Giving Life To Things

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Autobiography of Goethe. Truth and Poetry: From my Own Life, tr. John Oxenford, bks. I-XX (London: George Bell and Sons, 1897), 478-9:

My capacity of giving life to things, and rendering them present to me out of their real connexion, put me in the position that I could be perfectly at home in a certain century or in a department of science, without being in any degree instructed as to what preceded or what followed. Thus a certain theoretico-practical sense had been awakened in me, by which I could give account of things, rather as they should be than as they were, without any proper philosophical connection, but by way of leaps. To this was added a very easy power of apprehension, and a friendly reception of the opinions of others, if they did not stand in direct opposition to my own convictions.

Faithful And Silent Priests Of The Vanished God

Paolo Mantegazza, The Book of Love (New York: American-Neo-latin Library, 1917), ch. XVII, The Hell of Love, 186-189:

Pain, so rich in afflictions and tortures, in its varieties as infinite as the grains of sand in the ocean, and as deep as the ocean’s abysses, has reserved its greatest bitterness, its most cruel torments for love. And so it was to be; the warmest passion was to turn into the most inflexible frigidity; the deepest was to precipitate itself into the somberest depths; the richest in joys to be the most fecund in sorrows. From the fleeting breeze of a suspicion more rapid than the lightning, more evanescent than a word written in the soft sand of the seashore, to the certain consciousness of an unexpected betrayal; from the impatience of him who for one instant awaits his beloved, to the prolonged desperation of him who can no longer wait, love evinces all the notes of affliction, all the torments of the senses, all the tortures of sentiment. Of the bones which are scattered every day on the long path through which the human family passes on this planet, many were left by love; and suicide, homicide and insanity count in cemeteries and hospitals a much greater number of victims than are reckoned in the summary statistics of our sociologists. All this, of course, is for those who love with heart and mind and not with senses only. He who sees in love a question only of régime and hygiene recovers from the loss of his sweetheart with a tear and a new conquest; cures betrayal with betrayal, and with licentiousness heals every malady of the heart and drowns all his sorrows in his libertinism. . . .

If you wish to open just a little the door of this hell, if you want to sound its abysses with a passing glance, imagine on one side all the hopes, all the voluptuousness, all the riches of love, and on the other all the fears, all the bitternesses, all the miseries. And after this cruel exposition of the joys and sorrows of love, you will not have ended yet, because the fields of sufferance are a hundred times larger than those where joy is sown. The physical possession of a woman is one; the tortures of a man beholding the fruit near without his being able to touch it are thousands; and this example will suffice for all.

Thus, as the antithesis of life is death, in its presence all the arrows of our pride lose their sharpness, all our hopes are torn, all our joys shattered. In the delirium of passion and pride we all repeat hundreds of times: ‘‘I would have her dead rather than belonging to another—a thousand times buried, but not unfaithful.’’ And frequently the man who utters this blasphemy, his lips livid and his hair standing on end, stains his hands with blood by plunging them into the bosom of a victim. Folly and delirium! Hurricanes of the heart where love and hatred, pride and love, crime and torture clash and blend in the tumult of a dreadful storm. But love, which truly loves, infinite love which transforms man into the half of a creature that suffers and desires, ideal love that few feel and few see dimly in the twilight of a suprasensible region which their hands cannot reach, recognizes no greater torture than the death of the beloved. Oh, yes; let indifference, contempt, hatred, betrayal come, but that the dear one may live. Let others have this creature whom we have believed to be ours, into whose veins we have poured our blood; let this temple, perfumed with the incense of our thoughts, with the durable love of all our passions, become the temple of another god; let our flowers be trampled upon, our crowns broken, ourselves driven away by the rough broom of the sexton, but let the god live who sojourns there, let the idol of our life shine on the altar. Dejected like a fugitive, despised like a criminal, vituperated like a spy, in the cold and distant solitude we drink drop by drop a bottomless cup of gall, and every drop is bitterer than the last; but we know that she breathes the air of our planet, which we too breathe; we know that she is inebriated by the same sun that warms us; we know that among the numberless shadows that wander through the spaces of the invisible there is a creature around whom the air becomes mellower and the light brighter; that there are certain clods of earth which yield to the weight of a body that we love. No; as long as the woman we love lives, hope does not lose all its feathers, and far, far away, less tangible than a dream, more invisible than the regions of heaven, more inconceivable than eternity, it still soars on our horizon, perhaps not believed, not confessed, but it still lives and keeps us alive.

