Grief Not Cured

Abraham Cowley, Constantia and Philetus, ll. 317-8:

        Hee who acquainteth others with his moane,
        Addes to his friend's grief, but not cures his owne.

Nought But Death

Abraham Cowley, Constantia and Philetus (written around 1630, when Cowley was only twelve years old), ll. 445-476:

        I trust (deare soule) my absence cannot move
        You to forget, or doubt my ardent love;
        For were there any meanes to see you, I
        Would runne through Death and all the miserie
        Fate could inflict, that so the world might say,
        In Life and Death I lov’d CONSTANTIA.                    450
        Then let not (dearest sweet) our absence sever
        Our loves, let them ioyn’d closely still together,
        Give warmth to one another, till there rise
        From all our labours, and our industries
        The long-expected fruits; have patience (Sweet)
        There's no man whom the Summer pleasures greet
        Before he tast the Winter; none can say,
        Ere Night was gone, he saw the rising Day.
            So when wee once have wasted Sorrowe’s night,
            The sunne of Comfort then, shall give us light.       460
                                                                                PHILETUS.

        Your absence (Sir) though it be long, yet I
        Neither forget, nor doubt your Constancie.
        Nor, need you feare, that I should yeeld vnto
        Another, what to your true Love is due.                       470
        My heart is yours, it is not in my claime,
        Nor have I power to give it away againe.
        There's nought but Death can part our soules, no time
        Or angry Friends, shall make my Love decline:
            But for the harvest of our hopes I’le stay,
            Vnlesse Death cut it, ere’t be ripe, away.
                                                                            CONSTANTIA.

The Process Of Projection

Carl G. Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, tr. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2nd edt., 1969 = Bollingen Series XX., The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 8), IV., General Aspects of Dream Psychology, On the Nature of Dreams, 264-266:

Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naïvely suppose that people are as we imagine them to be. In this latter case, unfortunately, there is no scientific test that would prove the discrepancy between perception and reality. Although the possibility of gross deception is infinitely greater here than in our perception of the physical world, we still go on naïvely projecting our own psychology into our fellow human beings. In this way everyone creates for himself a series of more or less imaginary relationships based essentially on projection. Among neurotics there are even cases where fantasy projections provide the sole means of human relationship. A person whom I perceive mainly through my projections is an imago or, alternatively, a carrier of imagos or symbols. All the contents of our unconscious are constantly being projected into our surroundings, and it is only by recognizing certain properties of the objects as projections or imagos that we are able to distinguish them from the real properties of the objects. But if we are not aware that a property of the object is a projection, we cannot do anything else but be naïvely convinced that it really does belong to the object. All human relationships swarm with these projections; anyone who cannot see this in his personal life need only have his attention drawn to the psychology of the press in wartime. Cum grano salis, we always see our own unavowed mistakes in our opponent. Excellent examples of this are to be found in all personal quarrels. Unless we are possessed of an unusual degree of self-awareness we shall never see through our projections but must always succumb to them, because the mind in its natural state presupposes the existence of such projections. It is the natural and given thing for unconscious contents to be projected. . . . So long as the libido can use these projections as agreeable and convenient bridges to the world, they will alleviate life in a positive way. But as soon as the libido wants to strike out on another path, and for this purpose begins running back along the previous bridges of projection, they will work as the greatest hindrances it is possible to imagine, for they effectively prevent any real detachment from the former object. We then witness the characteristic phenomenon of a person trying to devalue the former object as much as possible in order to detach his libido from it. But as the previous identity is due to the projection of subjective contents, complete and final detachment can only take place when the imago that mirrored itself in the object is restored, together with its meaning, to the subject. This restoration is achieved through conscious recognition of the projected content, that is, by acknowledging the “symbolic value” of the object.

. . . We understand another person in the same way as we understand, or seek to understand, ourselves. What we do not understand in ourselves we do not understand in the other person either. So there is plenty to ensure that his image will be for the most part subjective. As we know, even an intimate friendship is no guarantee of objective knowledge.

Being Transported

Roger Scruton, Why Beauty Matters, 2009:

Ornaments liberate us from the tyranny of the useful, and satisfy our need for harmony; in a strange way, they make us feel at home; they remind us that we have more than practical needs; we are not just governed by animal appetites, like eating and sleeping; we have spiritual and moral needs, too, and if those needs go unsatisfied, so do we. We all know what it is like, even in the everyday world, suddenly to be transported by the things we see, from the ordinary world of our appetites to the illuminated sphere of contemplation. A flash of sunlight, a remembered melody, the face of someone loved: these dawn on us in the most distracted moments, and suddenly life is worthwhile. These are timeless moments, in which we feel the presence of another higher world.

Silence, Solitude, Grief, Love, & Thought

Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal Intime, from August 28, 1875 (tr. Mrs. Humphrey Ward):

I know that the world, which is only eager to silence you when you do speak, is angry with your silence as soon as its own action has killed in you the wish to speak. . . . Premature despair and the deepest discouragement have been my constant portion. Incapable of taking any interest in my talents for my own sake, I let everything slip as soon as the hope of being loved for them and by them had forsaken me. A hermit against my will, I have not even found peace in solitude, because my inmost conscience has not been any better satisfied than my heart.

Does not all this make up a melancholy lot, a barren failure of a life? What use have I made of my gifts, of my special circumstances, of my half-century of existence? What have I paid back to my country? Are all the documents I have produced, taken together, my correspondence, these thousands of journal pages, my lectures, my articles, my poems, my notes of different kinds, anything better than withered leaves? To whom and to what have I been useful? Will my name survive me a single day, and will it ever mean anything to anybody? A life of no account! A great many comings and goings, a great many scrawls—for nothing. When all is added up—nothing! And worst of all, it has not been a life used up in the service of some adored object, or sacrificed to any future hope. Its sufferings will have been vain, its renunciations useless, its sacrifices gratuitous, its dreariness without reward. . . . No, I am wrong; it will have had its secret treasure, its sweetness, its reward. It will have inspired a few affections of great price; it will have given joy to a few souls; its hidden existence will have had some value. Besides, if in itself it has been nothing, it has understood much. If it has not been in harmony with the great order, still it has loved it. If it has missed happiness and duty, it has at least felt its own nothingness, and implored its pardon.

