western scholarship is its specialization and cutting up of knowledge into different departments. The over-development of logical thinking and specialization, with its technical phraseology, has brought about the curious fact of modern civilization, that philosophy has been so far relegated to the background, far behind politics and economics, that the average man can pass it by without a twinge of conscience. The feeling of the average man, even of the educated person, is that philosophy is a "subject" which he can best afford to go without. This is certainly a strange anomaly of modern culture, for philosophy, which should lie closest to men's bosom and business, has become most remote from life. It was not so in the classical civilization of the Greeks and Romans, and it was not so in China, where the study of wisdom of life formed the scholars' chief occupation. Either the modern man is not interested in the problems of living, which are the proper subject of philosophy, or we have gone a long way from the original conception of philosophy.”
― Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living