Excerpts from Book that I read

www.groundsforsculpture.org

. . . . These states, in turn, are utterly different from the thrill of seeing the possibility of intellectual or artistic achievement, described by Charles Darwin in his Autobiography The geology of St Jago is very striking yet simple: a stream of lava formerly flowed over the bed of the sea, formed on triturated recent shells and corals, which it has baked into hard white rock. …. It then first dawned on me that I might perhaps write a book on geology of the various countries visited, and this made me thrill with delight. That was a memorable hour to me, and how distinctly I can call to mind the law cliff of lave beneath which I rested, with the sun glaring hot, a few strange desert plants growing near, and with living corals in the tidal pool at my feet. ~Page 21/22

www.groundsforsculpture.org Sometimes the links between depression, anxiety, and productivity are undeniable. Think of Edvard Munch’s omnipresent painting “The Scream,” for instance. Not only is this is the most accurate visual depiction of what a panic attack feels like, but it was also -- according to the artist himself -- directly inspired by a moment of existential terror. Here is the dairy entry: I was walking down the road when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature ~ Page 167 There is no "h" here, nevertheless I am supposed to say: Hff my friends"

But it was precisely this impossibility of fulfillment in intuition and longing that won the day. One young painter like Runge and poets like Novalis and Hoffmann many passages from Franz Sternbald had an almost bewitching effect -- for instance this passage, when a sunset moves Sternbald’s friend to the following exclamation: If you painters could show me the like in your works . . . I would gladly do without treatment, passion, composition, and all the rest -- if you could find such a rosy red sky as kindly nature uses today to unlock for me the gate to the gleaming land, the home of my childhood’s intimation . . . O my friends, if you could only entice the fantastical music composed by this evening’s sky into your painting! ! Page 66 ~ Excerpt: “Romanticism ~ A German Affair” Author Rudiger Safranski

phil·is·tineDictionary result for philistine /ˈfiləˌstēn/Submit noun 1. a person who is hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts, or who has no understanding of them. "I am a complete philistine when it comes to paintings" synonyms: lowbrow, anti-intellectual, materialist, bourgeois; More adjective 1. hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts. “Philistine” is what the Romantics call the person who has given himself over wholly to utility. A Romantic is proud not to be a philistine, yet he senses that when he grows older he can hardly fail to become one. The term “philistine” came from student jargon and in that context referred disparagingly to either a non-student or a former student who was stuck in a normal bourgeois life without the student’s freedoms. For the Romantics, the philistine became the epitome of the average man in general, from whom they wanted to mark themselves off. A philistine is not just someone who values the normal and regular -- the Romantics themselves did that at times -- but rather someone who tries to explain away the wondrous and mysterious and reduce it to the standards of normalcy. The philistine is a person with resentment who takes the extraordinary as ordinary and belittles the sublime. It is a matter, then of people who forbid themselves wonder and astonishment. There is a circumference of comfortable habits “within which they forever turn.” They not only lack imagination themselves, but take as suspect someone they think has too much of it. They only want to “trot along in the same worn track.” They always go the middle way. Romantics too need a middle, but, as Friedrich Shelegel expressed it, it is not the philistine middle “that one never leaves,” but the “true middle” that one takes with him on the “eccentric path of energy and enthusiasm.” ~ Page 130

The problem with the homunculus solution was that the all-knowing little person would do the knowing for each of us but would then face the difficulty with which we began in the first place. Who would do its knowing? We,, another little person, of course, only smaller. In turn, the second little person would need a third little person inside to be its knower. The chain would be endless and this postponing of the difficulty, known as infinite regress, effectively disqualified the homunculus solution. This disqualification was a good thing, of course, inasmuch as as it emphasized the inadequacy of a traditional brain “center” account for something as complex as knowing. But it had a chilling effect on the development of alternate solutions. It created a fear of the homunculus, worse than the fear of flying, which eventually became the fear of specifying a knowing itself, cognitively and neuroanatomically. In short order, the act of knowing and self sent from being inside a little brain person to being nowhere. The failure of the homunculus idea to provide a solution for how we know cast doubt on the very notion of self. This was unfortunate. One should, indeed, be skeptical of the homunculus-like knower, endowed with full knowledge and located in a single and circumscribed part of the brain. It makes no sense physiologically. All the available evidence suggests that nothing like it exists. The failure of the homunculus-style knower, however, does not suggest that the notion of self should or could be discarded along with that of the homunculus. Whether we like the notion or not, something like the sense of self does not exist in the normal human mind as we go about knowing things. Whether we like it or not, the human mind is constantly being split, like a house divided, between the part that stands for the known and the part that stands for the knower. The story contained in the images of core consciousness is not told by some clever homunculus. Nor is the story really told by you as a self because the core ‘you’ is only born as the story is told, within the story itself. You exist as a mental being when primordial stories are being told, and only then; as long as primordial stories are being told, and only then. You are music while the music lasts. ~ Page 190/191

A Replica of Thoreau's cabin

So it is with time. Whenever we talk about it, we do so in terms of something lesser. We find or lose time, like a set of keys; we save and spend it, like money. Time creeps, crawls, flies, flees, flows, and stands still; it is abundant of scarce; it weighs on us with palpable heft. Bells toll for a ‘long’ or ‘short’ time, as if their sound could be measured with a ruler. Childhood recedes, deadlines loom. The contemporary philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have proposed a thought experiment: take a moment and try to address time strictly in its own terms, stripping any metaphor. You’ll be left empty-handed. “Would time still be time for us if we could not ‘waste’ or ‘budget’ it? They wonder. “We think not” xii Forward