. . . What I have found difficult is to keep up a prejudice in favor of any form, nationality, or individuality whatever. Hence my indifference to my own person, my own usefulness, interest, or opinions of the moment. What does it all matter? Omnis determinatio est negatio. Grief localizes us, love particularizes us, but thought delivers us from personality. . . . To be a man is a poor thing, to be a man is well; to be the man—man in essence and in principle—that alone is to be desired.

That Nothing Is Forgotten; On Our Thoughts; On One's Journal; & On Virtues & Vices

Henry David Thoreau, Journal, entires taken from 1841, Feb. 8:

All we have experienced is so much gone within us, and there lies. It is the company we keep. One day, in health or sickness, it will come out and be remembered. Neither body nor soul forgets anything. The twig always remembers the wind that shook it, and the stone the cuff it received. Ask the old tree and the sand.

As time is measured by the lapse of ideas, we may grow of our own force, as the mussel adds new circles to its shell. My thoughts secrete the lime. We may grow old with the vigor of youth. Are we not always in youth so long as we face heaven. We may always live in the morning of our days. To him who seeks early, the sun never gets over the edge of the hill, but his rays fall slanting forever. His wise sayings are like the chopping of wood and crowing of cocks in the dawn.

My Journal is that of me which would else spill over and run to waste, gleanings from the field which in action I reap. I must not live for it, but in it for the gods. They are my correspondent, to whom daily I send off this sheet postpaid. I am clerk in their counting-room, and at evening transfer the account from day-book to ledger. It is as a leaf which hangs over my head in the path. I bend the twig and write my prayers on it; then letting it go, the bough springs up and shows the scrawl to heaven. As if it were not kept shut in my desk, but were as public a leaf as any in nature. It is papyrus by the riverside; it is vellum in the pastures; it is parchment on the hills. I find it everywhere as free as the leaves which troop along the lanes in autumn. The crow, the goose, the eagle carry my quill, and the wind blows the leaves as far as I go. Or, if my imagination does not soar, but gropes in slime and mud, then I write with a reed.

. . . Every time we teach our virtue a new nobleness, we teach our vice a new cunning. When we sharpen the blade it will stab better as well as whittle. The scythe that cuts will cut our legs. We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice. And when we cut a clear descending blow, our vice on tother edge rips up the work. Where is the skillful swordsman that can draw his blade straight back out of the wound?

. . . Go towards the sun and your shadow will fall behind you.

Goethe On Johann von Zimmermann

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), 15th bk., 572-576:

Zimmermann was also for a time our guest. He was tall and powerfully built; of a vehement nature open to every impulse; yet he had his outward bearing and manners perfectly under control, so that in society he appeared as a skilful physician and polished man of the world. It was only in his writings and amongst his most confidential friends, that he gave free course to his untamed inward character. His conversation was varied and highly instructive, and for one who could pardon his keen sensitiveness to whatever grated on his own personal feelings and merits, no more desirable companion could be found. For myself, as what is called vanity never disturbed me, and I in return often presumed to be vain also—that is, did not hesitate to enlarge upon whatever in myself pleased me, I got on with him capitally. We mutually tolerated and scolded each other, and, as he showed himself thoroughly open and communicative, I learned from him a great deal in a short time.

 To judge such a man with the indulgence of gratitude, nay on principle, I cannot say that he was vain. We Germans misuse the word "vain" (citel), but too often. In a strict sense, it carries with it the idea of emptiness, and we properly designate by it only the man who cannot conceal his joy at his Nothing, his contentment with a hollow phantom. With Zimmermann it was exactly the reverse; he had great deserts, and no inward satisfaction. The man who cannot enjoy his own natural gifts in silence, and find his reward in the exercise of them, but must wait and hope for their recognition and appreciation by others, will generally find himself but badly off, because it is but too well known a fact that men are very niggard of their applause; that they rather love to mingle alloy with praise, and where it can in any degree be done, to turn it into blame. Whoever comes before the public without being prepared for this, will meet with nothing but vexation; since, even if he does not overestimate his own production, it still has for him an unlimited value, while the reception it meets with in the world, is in every case qualified. Besides, a certain susceptibility is necessary for praise and applause, as for every other pleasure. Let this be applied to Zimmermann, and it will be acknowledged in his case too; that no one can obtain what he does not bring with him.

If this apology cannot be allowed, still less shall we be able to justify another fault of this remarkable man, because it disturbed and even destroyed the happiness of others. I mean his conduct towards his children. A daughter, who travelled with him, stayed with us while he visited the neighbouring scenes. She might be about sixteen years old, slender and well formed, but without attractiveness; her regular features would have been agreeable, if there had appeared in them a trace of animation, but she was always as quiet as a statue; she spoke seldom, and in the presence of her father never. But she had scarcely spent a few days alone with my mother, receiving the cheerful and affectionate attentions of this sympathizing woman, than she threw herself at her feet with an opened heart, and with a thousand tears, begged to be allowed to remain with her. With the most passionate language she declared that she would remain in the house as a servant, as a slave all her life, rather than go back with her father, of whose severity and tyranny no one could form an idea. Her brother had gone mad under his treatment; she had hitherto borne it though with difficulty, because she had believed that it was the same, or not much better, in every family, but now that she had experienced such a loving, mild and considerate treatment, her situation at home had become to her a perfect hell. My mother was greatly moved as she related to me this passionate effusion, and indeed, she went so far in her sympathy, as to give me pretty clearly to understand, that she would be content to keep the girl in the house, if I would make up my mind to marry her. If she were an orphan, I replied, I might think and talk it over; but God keep me from a father-in-law who is such a father! My mother took great pains with the poor girl, but this made her only the more unhappy. At last an expedient was found, by putting her to a boarding-school. Her life, I should observe in passing, was not a very long one.