But when we still live and she is dead; when we are still so cowardly as to live, to breathe, to eat, and she is buried in the humid miasma of a wooden coffin; when all the world still exists and she is dead; when the joy of a thousand flowers that blossom in every ray of light, the trills of a thousand birds that sing of love, the groups of the fortunates who embrace each other, and the benedictions of so many happy creatures are nothing but a frame to a gelid void, a dark world; when we remain suspended between an infinity of joy that was ours and an infinity of sorrow that is ours and shall be ours tomorrow and as long as we are so cowardly as to live,—then we may look upon suicide as the supreme joy of life, as the most sublime of human prides; then we may understand how man can in a flash dream of the great voluptuousness of mingling his bones with those of another creature; then we can understand how imagination can smile at the idea of the embrace of two corpses, of the fusion of two ashes, of the resurrection of two existences extinguished in the perfume of two flowers grown upon a human grave and which the wind blandly brings together that they may kiss again.

In the silence of the cemeteries there are some flowers that kiss each other and to which, perhaps, from under the earth responds the quivering of certain bones; there are certain lips on our planet, which closely pressed against each other one day, which death cruelly separated and which a second death has reunited forever. And when we survive, it is because a new organism has been created in us, and today we are no longer what we were yesterday. The thoughts of the past, the limbs of the past, all that we were yesterday is dead, dead forever; from the withered trunk of our existence, science, duty, friendship, paternal or maternal or filial love cause a new branch to shoot forth, which reproduces the ancient tree; and the common passer-by, seeing the same leaves, the same flowers, the same fruits, believes that only one corpse is buried there—but he is in error. We can survive certain sorrows on one condition only: to accomplish the miracle of dying today in order to be born anew tomorrow with the same name, but with a new life. And for the honor of human nature, these survivors remain the faithful and silent priests of the vanished god, like those Peruvians who, on the summits of the Andes, amidst the eternal glaciers of the Sorata or of the Illimani, still worship the god of their fathers. To understand certain sorrows is the proof of a lofty mind; to have experienced them is the glory of a martyr which exalts and purifies us.

The World Of Manly Business

Josiah Royce, ‘‘Tennyson and Pessimism,’’ in Studies of Good and Evil: A Series of Essays upon Problems of Philosophy and of Life (New York & London: D. Appleton & Co., 1915), 87-88:

One hears nowadays, very often, of youthful pessimism, prevalent, for instance, among certain clever college students. When I hear of these things, I do not always regret them. On the contrary, I think that the best man is the one who can see the truth of pessimism, can absorb and transcend that truth, and can be nevertheless an optimist, not by virtue of his failure to recognize the evil of life but by virtue of his readiness to take his part in the struggle against this evil. Therefore, I am often glad when I hear of this spread of pessimistic ideas among studious but undeveloped youth. For I say to myself, if these men are brave men, their sense of the evil that hinders our human life, will some day arouse them to fight this evil in dead earnest, while, if they are not brave men, optimism can be of no service to cowards. But in any case I like to suggest to such brave and pessimistic youth where the solution of their problem must lie. It surely cannot lie in any romantic dream of a pure and innocent world, far off somewhere in the future, in Heaven, or in Isles of the Blessed. These things are not for us. We are born for the world of manly business, and if we are worthy of our destiny, we may pos sibly have some good part in the Wars of the Lord. For nothing better have we any right to hope, and to an honest man that is enough.

Suffering From The Unrealised Ideal

Jean-Marie Guyau, A Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or Sanction, tr. Gertrude Kapteyn (London, 1898), 190-1:

Although the elements of remorse and of inward joy thus springing from the sensibility are generally variable, there is, however, one which presents a certain fixity, and which may exist in all elevated minds; we mean that satisfaction which an individual always feels in being classed with superior beings—beings conformable with the normal type of his species, and adapted, so to speak, to his own ideal. This satisfaction corresponds to the intellectual pain of feeling himself fallen from his rank and his species, sunk to the level of inferior beings. Unfortunately, this kind of satisfaction and this kind of intellectual remorse only clearly manifest themselves m philosophic minds. Moreover, this sanction, limited to a small number of moral beings, admits of a certain provisional antinomy. In fact, the pain caused by the contrast between our ideal and our real state must be all the greater to us, as we are more fully conscious of the ideal; for in that case we get a clearer perception of the distance separating us from it. Susceptibility of conscience, therefore, increases in proportion to the development of conscience, and the vividness of remorse is a measure of our very efforts towards morality. In the same way, as superior organisms are always more sensitive to all kinds of pain coming from outside . . . so is the more highly organized beings are morally more exposed than others to that suffering arising from inward causes, whose cause is always in action—the suffering from the unrealized ideal. True remorse, with its subtlety, its painful scruples, its inward tortures, may strike men, not in inverse, but in direct, ratio to their perfection.

