Clive Roberts’s Reviews > Imaginal Love: The Meanings of Imagination in Henry Corbin and James Hillman > Status Update

There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!’’ It’s the same thing when we take Prozac and deny the meaning of depression and the strange and terrible moods and disruptions it engenders. We want a physical cause for our problems—so we can take a pill or put an electrode in our brains—this is the underdone potato theory of psychopathology. The soul demands and deserves more.

“There is a loving in dreamwork … Let us call it imaginal love … This love does not reach only towards unifying as we have been so tediously taught. When we love, we want to explore, to discriminate more and more widely, to extend the intricacy that intensifies intimacy. “

“Ludwig Wittgenstein thought that “philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.”  — I couldn’t agree more!!

“…to reveal each disciple to himself … He leads each disciple to his own theophany…his own “inner heaven,”…to his eternal individuality … Khidr’s mission consists in enabling you to attain to the “Khidr of your being,” for it is in this inner depth, in this “prophet of your being,” that springs the Water of Life at the foot of the mystic Sinai, pole of the microcosm, center of the world.”

“Literary writing is a way of attempting to capture the poetry of the world. Sun, moon, mountains and rivers are the writing of being, the literature of what-is. Long before our species was born, the books had been written. The library was here before we were. We live in it. We can add to it, or we can try …
  When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry.”