I should hardly mention this culpable peculiarity of a man of such great deserts, if it had not already become a matter of public notoriety, and especially had not the unfortunate hypochondria, with which, in his last hours, he tortured himself and others, been commonly talked of. For that severity towards his children was nothing less than hypochondria, a partial insanity, a continuous moral murder, which, after making his children its victims, was at last directed against himself. We must also remember that though apparently in such good health, he was a great sufferer even in his best years;—that an incurable disease troubled the skilful physician who had relieved, and still gave ease to so many of the afflicted. Yes, this distinguished man, with all his outward reputation, fame, honour, rank, and wealth, led the saddest life, and whoever will take the pains to learn more about it from existing publications, will not condemn but pity him.

If it is now expected that I shall give a more precise account of the effect which this distinguished man had upon me, I must once more recall the general features of that period. The epoch in which we were living might be called an epoch of high requisitions, for every one demanded of himself and of others what no mortal had hitherto accomplished. On chosen spirits who could think and feel, a light had arisen, which enabled them to see that an immediate, original understanding of nature, and a course of action based upon it, was both the best thing a man could desire, and also not difficult to attain. Experience thus once more became the universal watchword, and every one opened his eyes as wide as he could. Physicians, especially, had a most pressing call to labour to this end, and the best opportunity for finding it. Upon them a star shone out of antiquity, which could serve as an example of all that was to be desired. The writings which had come down to us under the name of Hippocrates, furnished a model of the way in which a man should both observe the world and relate what he had seen, without mixing up himself with it. But no one considered that we cannot see like the Greeks, and that we shall never become such poets, sculptors, and physicians as they were. Even granted that we could learn from them, still the results of experience already gone through, were almost beyond number, and besides were not always of the clearest kind; moreover had too often been made to accord with preconceived opinions. All these were to be mastered, discriminated, and sifted. This also, was an immense demand. Then again it was required that each observer, in his personal sphere and labours, should acquaint himself with the true, healthy nature, as if she were now for the first time noticed, and attended, and thus only what was genuine and real was to be learned. But as, in general, learning can never exist without the accompaniment of a universal smattering and a universal pedantry, nor the practice of any profession without empiricism and charlatanry, so there sprung up a violent conflict, the purpose of which was to guard use from abuse, and place the kernel high above the shell in men's estimation. In the execution of this design, it was perceived that the shortest way of getting out of the affair, was to call in the aid of genius, whose magic gifts could settle the strife, and accomplish what was required. Meanwhile, however, the understanding meddled with the matter; all it alleged must be reduced to clear notions, and exhibited in a logical form, that every prejudice might be put aside, and all superstition destroyed. And since the achievements of some extraordinary men, such as Boerhaave and Haller, were actually incredible, people thought themselves justified in demanding even still more from their pupils and successors. It was maintained that the path was opened, forgetting that in earthly things a path can very rarely be spoken of; for, as the water that is dislodged by a ship, instantly flows in again behind it, so by the law of its nature, when eminent spirits have once driven error aside, and made a place for themselves, it very quickly closes upon them again.

But of this the ardent Zimmermann could form no idea whatever; he would not admit that absurdity did in fact fill up the world. Impatient, even to madness, he rushed to attack everything that he saw and believed to be wrong. It was all the same to him whether he was fighting with a nurse or with Paracelsus, with a quack, or a chemist. His blows fell alike heavily in either case, and when he had worked himself out of breath, he was greatly astonished to see the heads of this hydra, which he thought he had trodden under foot, springing up all fresh again, and showing him their teeth from innumerable jaws.

Every one who reads his writings, especially his clever work «On Experience,» will perceive more distinctly than I can express them, the subjects of discussion between this excellent man and myself. His influence over me, was the more powerful, as he was twenty years my senior. Having a high reputation as a physician, he was chiefly employed among the upper classes, and the corruption of the times, caused by effeminacy and excess, was a constant theme of conversation with him. Thus his medical discourses, like those of the philosophers and my poetical friends, drove me again back to nature. In his vehement passion for improvement I could not fully participate; on the contrary, after we separated, I instantly drew back into my own proper calling, and endeavoured to employ the gifts nature had bestowed upon me, with moderate exertion, and by good-natured opposition to what I disapproved of, to gain a standing for myself, in perfect indifference how far my influence might reach or whither it might lead me.

On Solitude; Isolating Oneself From Mankind; True Content; Egoism; Truly Great And Healthy Men; Morbidness & Human Weakness; Misanthropy; & Society

William Rounseville Alger, The Solitudes of Nature and of Man; or, The Loneliness of Human Life (Boston, Roberts Brothers, 1867), 122-24, 126: (emphasis mine):