Alone In The Company Of Many

Ramon Llull, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, tr. E. Allison Peers (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1923), §§228-9, 73:

The Lover went into solitude; and his heart was accompanied by thoughts, his eyes by tears, and his body by fasts and afflictions. But when the Lover returned to the companionship of men, these things went no longer with him, and the Lover remained quite alone in the company of many people. 

Love is an ocean, its waves troubled by the winds; it has no port or shore. The Lover perished in this ocean, and with him perished his trials . . .

Arise!

John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.330:

Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n.

A Piece Of The Sun’s Gold

Maria von Wedemeyer to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pätzig, 23 August, 1943 (in Love Letters from Cell 92, tr. John Brownjohn (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995)), 70:

Will you be writing to me today? I seem to see you as vividly as if I were sitting beside you. Your whole surroundings, your gestures, your hands and eyes. You'll write me the nicest letter, and—whatever it’s like—it will bring me a sunny day. No, not just a day. It will bring me a piece of the sun’s gold, one that I can absorb deep inside—one that outlasts any rain or storm and warms every little part of me with its radiant light. Thank you now and always, just for wanting to write to me. 

The Pretense Of Vice; Sentimentalism & The Passsionate; The Aristocratic vs. The Populace; Romanticised Biography; History & Literature; & Heroic Sincerity

Johan Huizinga, ‘‘The Task of Cultural History (1926 [1929]),’’ in The Course of Civilizations, tr. James S. Holmes & Hans van Marie (Providence: Cluny, 2018), 39-43 (footnotes omitted):

Permit me to digress for a moment on that extraordinary trait of our age, the pretense of vice. It is in a certain sense a modern repetition of the sentimentalism of the eighteenth century, but in a completely different form. The old sentimentalism felt itself to be intimately bound to the respect for virtue. It tended to balance passion and virtue in what was often a neck-breaking fashion. Nowadays this is no longer necessary. Passion alone, or what figures for it, is enough. In every depiction of reality in either word or image (I am here speaking of literature in general) the element of passion must be played up. Moral norms definitely may not be praised. Virtuous people assure themselves of their halo of the modern by means of a eulogy of immorality. Such a eulogy is as much a form of cultural hypocrisy as a sancti monious display of virtue was ever able to be.

Sentimentalism and the passionate are both nurtured in the soil of the plebeian intellectual attitude that captured the fields of literature and culture in the course of the eighteenth century. If one removes the sting of disdain from the word ‘‘plebeian,’’ the term ‘‘democratic’’ can be reserved for political and social fields, and the concept plebeian (including ‘‘bourgeois’’) can be placed in antithesis to aristocratic in the field of culture. An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic. In order to be strong it wants to be and needs to be hard and unemotional, or at any rate to allow the expression of feelings and inclinations only in elegant forms. Ernest Seillière has repeatedly expounded these things excellently.

The populace is always anti-stoic. Great waves of emotion, floods of tears, and excesses of feeling have always been breaks in the dikes of the popular soul, which then usually swept along the spirit of the upper classes. With Rousseau, ‘‘the bitter plebeian,’’ as Faguet called him, the anti-stoic intellectual attitude triumphed for good. Its name is romanticism. With it came that immodest interest in the grimaces of love and hatred which was to find uncurbed expression in the film. The intellectual difference between the literary display of vice and the conversation of two wenches talking about a sickness in a back alley is small. 

History may become democratic, but it must remain stoic. Jules Laforgue says somewhere in his letters that he cannot look upon all history as anything but one endless series of misery. But he was a poet. If the historian yielded to his sympathy with all the misery in the world he would be rendered unsuitable for his task.