….A sun dial tracks a moving shadow around its face, the hours are marked with printed numerals. Does the clock count the numbers or do you? Does time exist independently of the mind that counts it? “Whether, if soul did not exist, time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked,” Aristotle mused, “for if there cannot be something to count, there cannot be anything that can be counted.” It’s like the koan about the falling tree in the forest: is coal a clock if there is no scientist to measure its C-14/C-12 ratio? Augustine was resolute: time resides in measuring of it, which makes it solely a property of the human mind. On hears an echo of Augustine in the late physicist Richard Feynman, who pointed out that the dictionary definition of time is circular: time is a period, which is defined as a length of time. Feynman added, “What really matters anyway is not how we define time, but how we measure it. ~ Page 29

The man who has glimpsed, at the start of his career, certain mortal truths, reaches the point of no longer being able to live with them. If he remains loyal to them he is lost. To unlearn them, to renounce them -- sole method of making up with life, of leaving the path of Knowledge, of the Intolerable. In pursuit of the lie, any lie which promotes action, he idolizes it and from it seeks his salvation. Any obsession seduces him, provided it smothers the demon of his curiosity and immobilizes his mind. Hence he envies all those who, by means of prayer or any other freak, have arrested the course of their thoughts, abdicated the responsibilities of the intellect and encountered, within a temple or a madhouse, the happiness of being ‘through’. What would he not give to be able to exult, like them, in the shadow of an error, in the shelter of a stupidity! He will try anything “To elude my ruin, I shall play the game, I shall persevere out of stubbornness, out of whim, out of insolence. To breathe is an aberration which fascinates me. Air avoids me, the ground trembles under my feet. I have summoned every word and ordered them to dispose themselves into a prayer; and words have remained inert and mute. That is why I cry out, and continue to cry out: “Anything, except my truths!” ~ Page 195

Hanumanagundi Falls, also known as Suthanabbe Falls or Soothanabbi Falls is located in the hilly surroundings of the Kudremukh National Park in the Chikkamagaluru district of Karnataka, India. Hanumanagundi Falls is located between Karkala and Lakya Dam in the Kudremukh national park. Hanumanagundi Falls has an elevation of 996 m (3,268 ft).[1][2] The water falls from a height of 22 m (72 ft) and is a tiered waterfall.[3] Hanumanagundi Falls is situated at a distance of 79 km (49 mi) from Mangalore.[4]

. . . At the same time (about 5000 years ago) they spread from Taiwan they probably invented outriggers canoes, boats with logs propped on the side that increase their stability in rough water, making it possible to navigate the open seas. After thirty three hundred ago, ancient people making pottery in a style called Lapita appeared just to the east of New Guinea and soon afterward started expanding farther into the Pacific, quickly reaching Vanuatu three thousand kilometers from New Guinea. It took only a few hundred more years for them to spread through the western Polynesian islands including Toga and Samoa, and then, after long pause lasting until around twelve hundred years ago, they spread to the last habitable Pacific islands of New Zealand, Hawaii, and Easter Island by eight hundred years ago…. Page 200 "Who we are and How we got here" ~ Author David Reich {It is believed that the Hawaiian Islands were uninhabited until around 400 – 500 A.D., when the Polynesians arrived. ... Many historians believe that the Polynesians who settled Hawaii came from the Marquesas Islands, which had forbidding terrain and poor conditions for farming.}

In the short span of five years, he produced many timeless poems including the astonishing “Ode on the Grecian Urn” and “Ode to a Nightingale.” Before he became desperately ill, he was confident that his verse would live on after him, despite the bad reviews. He predicted, “I shall be among the English Poets after my death”. And indeed, Keats was obsessed with death, which seemed to hover over his shoulder and dictate to his pen. At twenty-one, he was already imagining what it would be like to live in his grave. “If I do fall, at least I will be laid Beneath the silence of a poplar shade,” He wrote in the poem “Sleep and Poetry,” “And over me the grass shall be smooth shaven; And there shall be a kind memorial graven” ~ Page 101 Chapter: "Symbolic Immortality" Excerpt from "On the Role of Death in Life"

americanliterature.com/author/lucretius americanliterature.com/author/lucretius/book/of-the-nature-of-things/summary

And what Cioran says of the mystic, in his essay “Dealing with the Mystics,” applies perfectly to his own thought. “The Mystic, in most cases, invents his adversaries…. His thought asserts the existence of others by calculation, by artifice: it is a strategy of no consequence. His thought boils down, in the last instance, to a polemic with himself: he seeks to be, he becomes a crowd, even if it is only by making himself one now mask after the other, multiplying his faces: in which he resembles his Creator, whose histrionics he perpetuates.” ~ Page 21 Yet while Cioran projects a recognizable political stance (though it’s present only implicitly in most of the essays), his approach is not, in the end, grounded in a religious commitment. Whatever his political-moral sympathies have in common with right-wing Catholic sensibility, Cioran himself, as I have already said, is committed to the paradoxes of an atheist theology. Faith itself, he argues, solves nothing. ~ Page 22 ~ Excerpt: "Temptation to Exist"