The man who separates himself from mankind to nourish dislike or contempt for them, has in him a morbid element which must make woe. True content, a life of divine delight, cannot be attained through a sense of superiority secured by thrusting others down; but only through one secured by lifting ourselves up, by communing with the great principles of morality, contemplating the conditions of universal good, laying hold of the will of God. Whoso would climb over a staircase of subjected men into a lonely happiness, will find it misery when he arrives. To be really happy one must love and wish to elevate men, not despise and wish to rule them. There is nothing in which the blindness and deceit of self-love is more deeply revealed than in the supposition with which misanthropic recluses frequently flatter themselves, of their complete detachment from other men, their lofty freedom. Spatial separation is not spiritual independence. Of all men the man-hater is the one who is fastened to his fellow-men by the closest and the most degrading bond. Misanthropy, as a dominant characteristic, if thoroughly tracked and analyzed, will be found almost always to be the revenge we take on mankind for fancied wrongs it has inflicted on us, especially for its failure to appreciate us and admire us according to our fancied deserts. The powerful and savagely alienated Arthur Schopenhauer, who said that, in order to despise men as they deserved, it was necessary not to hate them, was embittered, almost infuriated, by disappointment in not obtaining the notice he thought he merited. He came daily from his sullen retreat to dine at a great public table where he could display his extraordinary conversational powers. He eagerly gathered every scrap of praise that fell from the press, and fed on it with desperate hunger. He sat in his hotel at Frankfort, in this age of newspapers and telegraphs, a sublimer Diogenes, the whole earth his tub. An apathetic carelessness for men shows that we really despise them, but an angry and restless resentment towards them betrays how great a place they occupy in our hearts. Diogenes and Alcibiades were equally dependent on public attention; the one to feel the enjoyment of his pride and scorn intensified by the reaction of hate and admiration he called forth; the other to feel the similar fruition of his vanity and sympathy. . . . The greatest egotists are the most fond both of retirement and publicity. There they lave their wounds with the anodyne of self-love; here they display their claims to admiration. The truly great and healthy man is not dependent on either, but draws blessings out of both,—resolve, inspiration, consecration, sanity. In both he pleases himself by improving every possibility of indulging in sentiments of respect and affection towards his race.

The great danger of the courters of solitude is the vice of pampering a conviction and feeling of their own worth by dwelling on the ignobleness of other men. They are tempted to make the meanness and wretchedness of the world foils to set off their own exceptional magnanimity. They need especially to guard themselves against this fallacy by laying bare to their own eyes the occult operations of pride and vanity. An efficacious antidote for their disease is a clear perception of the humbling truth of the case, of the ignoble cause of the disease. For it is unquestionably true that the man who despises the world, and loathes mankind, is usually one who cannot enjoy the boons of the world, or has been disappointed of obtaining from his fellows the love and honor he coveted. He then strives to console himself for the prizes he cannot pluck, by industriously cultivating the idea of their contemptibleness. Rousseau demanded more from men than they could give him. His brain and heart were pitched too high; with the fine intensity of their tones the cold and coarse souls of common men made painful discords. Instead of wisely seeing the truth, and nobly renouncing his excessive exactions, he turned against the world and labored with misanthropic materials to build up his overweening self-love. Of course he was not conscious of this himself. It was a disease, and, fleeing from all antidotes, it fed in solitude; whence he looked abroad and fancied that he saw his contemporaries leagued in a great plot against him.

. . . Thousands have been impelled to solitude by resentment,—as the hermit confessed to Imlac he was,—where one has been led to it by devotion. The true improvement of our lonely hours is not to cherish feelings of superiority to our neighbors, but to make us really superior by a greater advancement in the knowledge of truth, the practice of virtue, communion with the grandeurs of nature, and absorption in the mysteries of God. He who is continually exercising scorn towards the pleasures of society and the prizes of the world, is one who has failed in the experiment of life and been soured by his failure. The truly successful man appreciates these goods at their genuine value,—sees that in their place they have sweetness and worth, but knows that there are other prizes of infinitely higher rank, and is so content with his possession and pursuit of these latter as to have no inclination to complain of the deceitfulness and vileness of the former. To dwell alone is an evil when we use our solitude to cherish an odious idea of our race, and a disgust for the natural attractions of life. It should be improved, not negatively for dislike and alienation, but positively to cultivate a more earnest love for higher mental pursuits, choicer spiritual fruitions, than the average community about us are wonted to. Scorn for man, disgust for the world, is no sign of strength, loftiness, or victory, but rather a sign of weakness, defeat, and misery. “The great error of Napoleon was a continued obtrusion on mankind of his want of all community of feeling for or with them.” He deceived himself in fancying his ruling feelings unlike in kind to those of the bulk of men; they were the same in sort, only superior in scale and tenacity, and in the greater stage on which they were displayed.

The Certainty Of Being Alone

Hippolyte Taine, A Tour Through the Pyrenees, tr. J. Safford Fiske (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1875), 149-51:

This valley is solitary and out of the world; it is without culture; no tourists, not even herdsmen are to be found; three or four cows, perhaps, are there, busily cropping the herbage. Other gorges at the sides of the road and in the mountain of Gourzy are still wilder. There the faint trace of an ancient pathway may with difficulty be made out. Can anything be sweeter than the certainty of being alone? In any widely known spot, you are in constant dread of an incursion of tourists; the hallooing of guides, the loud-voiced admiration, the bustle, whether of fastening horses, or of unpacking provisions, or of airing opinions, all disturb the budding sensation; civilization recovers its hold upon you. But here, what security and what silence! nothing that recalls man; the landscape is just what it has been these six thousand years: the grass grows useless and free as on the first day; no birds among the branches; only now and then may be heard the far-off cry of a soaring hawk. Here and there the face of a huge, projecting rock patches with a dark shade the uniform plane of the trees: it is a virgin wilderness in its severe beauty. The soul fancies that it recognizes unknown friends of long ago; the forms and colors are in secret harmony with it; when it finds these pure, and that it enjoys them unmixed with outside thought, it feels that it is entering into its inmost and calmest depth—a sensation so simple, after the tumult of our ordinary thoughts, is like the gentle murmur of an Æolian harp after the hubbub of a ball.

Life's Endless Toil

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Day is Done (composed in 1844, and pub. in 1845 as an intro. to a compiled volume of lyrics Longfellow himself did; it was prefixed to a collection he titled The Waif):

                The day is done, and the darkness
                      Falls from the wings of Night,
                As a feather is wafted downward
                      From an eagle in his flight.

                I see the lights of the village
                      Gleam through the rain and the mist,
                And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me
                      That my soul cannot resist:

                A feeling of sadness and longing,
                      That is not akin to pain,
                And resembles sorrow only
                      As the mist resembles the rain.

