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Vol. 1: Kant, Kantianism and Idealism: The Origins of Continental Philosophy. ***/5. Chapters being organized by thinker unfortunately gives you a rather choppy picture of the development of German Idealism - could have used a supplementary overview chapter. Best chapters are Stepelevich on the Young and Old Hegelians and Lawrence on Schelling.

"But there's still
a self-invading evil sensed at night, beside
my breastplate of dark bone and a helmet skull,
both hand-me-downs from the dead – to whom I ride.
Though showing a shield of dream, I won't fail

but fight here on a wishing-horse in an archaic war,
alive in an ancient mind. The haunted and immense
battlefield has to end."

i like " 'the psychological' (held between quotes as though held between tongs)"

"a lopsided psalm in our deformed fingers
we listen to sand pouring in our veins
and in our dark interior grows a white church
of salt memories calcium and unspeakable weakness"

"I felt a terrible aching in my heart.
'Why doesn't anyone like you?'
He hugged me, pressed me to him, and answered with a wink:
'Because I'm a stranger, understand? That's the whole trouble...'
I tugged at his sleeve, unable to say anything.
'Don't be angry,' he said once more and whispered into my ear: 'Don't cry either.'
But tears were flowing down his cheeks from under his clouded spectacles."

"At home Just the Job was more and more disliked. Even the friendly cat belonging to our gay lady lodger wouldn't climb up on his knees as it did with everyone else, and didn't come when he called. For this I would beat it, pull its ears and was almost reduced to tears in my efforts to persuade it not to be frightened of him."

"Waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying “that is all” more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall."

"The leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he, too, made that statement. The sparrows fluttering, rising, and falling in jagged fountains were part of the pattern; the white and blue, barred with black branches... All taken together meant the birth of a new religion."

"Tsiganok would catch some cockroaches behind the stove, quickly make a harness from cotton threads, cut some sleigh runners from a piece of paper, and there, across the yellow, clean scrubbed table a coach and four would gallop, Ivan guiding the black steeds with a thin sliver of wood and shouting excitedly:
'They're off to fetch the Archbishop!'"

"You, eternal one, did show yourself to me.
I hold you dear as if a son,
who left me while a child,
for fate had called you to a throne
that overlooked the vales.
And I, a hoary man, remained
confused about his grown-up son,
untrained in all the modern things
to which the son is drawn...
At times I wish you back with me
inside this womb that brought you up." !!!

i feel a liquid unity with rilke that he believes that god dwells most naturally in darkness; i tried (and failed) to write a poem about that a few months ago. Ich glaube an Nächte

"I love you, you the gentlest law
through which we ripen as we fight with it;
you homesickness we cannot quite curtail,
you forest within which we lose our trail,
you song we have sung with every silence kept,
you darkened net,
where every feeling apt to flee is caught."

"What we experience as spring, God sees as a fleeting smile passing over the earth. The earth seems to be remembering something, which then in the summer she tells to everyone; until at last she becomes wiser in the great stillness of autumn, which is how she confides in the lonely."

"To love was therefore very dangerous. To like = to be like = to be the same as. If she likes me, she is like me, she is me. Thus she began by saying that she was my sister, my wife, she was a McBride. I was life. She was the Bride of Life. She developed my mannerisms. She had the Tree of Life inside her. She was the Tree of Life."

the ultimate irony of this book is that every sentence is so exactly me that it is making me feel even more ontologically insecure

"The schizoid individual exists under the black sun of his own scrutiny. The glare of his awareness kills his spontaneity, his freshness; it destroys all joy. Everything withers under it. And yet he remains, although profoundly *not* narcissistic, compulsively preoccupied with the sustained observation of his own mental and or bodily processes. In Federn's language, he cathects his ego-as-object with mortido.

"'You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, this is something you are free to do and is in accord with your nature, but perhaps precisely this holding back is the only suffering that you might be able to avoid.'
-Franz Kafka"

"He experiences himself as a man who is only saving himself from drowning by the most constant, strenuous, desperate activity. Engulfment is felt as a risk in being understood (thus grasped, comprehended), in being loved, or even simply in being seen. To be hated may be feared for other reasons, but to be hated as such is often less disturbing than to be destroyed, as it is felt, through being engulfed by love."

"An argument occurred between two patients in the course of a session in an analytic group. Suddenly, one of the protagonists broke off the argument to say 'I can't go on. You are arguing in order to have the pleasure of triumphing over me. At best you win an argument. At worst you lose an argument. *I am arguing in order to preserve my existence.*'"

"Freud was a hero. He descended to the 'Underworld' and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone. We who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him and conveyed to us. He survived. We must see if we now can survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defence."

"Among [Marcuse's] one-dimensional men, it is not surprising that someone with an insistent experience of other dimensions, that he cannot entirely deny or forget, will run the risk either of being destroyed by the others, or of betraying what he knows."

"She slummed, as usual, in her choice of spoken words; either too many words to an idea or not enough furniture for the idea itself or somebody else's furniture; always a muddle and clutter of speech."
this book is tedious and I'm looking forward to being done with it but Janet Frame is v. good at articulating the abjection of being shy

"Promoted artifacts by the dereliction of our creator, and greater now than the sum of his skills, we shall be with you while there are beaches. Imperishable by-products of the perishable will, we shall lie like skulls in the hands of soliloquists."
–The Apotheosis of Tins

"The word “radical” is derived from the Latin root, “rad,” which actually means “root.” Radicalism is not a measurement of degree of ideological fanaticism, to the right or the left; rather, it describes a style of approach to social problems. The radical, literally speaking, is someone who seeks out the root of a problem so that she may strike at it for a solution."

Gosh, I love Wemmick. :)

Broke up laughing at 13-year-old Murnane building a miniature Trappist monastery out of wet clay and writing a Mass roster for imaginary monks. I assumed his fictional narrators were exaggerations of himself and his own poetic eccentricities, but it seems that he might have been getting away with writing memoirs all this time.

Britain's cotton industry started off largely as knockoffs of the highly popular Indian calicoes, which the East India Company exported. When the Industrial Revolution in Britain started and they could make knockoffs at an unprecedented rate, EIC deindustrialized India and used it as a captive market for British cotton. Christ.

Singer's reasoning is good so far, but my god is he a klutz when it comes to talking about delicate concepts - dreading the "defective babies" chapter. I'm not sure if I can agree with the thesis of utilitarianism, but it's an interesting thought experiment.

so - has murnane chosen all his subsequent book titles from this text? or

having just read The Plains by Gerald Murnane, part VII of the chapter on immensity is appropriate: it traces artistic impressions of plains/deserts, poetics of featurelessness, dialectics of the horizon and the centre, etc... ideas very much relevant to Murnane's novel. Rilke: "The plain is the sentiment that exalts us." I wonder if Murnane read this book.