 Soberness, restraint, a certain skeptical reserve in investigating the deepest emotions of the heart—all of which are the duty of true historical writing—do not please the contemporary reader. At this point enters the second genre of historical belles-lettres we have in mind. The romanticized biography has in recent years become an international fashion as a genre. It frequently appears as one in a series under a general title. This indicates the role played in the phenomenon by publishing interests. There is a demand for a new sort of Vitæ, based on a thorough knowledge of the sources and half meant as genuine history, but with the express intention that that history should be exaggerated, prepared for a market primarily literary. If the author is of a sober turn, the demand gives rise to works that exceed the bounds of history only slightly, such as Andre Maurois’s Disraeli. At other times the literary is completely dominant, as in Joseph Delteil’s Jeanne a’Arc. Emil Ludwig has become world famous in a few short years. Wilhelm Hausenstein instructs us in the conjugal secrets of Rembrandt and Saskia. And last year Dutch literature was given a remarkable specimen of the genre from the hand of Felix Timmermans: Pieter Brueghel, zoo heb ik U uit Uw werken geroken [literally, ‘‘Pieter Brueghel: Thus Have I Smelled You in Your Works’’]. In it a well-known writer lent his name to a double novelty: the vocative book-title and olfactory historiography (though the latter had already been practiced by others before him).

More striking than all these names is the fact that the scholar most at home in French history of the fifteenth century, Pierre Champion, felt called upon, after his excellent works Charles d’Orléans, François Villon, and Histoire poétique du XVie siècle, to follow the path of romantic biography and literary effect in his Louis XI.

Anyone with the true historical spirit, whether he is the most academic scholar or the simplest cultured reader, reacts negatively to this whole genre, for the same reason that a connoisseur despises crusted wine. He can taste the adulteration. No literary effect in the world can compare to the pure, sober taste of history. He does not want his history dry, but he does want it sec. For him the first authentic historical document that comes to hand—whether a chronicle or a verdict, a deed, a letter, or a resolution—will be enough to wash away the scented taste of the hybrid genre.

The writer of historical belles-lettres will retort: But do you historians not recognize the strongly subjective element in all historical cognition—in the formulation of the question, in the selection and sifting of the material, in the interpretation and synthesis of the data ascertained? What is the difference between my work and yours, except the liveliness and the ingeniousness of the fantasy, which is also indispensable for you? The answer is that the difference lies in the intellectual preoccupation from which the work derives. Take one of the best representatives of the form I am objecting to, Guy de Pourtalès’s life of Liszt, the first volume in the series of Vie des hommes illustres. What the author provides from the very first page is literature, not history. Everything he describes the historian will only suspect, and everything the historian would like to have described is obscured by the literary image. The utterly sincere need to understand the past as well as possible without any admixture of one’s own is the only thing that can make a work history. Judgment has to rest on an absolute conviction that what is described must have been that way. And as soon as the past is converted into the language of the novel, into the form of an imaginative literary work, the sacred essence of history has been adulterated, although the author may still believe that he is writing history. In this way one abandons the form of perception natural to one’s sustaining culture, and smothers in the well-meaning reader the genuine historical sense.

No borders can be defined. It is a question of conscience, humility, and subservience. Goethe said to Eckermann: ‘‘When eras are on the decline, all tendencies are subjective; but on the other hand, when matters are ripening for a new epoch, all tendencies are objective. . . .’’ If this is true, our time must ask itself where it stands. ‘‘The retreat of historical knowledge in the last decade,’’ is, according to Rothacker, ‘‘certainly not accidental.’’

. . . Carlyle saw as the fundamental characteristics of his heroes their utter seriousness, their deep sincerity toward themselves and the world. Not everyone can be a hero, but everyone can strive toward a heroic sincerity.

 

The Country Of My Choice

Henri-Frédéric Amiel, The Journal Intime, tr. Mrs Humphry Ward, May 2, 1877:

Which nation is best worth belonging to? There is not one in which the good is not counterbalanced by evil. Each is a caricature of man, a proof that no one among them deserves to crush the others, and that all have something to learn from all. I am alternately struck with the qualities and with the defects of each, which is perhaps lucky for a critic. I am conscious of no preference for the defects of north or south, of west or east; and I should find a difficulty in stating my own predilections. Indeed I myself am wholly indifferent in the matter, for to me the question is not one of liking or of blaming, but of understanding. My point of view is philosophical—that is to say, impartial and impersonal. The only type which pleases me is perfection—man, in short, the ideal man. As for the national man, I bear with and study him, but I have no admiration for him. I can only admire the fine specimens of the race, the great men, the geniuses, the lofty characters and noble souls, and specimens of these are to be found in all the ethnographical divisions. The “country of my choice” (to quote Madame de Staël) is with the chosen souls. I feel no greater inclination toward the French, the Germans, the Swiss, the English, the Poles, the Italians, than toward the Brazilians or the Chinese. The illusions of patriotism, of Chauvinist, family, or professional feeling, do not exist for me. My tendency, on the contrary, is to feel with increased force the lacunas, deformities, and imperfections of the group to which I belong. My inclination is to see things as they are, abstracting my own individuality, and suppressing all personal will and desire; so that I feel antipathy, not toward this or that, but toward error, prejudice, stupidity, exclusiveness, exaggeration. I love only justice and fairness. Anger and annoyance are with me merely superficial; the fundamental tendency is toward impartiality and detachment. Inward liberty and aspiration toward the true—these are what I care for and take pleasure in.