                Come, read to me some poem,
                      Some simple and heartfelt lay,
                That shall soothe this restless feeling,
                      And banish the thoughts of day.

                Not from the grand old masters,
                      Not from the bards sublime,
                Whose distant footsteps echo
                      Through the corridors of Time.

                For, like strains of martial music,
                      Their mighty thoughts suggest
                Life's endless toil and endeavour;
                      And to-night I long for rest.

                Read from some humbler poet,
                      Whose songs gushed from his heart,
                As showers from the clouds of summer,
                      Or tears from the eyelids start;

                Who, through long days of labour,
                      And nights devoid of ease,
                Still heard in his soul the music
                      Of wonderful melodies.

                Such songs have power to quiet
                      The restless pulse of care,
                And come like the benediction
                      That follows after prayer.

                Then read from the treasured volume
                      The poem of thy choice,
                And lend to the rhyme of the poet
                      The beauty of thy voice.

                And the night shall be filled with music,
                      And the cares, that infest the day,
                Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
                      And as silently steal away.

No Letter

Aphra Behn (1640-1689), The Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister, pt. I., 1st letter to Sylvia:

                    I have lived a whole Day
                    and yet no Letter from Sylvia.

Weariness

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Weariness:

 

Mine eyes are weary of surveying

The fairest things, too soon decaying;

Mine ears are weary of receiving

The kindest words—ah, past believing!

Weary my hope, of ebb and flow;

Weary my pulse, of tunes of woe:

My trusting heart is weariest!

I would—I would, I were at rest!

For me, can earth refuse to fade?

For me, can words be faithful made?

Will my embitter’d hope be sweet?

My pulse forego the human beat?

No! Darkness must consume mine eye—

Silence, mine ear—hope cease—pulse die—

And o’er mine heart a stone be press’d—

Or vain this,—‘Would I were at rest!’

There is a land of rest deferr’d:

Nor eye hath seen, nor ear hath heard,

Nor Hope hath trod the precinct o’er;

For hope beheld is hope no more!

There, human pulse forgets its tone—

There, hearts may know as they are known!

Oh, for dove’s wings, thou dwelling blest.

To fly to thee, and be at rest!

The Dark Of Night

Anna Wertz, “The Genesis of Hans Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2003), 12:

. . . while Blumenberg’s work continued to earn him growing public attention, the man himself became increasingly harder to find. He spent a good deal of his life in partial hiding, preferring to work in the dark of night and sometimes spending long stretches of time without seeing anyone, let alone giving interviews—the last photograph taken of him is from 1960.

That The Modern World Is Both Christian And Un-Christian

Karl Löwith, Meaning In History: Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1949), 200-2:

The communities of modern times are neither religiously pagan nor Christian; they are decidedly secular, i.e., secularized, and only so far, by derivation, are they still Christian. The old churches of modern cities are no longer the outstanding centers of the communal life but strange islands immersed in the business centers. In our modern world everything is more or less Christian and, at the same time, un-Christian: the first if measured by the standard of classical antiquity, the second if measured by the standard of genuine Christianity. The modern world is as Christian as it is un-Christian because it is the outcome of an age-long process of secularization. Compared with the pagan world before Christ, which was in all its aspects religious and superstitious and therefore a suitable object of Christian apologetics, our modern world is worldly and irreligious and yet dependent on the Christian creed from which it is emancipated. The ambition to be ‘‘creative’’ and the striving for a future fulfilment reflect the faith in creation and consummation, even when these are held to be irrelevant myths.

Radical atheism, too, which is, however, as rare as radical faith, is possible only within a Christian tradition; for the feeling that the world is thoroughly godless and godforsaken presupposes the belief in a transcendent Creator-God who cares for his creatures. To the Christian apologists, the pagans were atheists not because they did not believe in any divinity at all but because they were ‘‘polytheistic atheists.’’ To the pagans the Christians were atheists because they believed in only one single God transcending the universe and the city-state, that is, everything that the ancients had consecrated. The fact that the Christian God has ruled out all the popular gods and protecting spirits of the pagans created the possibility of a radical atheism; for, if the Christian belief in a God who is as distinct from the world as a creator is from his creatures and yet is the source of every being is once discarded, the world becomes emancipated and profane as it never was for the pagans. If the universe is neither eternal and divine, as it was for the ancients, nor transient but created, as it is for the Christians, there remains only one aspect: the sheer contingency of its mere ‘‘existence.’’ The post-Christian world is a creation without creator, and a saeculum (in the ecclesiastical sense of this term) turned secular for lack of religious perspective.

Tocqueville On The Indians, The Americans, & The Virtues & Vices Of The Latter

Alexis de Tocqueville, “A Fortnight in the Wilderness, 1831,” in Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, the translator unnamed (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862), 139-140, 141-3, 145-6, 149, 152-154:

One of the things we were most curious about on arriving in America, was to visit the extreme limits of European civilization; and, if we had time, even some of the Indian tribes which have preferred flying to the wildest deserts to accommodating themselves to what the white man calls the enjoyments of social life. . . .  «And what has become of the Indians?» I asked. «The Indians,» replied our host, «are gone I know not whither, beyond the great lakes; the race is becoming extinct; they are not made for civilization—it kills them.»

Man becomes accustomed to everything,—to death on the battle-field, to death in the hospital, to kill and to suffer. Use familiarizes all scenes. An ancient people, the first and legitimate masters of the American continent, melts away every day from the earth, as snow before the sun, and disappears. Another race rises up in its place with still more astonishing rapidity; before this race the forests fall, the marshes dry up; vast rivers, and lakes extensive as seas, in vain oppose its triumph and progress. Deserts become villages—villages towns. The American who daily witnesses these marvels sees nothing surprising in them. This wonderful destruction, and still more astonishing progress, seem to him to be the ordinary course of events. He considers them as laws of nature. [...]

