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“Truth as a living power that takes possession of the internal being of a human and actually rescues him from false self-assertion is termed Love.”

"Screens are like windshields in a car: with increased speed, we lose the sense of lateralization, which is an infirmity in our being in the world, its richness, its relief, its depth of field. (...) it is not by chance that animals' eyes are situated on the sides of their head. Their survival depends on anticipating surprise, and surprises never come head-on. Predators come from the back or the sides."

“once, when he had been standing with his father, looking at one of those landscapes he had suddenly cried out: 'Oh, how beautiful it is!'-and then been embarrassed when his father was glad. For he might just as easily have said: 'How terribly sad it is.' It was the failure of language that caused him anguish, a half-awareness that the words were merely accidental, mere evasions, and never the feeling itself.”

"You were always going to do it. You liked to push back against it — it’s a good feeling, surrender, actually — but you knew, you knew from the first moment you heard - even before you heard the question — you knew what your answer would be. This was always going to happen. She’s been dead since the beginning." haha.. ha... ha

"Everything is recorded now, written down, dug up, so if you say it, you say it with full awareness it might — it likely will be - taken down as evidence. And we are alive ina time that has mountains of dead words but not enough action. That’s a difficult truth, perhaps, but it is a truth." Oh well.

“but in this mournfulness there lay a subtle relish, a pride in doing something utterly alien to the people about him, serving a divinity uncomprehended by the rest. And then it was that, fleetingly, something would flare up in his eyes that was like the ravishment of religious ecstasy.”

"We are, proclaim psychoanalysis and structural anthropology, les enfants d'Edipe. Thus the modern dramaturgy of consciousness and symbolic identifications bids us recognize in Oedipus and Narcissus, in Prometheus and Odysseus, mon semblable, mon frère. More and more, we can come to understand in the modernist movements in the West a hunger for 'beginnings', for a return to archaic, essentially Greek, sources."

"Absolute tragedy is so exceedingly rare a form precisely because it negates the up-beat, the pendulum-swing towards hope which seems to be ingrained in human sensibility. (...) Tragedy perceives the world as does Ivan Karamazov when he sends back to God his 'ticket of admission'." HHHHHHHHSHSH

"Creon is on stage during Antigone's monologue. But her words are directed neither at him nor at the chorus. Antigone addresses those who cannot or will not hear her-the guests of Persephone in the night-world. She speaks to herself and to her dead."

Antigone's lament and farewell can best be understood as a desperate endeavour to come home to her own sole truth of being (...) If Antigone does not wholly succeed, it is precisely because the vehemence of her dissociations, of her cumulative exits from the compromising fabric of erotic, social, and civic life, have finally made her something of a stranger even to the initial certitudes and firmness of her own ego.

me 2 pages in: okay victor ward
mike ma: “Vic­tor Ward and I shake hands like men, and he tells me that my last work was “a lit­tle too sim­i­lar” to an­other he can’t re­call. I tell him that all of to­day’s best art is stolen or heav­ily in­spired. He agrees fully and I con­fess to him that this is the place to be tonight. He shouts, “Ab­so­lutely, baby. You’re so cool.” FUCK YOU 5 STARS

“In either case one of the best things that can happen to us is to recall that, to use Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s suggestive term, all historical events are “penultimate,” that their ultimate significance lies in a reality that transcends them and that transcends all the empirical coordinates of human existence.” .

"Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides experienced, were in some measure able to articulate, a primordial equation between the 'being of Being'. They apprehended, they were possessed by, language in its original state of truthful nomination and concealment. Thus they could both 'say the world' and perceive that which speech guarded inviolate within its own autonomous strengths."

“Power is ultimately an illusion because it cannot transcend the limits of the empirical world. Laughter can—and does every time it relativizes the seemingly rocklike necessities of this world.”

“and like a cloud of vapour or like waters circumfluent in space the liquid letters of speech, symbols of the element of mystery, flowed forth over his brain.”

“a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.” ahhh :')

“He had told himself bitterly as he walked through the streets that she was a figure of the womanhood of her country, a batlike soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness”

“O! In the virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh.”

“He burned to appease the fierce longings of his heart before which everything else was idle and alien. He cared little that he was in mortal sin, that his life had grown to be a tissue of subterfuge and falsehood. Beside the savage desire within him to realise the enormities which he brooded on nothing was sacred.”

“The noise of children at play annoyed him and their silly voices made him feel, even more keenly, that he was different from others. He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how: but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him.”

“Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learned them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the real world about him. The hour when he too would take part in the life of that world seemed drawing near and in secret he began to make ready for the great part which he felt awaited him the nature of which he only dimly apprehended.”

"The renown, the very survival, in the spiritual sense, of the house of Oedipus lies in the hands of her silence. She is wedded to that silence; 'she knows not any man and yet she is a bride'." okay this is it for today

"Kierkegaard's relation to the child of Oedipus is one of possessive irony, of a Donjuanism of the soul such as he himself has described in his analysis of Mozart. 'She is my creation, her thoughts are my thoughts, and yet it is as if I had rested with her in a night of love, as if she had entrusted me with her deep secret, breathing out this secret and her soul in my embrace.'"

"Innocence is irreconcilable with human action; but only in action is there moral identity." i can’t finish this book because every other sentence i need to stop and take a walk. what if we all just died

"Inside the family, continues Hegel, one relationship is privileged above all others by virtue of the immediacy and purity of its ethical substance." i have so many jokes about what comes next

"The torment of Narcissus is stilled: the image is substance, it is the integral self in the twin presence of another. Thus sisterliness is ontologically privileged beyond any other human stance. In it, the homecomings of Idealism and Romanticism are given vital form. This form receives supreme, everlasting expression in Sophocles' Antigone." okay. yay :)

"As Hegel insists, the roots of exile, of self-division, are internal. They are a fatal constant of self-consciousness. It is to ourselves that we are strangers. However absolute the empathy which knits friend to friend, however symbiotic and self-sacrificial the uses of amity there can be no true homecoming to the self through another."

"No literalism, no psychoanalytic labelling, will elucidate the utter seriousness, the period-magic of Baudelaire's call to 'mon enfant, rna sceur' ('my child, my sister'). But it is just this magic and this seriousness, irrelevant as they may be to Sophocles' meaning, which must be grasped if we are to make sense of the special lustre of Antigone in nineteenth-century feeling."

"Moreover, only one born of the union of brother and sister can bring on the twilight of the gods which is also the morning of man (only he can, in Hegelian terms, close history)." i need to speak with George Steiner. i need to speak with George Steiner

"An even clearer example, and certainly one of the greatest in
English literature, is The Duchess of Malfi. The Duchess has the
innocence of abundant life in a sick and melancholy society, where
the fact that she has "youth and a little beauty" is precisely why
she is hated." felt