The Life Of The Thinker

Henri-Frédéric Amiel, The Journal Intime, entry of September 9, 1880:

All personal events, all particular experiences, are to me texts for meditation, facts to be generalized into laws, realities to be reduced to ideas. Life is only a document to be interpreted, matter to be spiritualized. Such is the life of the thinker. Every day he strips himself more and more of personality. If he consents to act and to feel, it is that he may the better understand; if he wills, it is that he may know what will is. Although it is sweet to him to be loved, and he knows nothing else so sweet, yet there also he seems to himself to be the occasion of the phenomenon rather than its end. He contemplates the spectacle of love, and love for him remains a spectacle. He does not even believe his body his own; he feels the vital whirlwind passing through him—lent to him, as it were, for a moment, in order that he may perceive the cosmic vibrations. He is a mere thinking subject; he retains only the form of things; he attributes to himself the material possession of nothing whatsoever; he asks nothing from life but wisdom. This temper of mind makes him incomprehensible to all that loves enjoyment, dominion, possession. He is fluid as a phantom that we see but cannot grasp; he resembles a man, as the manes of Achilles or the shade of Creusa resembled the living. Without having died, I am a ghost. Other men are dreams to me, and I am a dream to them.

Monstre Incompréhensible

Henri-Frédéric Amiel, The Journal Intime, entry of December 26, 1868:

If men are always more or less deceived on the subject of women, it is because they forget that they and women do not speak altogether the same language, and that words have not the same weight or the same meaning for them, especially in questions of feeling. Whether from shyness or precaution or artifice, a woman never speaks out her whole thought, and moreover what she herself knows of it is but a part of what it really is. Complete frankness seems to be impossible to her, and complete self-knowledge seems to be forbidden her. If she is a sphinx to us, it is because she is a riddle of doubtful meaning even to herself. She has no need of perfidy, for she is mystery itself. A woman is something fugitive, irrational, indeterminable, illogical, and contradictory. A great deal of forbearance ought to be shown her, and a good deal of prudence exercised with regard to her, for she may bring about innumerable evils without knowing It. Capable of all kinds of devotion, and of all kinds of treason, “monstre incompréhensible,” raised to the second power, she is at once the delight and the terror of man.

Death Is Over Our Heads

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. III (London: George Bell & Sons, 1896), pt. III, sect. I, mem. I, subs. I, 43:

Why do we contend and vex one another? behold death is over our heads, and we must shortly give an account of all our uncharitable words and actions: think upon it, and be wise!

Art Added To Scholarship

George Macaulay Trevelyan, Clio, A Muse & Other Essays (London/New York/Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1949 [1913]), 162-3:

. . . history is not merely the accumulation and interpretation of facts—hard enough that in itself!—but involves besides the whole art of book composition and prose style. Life is short, art is long, but history is longest, for it is art added to scholarship.

The idea that histories which are delightful to read must be the work of superficial temperaments, and that a crabbed style betokens a deep thinker or conscientious worker, is the reverse of the truth. What is easy to read has been difficult to write. The labour of writing and rewriting, correcting and recorrecting, is the due exacted by every good book from its author, even if he know from the beginning exactly what he wants to say. A limpid style is invariably the result of hard labour, and the easily flowing connection of sentence with sentence and paragraph with paragraph has always been won by the sweat of the brow. 

Now in the case of history all this artistic work is superimposed on the labours of scholarship, themselves enough to fill a lifetime. The historical architect must quarry his own stones and build with his own hands. Division of labour is possible in only a limited degree. No wonder then that there have been so few historians really on a level with the opportunities of their great themes, and that except Gibbon every one of them is imperfect either in science or in art. The double task, hard as it is, we little people must shoulder as best we may, in the temporary absence of giants. And if the finest intellects of the rising generation can be made to realize how hard is the task of history, more of them will become historians.