These Indians were short; their limbs, so far as could be seen under their clothes, were meagre; their skins, instead of being, as is generally supposed, a red copper color, were dark, almost like those of mulattoes. Their black and shining hair fell straight down their necks and shoulders. Their mouths were in general immoderately large. The mean and malicious expression of their countenances showed the depth of depravity which a long abuse of the benefits of civilization alone can give. One would have taken them for men from the dregs of our great European towns; and yet they were savages. With the vices which they had caught from us was mixed a rude barbarism, which made them a hundred times more revolting. These Indians were unarmed; they wore European clothes, but put on in a different way from ours. It was evident that they were unaccustomed to them, and that they felt imprisoned in their folds. To the ornaments of Europe they joined barbarous finery, feathers, enormous ear-rings, and necklaces of shells. Their movements were quick and irregular; their voices sharp and discordant, their looks wild and restless. At first sight they might have been taken for wild animals, tamed to resemble men, but still brutal. These feeble and degraded creatures belonged, however, to one of the most celebrated tribes of ancient America. We had before us, and it is a sad fact, the last remains of the famous confederation of the Iroquois, whose manly sense was as renowned as their courage, and who long held the balance between the two greatest European nations.

Still it would be wrong to judge of the Indian race from this imperfect specimen; the cuttings of a wild tree which has grown up in the mud of our towns. We ourselves made this mistake, and afterwards had to correct it. [...]

When we returned to the town we talked to several people of the young Indian. We spoke of his [i.e., of an Indian's] imminent danger; we offered to pay his expenses in an inn. It was useless. We could persuade no one to care about him. Some said: «These men are accustomed to drink to excess, and to sleep on the ground; and they do not die of such accidents.» Others owned that the Indian probably would die; but evidently there rose to their lips the half-expressed thought: What is the life of an Indian? Such was the general feeling. In this society, so proud of its morality and philanthropy, one meets with complete insensibility, with a cold, uncompassionating egotism, when the aborigines are in question. The inhabitants of the United States do not hunt the Indians with cries and horns as the Spaniards used to do in Mexico. But an unpitying instinct inspires here as elsewhere the European race.

How often in the course of our travels we met with honest citizens, who said to us, as they sat quietly in the evening at their firesides, «every day the number of the Indians is diminishing; it is not that we often make war upon them, but the brandy which we sell to them at a low price, carries off every year more than our arms could destroy. This western world belongs to us,» they added; «God, by refusing to these first inhabitants the power of civilization, has predestined them to destruction. The true owners of this continent are those who know how to turn its resources to account.»

Satisfied by this reasoning, the American goes to church to hear a minister of the gospel repeat to him that all men are brothers, and that the Almighty, who made them all on the same model, has imposed on all the duty of helping each other. [...]

In America, more even than in Europe, there is but one society, whether rich or poor, high or low, commercial or agricultural; it is everywhere composed of the same elements. It has all been raised or reduced to the same level of civilization. The man whom you left in the streets of New York you find again in the solitude of the Far West; the same dress, the same tone of mind, the same language, the same habits, the same amusements. No rustic simplicity, nothing characteristic of the wilderness, nothing even like our villages. This peculiarity may be easily explained. The portions of territory first and most fully peopled have reached a high degree of civilization. Education has been prodigally bestowed; the spirit of equality has tinged with singular uniformity the domestic habits. Now, it is remarkable that the men thus educated are those who every year migrate to the desert. In Europe a man lives and dies where he was born. In America you do not see the representatives of a race grown and multiplied in retirement, having long lived unknown to the world, and left to its own efforts. The inhabitants of an isolated region arrived yesterday, bringing with them the habits, ideas, and wants of civilization. They adopt only so much of savage life as is absolutely forced upon them; hence you see the strangest contrasts. You step from the wilderness into the streets of a city, from the wildest scenes to the most smiling pictures of civilized life. If night does not surprise you and force you to sleep under a tree, you may reach a village where you will find everything; even French fashions, and caricatures from Paris. The shops of Buffalo or Detroit are as well supplied with all these things as those of New York. The looms of Lyons work for both alike. You leave the high road, you plunge into paths scarcely marked out; you come at length upon a ploughed field, a hut built of rough logs, lighted by a single narrow window; you think that you have at last reached the abode of an American peasant: you are wrong. You enter this hut which looks the abode of misery; the master is dressed as you are; his language is that of the towns. On his rude table are books and newspapers; he takes you hurriedly aside to be informed of what is going on in Europe, and asks you what has most struck you in his country. He will trace on paper for you the plan of a campaign in Belgium, and will teach you gravely what remains to be done for the prosperity of France. You might take him for a rich proprietor, come to spend a few nights in a shootingbox. And, in fact, the log-hut is only a halting-place for the American, a temporary submission to necessity. As soon as the surrounding fields are thoroughly cultivated, and their owner has time to occupy himself with superfluities, a more spacious and suitable dwelling will succeed the log-hut, and become the home of a large family of children, who, in their turn, will some day build themselves a dwelling in the wilderness.

To cross almost impenetrable forests; to swim deep rivers; to encounter pestilential marshes; to sleep exposed to the damp air of the woods;—these are efforts which an American easily conceives, if a dollar is to be gained by them—that is the point. But that a man should take such journeys from curiosity, he cannot understand. Besides, dwelling in a wilderness, he prizes only man's work. He sends you to visit a road, a bridge, a pretty village; but that you should admire large trees, or wild scenery, is to him incomprehensible. We could make no one understand us.

[...] We were beside ourselves with joy at the prospect of at length finding a place which the torrent of European civilization had not yet invaded.

