Idem Per Idem

• 2012-05-31

  The sort of person I am calling a ‘‘literary intellectual’’ thinks that a life that is not lived close to the present limits of the human imagination is not worth living. For the Socratic idea of self examination and self-knowledge, the literary intellectual substitutes the idea of enlarging the self by becoming acquainted with still more ways of being human. For the religious idea that a certain book or tradition might connect you up with a supremely powerful or supremely lovable nonhuman person, the literary intellectual substitutes the Bloomian thought that the more books you read, the more ways of being human you have considered, the more human you become—the less tempted by dreams of an escape from time and chance, the more convinced that we humans have nothing to rely on save one another. The great virtue of the literary culture that is gradually coming into being is that it tells young intellectuals that the only source of redemption is the human imagination, and that this fact should occasion pride rather than despair.

  — Richard Rorty, Philosophy as a Transitional Genre

• 2012-05-07

  

  Philip Glass

• 2012-04-12

• 2012-04-10

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• 2012-04-07

  How the music sounds is not the point.

  — Arnold Schoenberg, quoted on p. 185 of Stephen Toulmin’s Cosmpolis

• 2012-04-01

  Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
  A being darkly wise, and rudely great: …
  [Man] hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest,
  In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;
  In doubt his mind or body to prefer,
  Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
  Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
  Whether he thinks to little, or too much;
  Chaos of thought and passion all confused;…
  Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
  The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

  — Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, quoted in Stephen Toulmin’s Cosmopolis, p. 114-5

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• 2012-03-25

  I am alone, alone, deathly alone. I weep soundlessly, you hear me. Want to condemn myself to death, everything is my fault, you know why and you have more than a little to do with it. What is one doing when one says “I am alone”? Since it is neither true nor false, it is primarily a question, but this is true of all phrases, of producing an effect on someone, of saying “come.

  — Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, p. 85

• 2012-03-04

  I imagine the gift of an infinite suffering, of blood and open bodies, in the image of an ejaculation cutting down the one it jolts and abandoning him to an exhaustion charged with nausea

  I imagine the earth projected in space, like a woman screaming, her head in flames.

  Before the terrestrial world whose summer and winter order the agony of all living things, before the universe composed of innumerable turning stars, limitlessly losing and consuming themselves, I can only perceive a succession of cruel splendors whose very movement requires that I die: this death is only the exploding consumption of all that was, the joy of existence of all that comes into the world; even my own life demands that everything that exists, everywhere, ceaselessly give itself and be annihilated.

  — Georges Bataille, from Visions of Excess.  A totally metal, but also kind of beautiful, sort of passage.