Most Solid Goodness Of Heart

Ernest Renan, Marcus Aurelius, tr. William G. Hutchison (London; New York: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1904), 239-40:

The most solid goodness of heart is that which is founded on absolute weariness, on the clear perception of the fact that all in this world is trivial and without real depth. In this absolute ruin of all things, what remains? Wickedness? Oh, that is not worth the trouble! Wickedness presupposes a certain faith in the seriousness of life—faith at least in pleasure, faith in vengeance, faith in ambition. Nero believed in art, Commodus in the circus—and that made them cruel. But why should the disillusioned being who knows that every object of desire is frivolous, give himself the trouble of cultivating a disagreeable feeling? The charity of the sceptic is the most assured, and the pious Emperor [i.e., Marcus Aurelius] was more than a sceptic; the movement of life in his soul was all but as imperceptible as the whispered sounds of the interior of a tomb. He attained the Buddhist Nirvana, the peace of Christ. Like Jesus, Sakya Muni, Socrates, Francis of Assisi, and three or four other sages, he had absolutely vanquished death. He could afford to smile at it, for, indeed, it had no longer any meaning for him.

Disintegrating Effect Of German Education

Emery Neff, The Poetry of History: The Contribution of Literature and Literary Scholarship To the Writing of History since Voltaire (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1947; repr. 1961), 192-4 (emphasis all mine):

Before long, this atmosphere [= professionalisation of learning and collecting extremely detailed histories] began to affect even distinguished minds. The revolutions of 1848 had wrenched Theodor Mommsen from the collecting of Latin inscriptions to plunge him into the struggles of liberal journalism. Fresh from this experience in the actual making of history, he published in 1854-1856 the opening volumes of a brilliantly narrated History of Rome interpreting the downfall of the Republic in vividly intelligible terms of nineteenth-century political life. The work scandalized academic historians by the modernity of its phrasing, its partisanship for Caesar, and its lack of references and footnotes. In its defense, the author wrote: “I wanted to bring down the ancients from the fantastic pedestal on which they appear, into the real world. . . . Those who have lived through historical events, as I have, begin to see that history is neither written nor made without love and hate.” But after the Prussian Academy had invited him to Berlin to direct and edit the collection of all extant Latin inscriptions, Mommsen began to regard his masterpiece as a youthful indiscretion. Always convinced that he needed to learn more, he scattered his phenomenal energy over more than a thousand technical publications, and never executed his plan to complete his Roman history with the aid of impeccable information. Even more disintegrating was the effect of a German education on the widely cultured Lord Acton, who read and annotated enormously for a life’s work on the History of Liberty, without writing a line of it, and is remembered chiefly for his planning the Cambridge Modern History, prepared by many historians on the principle of the division of labor. John Morley, who could not be accused of bias against science, lamented in 1878 that history “threatens to degenerate from a broad survey of great periods and movements of human society into vast and countless accumulations of insignificant facts, sterile knowledge, and frivolous antiquarianism.” Looking backward from 1925, the scientific philosopher Whitehead described the widespread results of this professionalization of learning: “In its last twenty years the century closed with one of the dullest stages of thought since the time of the First Crusade. It was an echo of the eighteenth century, lacking Voltaire and the reckless grace of the French aristocrats. The period was efficient, dull, and half hearted. It celebrated the triumph of the professional man.”

As usual, my ailment is perhaps German even in this. The barely bearable and controllable penchant for erudition, to the point where one experiences, in Neff’s words, a «pathological fear of making generalizations that might be contradicted by facts dredged up by rivals with even more limited interests [but more specialised knowledge]». Does one has to choose between proceeding either horizontally or vertically in gaining and producing knowledge? 

 

Swiss & Florentine Democracy, & German Freedom

Letter by John Richard Green to E. A Freeman, November 17, 1871 (in Letters of John Richard Green, ed. Leslie Setphen, 1901, 308-9):

The Piazza at Florence gave me the same thrill that I remember on the Lake of Lucerne:—I am afraid an even more delightful thrill, for after all Swiss democracy is a democracy of institutions, we admire its constitution, its landesgemeinde and the like, but Florentine democracy was a democracy of men. Teutonic freedom is too often a development of man on one side only, the political, while Italian was (I feel all the answer that lies in that ‘‘was’’) a development of the whole man,—political, intellectual, religious, artistic.