The appearance of the master of this dwelling is as remarkable as his abode. His sharp muscles and slender limbs, show him at the first glance to be a native of New England; his make indicates that he was not born in the desert. His first years were passed in the heart of an intellectual and cultivated society. Choice impelled him to the toilsome and savage life for which he did not seem intended. But if his physical strength seems unequal to his undertaking; on his features, furrowed by care, is seated an expression of practical intelligence, and of cold and persevering energy. His first years were passed in the heart of an intellectual and cultivated society. Choice impelled him to the toilsome and savage life for which he did not seem intended. But if his physical strength seems unequal to his undertaking, on his features, furrowed by care, is seated an expression of practical intelligence, and of cold and persevering energy. His step is slow and measured, his speech deliberate, and his appearance austere. Habit, and still more pride, have given to his countenance a stoical rigidity, which was belied by his conduct. The pioneer despises (it is true) all that most violently agitates the hearts of men; his fortune or his life will never hang on the turn of a die, or the smiles of a woman; but to obtain competence he has braved exile, solitude, and the numberless ills of savage life; he has slept on the bare earth, he has exposed himself to the fever of the woods, and the Indian’s tomahawk. Many years ago he took the first step. He has never gone back; perhaps twenty years hence he will still be going on without desponding or complaining. Can a man capable of such sacrifices be cold and insensible? Is he not influenced by a passion, not of the heart but of the brain, ardent, persevering, and indomitable? His whole energies concentrated in the desire to make his fortune, the emigrant at length succeeds in making for himself an entirely independent existence, into which even his domestic affections are absorbed. He may be said to look on his wife and children only as detached parts of himself. Deprived of habitual intercourse with his equals, he has learnt to take pleasure in solitude. When you appear at the door of his lonely dwelling, the pioneer steps forward to meet you; he holds out his hand in compliance with custom, but his countenance expresses neither kindness nor joy. He speaks only to question you, to gratify his intelligence, not his heart; and as soon as he has obtained from you the news that he wanted to hear he relapses into silence. One would take him for a man who, having been all day wearied by applicants and by the noise of the world, has retired home at night to rest. If you question him in turn, he will give you in a clear manner all the information you require; he will even provide for your wants, and will watch over your safety as long as you are under his roof; but, in all that he does there is so much constraint and dryness; you perceive in him such utter indifference as to the result of your undertakings, that your gratitude cools. Still the settler is hospitable in his own way, but there is nothing genial in his hospitality, because, while he exercises it, he seems to submit to one of the painful necessities of the wilderness; it is to him a duty of his position, not a pleasure. This unknown person is the representative of the race to which belongs the future of the New World; a restless, speculating, adventurous race, that performs coldly feats which are usually the result of passionate enthusiasm; a nation of conquerors, who endure savage life without feeling its peculiar charms, value in civilized life only its material comforts and advantages, and bury themselves in the wilds of America, provided only with an axe and a file of newspapers! A mighty race which, as is the case with all great nations, is governed by one idea, and directs its sole efforts to the acquisition of wealth with a perseverance and contempt for life which might be called heroic, if such a term could be applied to any but virtuous efforts. A migratory race, which neither rivers nor lakes can stop, before which the forest falls and the prairie becomes covered with foliage, and which, having reached the Pacific Ocean, will retrace its steps to disturb and to destroy the social communities which it will have formed and left behind.

Haeckel, Darwin, And The Idiot-Physiognomy

Wilhelm Bölsche, Haeckel: His Life and Work, tr. Joseph McCabe (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906), 146-7:

Darwin was never a handsome man from the æsthetic point of view. When he wanted to sail with Fitz-Roy, it was a very near question whether the splenetic captain would not reject him because he did not like his nose. His forehead had so striking a curve that Lombroso, the expert, could put him down as having «the idiot-physiognomy» in his Genius and Insanity. At the time when he wrote the Origin of Species he had not the patriarchal beard that is inseparable from his image in our minds; he was bald, and his chin clean shaved. The prematurely bent form of the invalid could never have had much effect in such a place, no matter what respect was felt for him. Haeckel, young and handsome, was an embodiment of the mens sana in corpore sano. He rose above the grey heads of science, as the type of the young, fresh, brilliant generation. It was an opponent at this Congress, who sharply attacked the new ideas, that spoke of the «colleague in the freshness of youth» who had brought forward the subject. He brought with him the highest thing that a new idea can associate with: the breath of a new generation, of a youth that greets all new ideas with a smiling courage. Behind this was the thought of Darwin himself, a wave that swept away all dams.

‘‘Progress,’’ Hopelessness, France, And Flaubert

Karl Löwith, Meaning In History: Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1949), 96-97:

It took, however, only a few generations among the most enlightened nations to realize the hopelessness of all scientific progress toward a civilized barbarism. In the midst of frantic progress by means of scientific inventions in the middle of the nineteenth century, a mood of aimlessness and despair cast its first shadow upon Europe’s most advanced minds; for the very progress seemed to proceed toward nothingness. In France this nihilism found its most sophisticated expression in the writings of Flaubert and Baudelaire. Having exposed, in the Temptation of St. Anthony, all sorts of current beliefs and superstitions, Flaubert set about to disentangle and analyze the chaos of our modern, scientific culture. He made a list of human follies, intended as an ironical glorification of all that had passed for truth. The result of these absurd studies was the novel Bouvard et Pécuchet—the story of two Philistines, sincerely striving for their higher education; good-natured men of sense, who had been office clerks. In their happily acquired country seat they ramble through the entire maze of piled-up knowledge, from horticulture, chemistry, and medicine to history, archeology, politics, pedagogy, and philosophy—only to return to their copying, now making extracts from the books which they had perused in vain. The whole work leads to the conclusion that our entire scientific education is inane. Doctrines of age-long standing are expounded and developed in a few lines, then they are disposed of by other doctrines which are arraigned against them and then destroyed in turn with equal precision and passion. Page after page, line after line, some new kind of knowledge turns up; but at once another appears to knock the first one down, and then it, too, topples over, hit by a third. At the end of the unfinished sketch, Pécuchet draws a gloomy picture, Bouvard a rosy one, of the future of European mankind. According to the one, the end of the debased human race, sunk into general depravity, approaches. There are three alternative possibilities: (1) radicalism severs every tie with the past, entailing inhuman despotism; (2) if theistic absolutism is victorious, liberalism, with which mankind has been imbued since the French Revolution, will perish, and a revolutionary change will take place; (3) if the convulsions of 1789 continue, their waves will carry us away, and there will no longer be ideals or religion or morality: “America will conquer the world.” According to the second picture, Europe will be rejuvenated with the aid of Asia, and there will develop undreamed-of techniques of communication, U-boats, and balloons; new sciences will be born, enabling man to place the powers of the universe at the service of civilization and, when the earth is exhausted, to emigrate to other stars. Together with human wants, evil will cease, and philosophy will become religion.

The Dark Ages?

Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, tr. Harriet Martineau (London: George Bell and Sons, 1896), vol. III., 123:

We shall see that the entire spiritual movement of modern times is referrible to that memorable season in human history, which Protestantism is pleased to call the dark ages. . . . It is an exaggeration also to attribute to the Germanic invasions the retardation of intellectual development during the Middle Ages; for the decline was taking place for centuries before the invasions were of any engrossing importance. . . .

Full Of Divinity

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, The System of Economic Contradictions; or, The Philosophy of Poverty, tr. Benjamin R. Tucker (1888), vol. I., Intro., pt. III.:

I need the hypothesis of God to justify my style.

In my ignorance of everything regarding God, the world, the soul, and destiny; forced to proceed like the materialist, — that is, by observation and experience, — and to conclude in the language of the believer, because there is no other; not knowing whether my formulas, theological in spite of me, would be taken literally or figuratively; in this perpetual contemplation of God, man, and things, obliged to submit to the synonymy of all the terms included in the three categories of thought, speech, and action, but wishing to affirm nothing on either one side or the other, — rigorous logic demanded that I should suppose, no more, no less, this unknown that is called God. We are full of Divinity, Jovis omnia plena; our monuments, our traditions, our laws, our ideas, our languages, and our sciences, all are infected by this indelible superstition outside of which we can neither speak nor act, and without which we do not even think.

God's Closet: Solitude

William Rounseville Alger, The Solitudes of Nature and of Man; or, The Loneliness of Human Life (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1867), 146-148:

To be ignorant of yourself, uneasy and exacting, is to be repulsive no less than miserable. Who would enjoy the world, must move through it detached from it, coming into it from a superior position. He must not be weakly dependent on his fellows, but say to himself, Cannot God, the Universe and I, make my life a rich, self-sufficing thing here in time? To command love we must not be dependent on it; a tragical truth for those who have most need of love. The way to self-sufficingness is the way to public conquest. Happy in the closet is winsome in the crowd. The king of solitude is also the king of society. The reverse, however, is not so true. Many an applauded domineerer of the forum, many a brilliant enchantress of the assembly, when alone, is gnawed by insatiable passions, groans restlessly under the recoil of disappointment. William von Humboldt wrote to his friend Charlotte, «There are few who understand the value of solitude, and how many advantages it offers, especially to women, who are more apt than men to wreck themselves on petty disquietudes.» Self-inspection, self-purification, self-subdual to the conditions of noble being and experience, these form the fitting occupation of our solitary hours. Yet, self must not be the conspicuous object of our contemplation, but great truths and sentiments, moral and religious principles, nature, humanity, and God, the perennial fountains of fresh and pure life. He who follows this course is best qualified to read and interpret the secrets of other souls. He is likewise best fitted to master the world, in the only sense in which a good man will wish to master it. There is no more efficacious mode of observing mankind, than as they are seen from the loop-holes of retreat, and mirrored in our own consciousness. In relation to what is deep and holy, as compared with each other, society is a concealer, solitude a revealer: much, hidden from us in that, is shown to us in this. Amidst a festival the moonlight streams on the wall; but it is unnoticed while the lamps blaze, and the guests crowd and chatter. But when the gossipers go, and the lights are put out then, unveiled of the glare and noise, that silvery illumination from heaven grows visible, and the lonely master of the mansion becomes conscious of the visionary companionship of another world. Solitude is God's closet. It is the sacred auditorium of the secrets of the spiritual world. In this whispering-gallery without walls, tender and reverential spirits are fond of hearkening for those occult tones, divine soliloquies, too deep within or too faintly far ever anywhere else to suffer their shy meanings to be caught. Given a suffciently sensitive intelligence to apprehend the revelations, and every moment of time is surcharged with expressiveness, every spot of space babbles ineffable truths. Silence itself is the conversation of God. We know that in the deepest apparent stillness sounds will betray themselves to those who have finer sense and pay keener attention than ordinary. On the Alps, when everything seems so deathly quiet in the darkness, place your ear at the surface of the ice, and you may catch the tinkle of rivulets running all through the night in the veins and hollows of the frozen hills. Has not the soul too its buried streams of feeling whose movements only the most absorbed listening, in the most hushed moments, can distinguish?

What is it to subject a thing, save to extricate yourself from it, rise apart, and command it from a higher position? To overcome the world it is indispensable first to overlook the world from some private vantage-ground quietly aloof. Would you lift the soul above the petty passions that pester and ravage it, and survey the prizes, the ills, and the frets of ordinary life in their proper perspective of littleness? Accustom yourself to go forth at night, alone, and study the landscape of immensity; gaze up where eternity unveils her starry face and looks down forever without a word. These exercises, their lessons truly learned, so far from making us hate the society of our fellow-creatures, or foolishly suffer from its annoyances, will fit us wisely to enjoy its blessings; be masters of its honors, not victims of its penalties. If to be alone breeds in us a sullen taciturnity, it is proof that we are already bad characters. The more a misanthrope is dissociated from men, the more he loathes them; the longer a pure and loving soul is kept from them, the intenser is his longing to be united with them. None are so bitter and merciless, so abounding in sneers and sarcasms about society and its occupants, as those most thoroughly familiarized and hardened in its routine.