What Care?

George Wither (1588-1667), The Shepherd’s Resolution (1619):

                Shall I, wasting in despaire,
                Dye because a woman’s faire?
                Or make pale my cheeks with care
                ‘Cause another’s rosie are?
                Be shee fairer than the day,
                Or the flow’ry meads in May,
                    If she think not well of me,
                    What care I how faire shee be?

                Shall my foolish heart be pin’d
                ‘Cause I see a woman kind?
                Or a well-disposed nature
                Joyned with a lovely feature?
                Be shee meeker, kinder, than
                The Turtle-dove or pelican;
                    If shee be not so to me,
                    What care I how kind she be?

                Shall a woman’s virtues move
                Me to perish for her love?
                Or, her well-deservings knowne,
                Make me quite forget mine own?
                Be shee with that goodnesse blest
                Which may merit name of Best;
                    If she be not such to me,
                    What care I how good she be?

                ‘Cause her fortune seems too high,
                Shall I play the foole and dye?
                Those that beare a noble minde,
                Where they want of riches find,
                Thinke what with them they would doe
                That without them dare to woe;
                    And, unless that minde I see,
                    What care I how great she be?

                Great or good, or kind or faire,
                I will ne’er the more dispaire;
                If she love me, this beleeve:
                I will die ere she shall grieve.
                If she slight me when I wooe,
                I can scorne and let her goe;
                    If she be not fit for me,
                    What care I for whom she be?

Taking A Foothold Outside Your Time

Lord Acton, vol. 3 of Selected Writings: Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics/ Fund, 1988), 620:

Resist your time—take a foothold outside it—see other times and ask yourself whether the time of our ancestors is fit for us.

Knowledge of history means choice of ancestors. 

Clear, Pure, & Bright

Ramon Llull, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, tr. E. Allison Peers (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1923), 37 & 39:

The paths of love are both long and short. For love is clear, pure and bright, subtle yet simple, strong, diligent, brilliant, and abounding both in fresh thoughts and in old memories. 

They asked the Lover: ‘What are the fruits of love?’ And the Lover made answer: ‘They are pleasures, thoughts, desires, trials, perils, torments, sighs and griefs. And without these fruits Love’s servants have no part in her.’ [...]

The Lover cried aloud to all men, and said: ‘Love bids you ever love: in walking and sitting, in sleeping and waking, in buying and selling, in weeping and laughing, in speech and in silence, in gain and in loss—in short, in whatsoever you do, for this is Love’s commandment.’ 

Cares, Sighs, & Tears

Ramon Llull, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, tr. E. Allison Peers (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1923), 23-24:

Long and perilous are the paths by which the Lover seeks his Beloved. They are peopled by cares, sighs and tears. They are lit up by love. 

Many Lovers came together to love One only, their Beloved, who made them all to abound in love. And each declared his Beloved perfection, and his thoughts of Him were very pleasant, making him to suffer pain which brought delight.

The Lover wept and said: ‘How long shall it be till the darkness of the world is past, that the mad rush of men towards hell may cease? When comes the hour in which water, that flows downwards, shall change its nature and mount upwards? When shall the innocent be more in number than the guilty? Ah! When shall the Lover with joy lay down his life for the Beloved? And when shall the Beloved see the Lover grow faint for love of Him?’

Said the Lover to the Beloved: ‘Thou that filled the sun with splendour, fill my heart with love.’ And the Beloved answered: ‘Wert thou not filled with love, thine eyes had not shed those tears, nor hadst thou come to this place to see thy Beloved.’

The Beloved made trial of His Lover to see if his love for Him were perfect, and He asked him how the presence of the Beloved differed from His absence. The Lover answered: ‘As knowledge and remembrance differ from ignorance and oblivion.’ 

The Beloved asked the Lover: ‘Hast thou remembrance of anything with which I have rewarded thee, that thou wouldst love Me thus?’ ‘Yea,’ replied the Lover, ‘for I distinguish not between the trials that Thou sendest me and the joys.’

‘Say, O Lover,’ asked the Beloved, ‘if I double thy trials, wilt thou Still be patient?’ ‘Yea,’ answered the Lover, ‘so that Thou double also my love.’

Said the Beloved to the Lover: ‘Knowest thou yet what love meaneth?’ The Lover replied: ‘If I knew not the meaning of love, I should know the meaning of labour, grief and sorrow.’