work_id,theme,provenance,created_at,text,reviewed_on,id,comments,metaphor,dictionary,updated_at,context
6593,"",Reading,2009-08-11 00:00:00 UTC,"Why he should say a little stroll I never did discover. Because suddenly, from a height of thousands of centuries, the first stone of an avalanche came tumbling down: it was my heart. Who could it have been? Who could have taken me for that little stroll in the Stone Age from which I never returned because I ended up staying there?
(p. 9)",,17494,"","""Because suddenly, from a height of thousands of centuries, the first stone of an avalanche came tumbling down: it was my heart.""","",2009-09-14 19:50:21 UTC,""
6593,"",Posted to facebook by Greg Camphire,2009-08-11 00:00:00 UTC,"The answer is yes, but there is nothing wrong with having an oblique heart, it is a lighthouse, a compass, wisdom, sharp instinct, experience of death, the power to divine a disquieting but blissful lack of adjustment, because I am discovering that my own maladjustment stems from my origins. For everyone knows that mosquitoes are a sign of heavy rain, that to cut my hair under a new moon will give it greater strength, to mention [End Page 11] a name I dare not utter will cause delays and great misfortune, and tying the devil with red string to the leg of a piece of furniture has at least tied up my demons. And I know in my heart -- which has never dared expose itself in the centre, and for centuries has kept well to the left under the cover of shadows -- I know full well that Man is such a stranger, even unto himself, that innocence alone makes him natural.
(pp. 11-12)",,17495,"","""The answer is yes, but there is nothing wrong with having an oblique heart, it is a lighthouse, a compass, wisdom, sharp instinct, experience of death, the power to divine a disquieting but blissful lack of adjustment, because I am discovering that my own maladjustment stems from my origins.""","",2009-09-14 19:50:21 UTC,""
6851,"",Reading,2011-05-18 20:54:57 UTC,"It is a difficult point to admit. We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing. (""You're the least important person in the room and don't forget it,"" Jessica Mitford's governess would hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion; I copied that into my notebook because it is only recently that I have been able to enter a room without hearing some such phrase in my inner ear.) Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people's favorite dresses, other people's trout.
(p. 136)",,18426,"","""'You're the least important person in the room and don't forget it,' Jessica Mitford's governess would hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion; I copied that into my notebook because it is only recently that I have been able to enter a room without hearing some such phrase in my inner ear.""","",2011-05-18 20:54:57 UTC,""
6851,"",Reading,2011-05-18 20:57:36 UTC,"It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee driking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing ""How High the Moon"" on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could even improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished.
(pp. 139-40)",,18427,"","""Otherwise they [the people we used to be] turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.""","",2011-05-18 20:57:36 UTC,""
7194,"",Reading,2012-02-29 15:50:20 UTC,"Thinking is out of order because the quest for meaning produces no end result that will survive the activity, that will make sense after the activity has come to its end. In other words, the delight of which Aristotle speaks, though manifest to the thinking ego, is ineffable by definition. The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life the human body is a corpse; without thinking the human mind is dead. This in fact is the metaphor Aristotle tried out in the famous seventh chapter of Book Lambda of the Metaphysics: ""The activity of thinking [energeia that has its end in itself] is life."" Its inherent law, which only a god can tolerate forever, man merely now and then, during which time he is godlike, is ""unceasing motion, which is motion in a circle""--the only movement, that is, that never reaches an end or results in an end product. [...]
(I.ii.13, pp. 123-4)",,19599,Arendt seems to warn that this is *not* a body metaphor...,"""Without the breath of life the human body is a corpse; without thinking the human mind is dead.""","",2012-02-29 15:50:20 UTC,13. Metaphor and the Ineffable
8251,"",Reading,2018-01-23 15:06:17 UTC,"January 31, 1944
My desk is the monument to my mind, and by the appearance of it, my mind must have intimate contact with garbage collectors. I don’t live by the day. I live by the second. What I can postpone that is unpleasant for another second, I do. If it requires four or five backbreaking steps to hang the skirt up instead of putting it on the back of the chair, it is put on the back of the chair -- to be hung up later. As the days go by and the stacks of clothes on the back of the chair get thicker and the mountains of paper and books on the desk rise, the walls of the room gradually diminish until there is only a narrow rim left up around the ceiling. This has an irritating effect on Regina, which she voices in the strongest possible imperatives. The room is highly contradictory. Over the mantelpiece, a most mellow gray, aging picture of Christ -- gentle and benign, merciful yet stern, and looking just the least amused. He must be often. Hung by the side of the door, the Devil -- cross-eyed, thin, wicked -- my own creation. He is a peculiar wall piece, but he doesn’t disturb me. Over the bookcase, a china duck headed for infinite space -- only hoping that he will find a shore before he grows weak and drops into the sea.",,25119,"","""My desk is the monument to my mind, and by the appearance of it, my mind must have intimate contact with garbage collectors.""","",2018-01-23 15:06:17 UTC,""
8251,"",Reading,2018-01-23 15:07:47 UTC,"February 2, 1944
It is pleasanter to daydream than to work. It is pleasanter to be five years older and beautiful than status quo and under par, but I must force my loose mind into its overalls and get going. Once I am in, at least, I stay put. I think I will go back -- way back -- to when I first began. What I know about it is only hearsay. There is so little I know about them that I sometimes wonder just what they must have felt and how they must have acted with me. Me! Red and ugly with my latent heat, dribbling and drooling, howling and yelling, and otherwise letting nature take its course. But I was theirs and they loved me; and they never stopped, though at times it must have been mingled with contempt and kept alive by conscience. They probably enjoyed me more the first three years than they ever did later. I was too little to kill their pleasure then, too little for them to kill mine. When I grew less ugly (and from pictures I did show remarkable improvement after the first year), they must have had high hopes; they must have struggled even harder. I was totally unaware of them -- except as a satisfaction for my necessities. If, in my animal state, I recognized possession, it was because they were undoubtedly the most agreeable-looking creatures in cradle distance. Their heyday came when they got me home, though. I guess that day lasted about four years. I was their plaything, and I hope they played. They have never got a chance since.",,25120,"","""It is pleasanter to be five years older and beautiful than status quo and under par, but I must force my loose mind into its overalls and get going.""","",2018-01-23 15:07:47 UTC,""
8287,"",Reading,2018-05-21 20:57:35 UTC,"And I know that just as the voice of Jesus was not heard, and is not heard, save here and there; just as the voice of Tolstoy is not heard, save here and there; and others great and small are lost in the great echoless desert of indifferentism, having produced little perceptible effect, so my voice also will be lost, and barely a slight ripple of thought be propagated over that dry and fruitless expanse; even that the next wind of trial will straighten and leave as unimprinted sand.
(p. 176)",,25205,"","""nd I know that just as the voice of Jesus was not heard, and is not heard, save here and there; just as the voice of Tolstoy is not heard, save here and there; and others great and small are lost in the great echoless desert of indifferentism, having produced little perceptible effect, so my voice also will be lost, and barely a slight ripple of thought be propagated over that dry and fruitless expanse; even that the next wind of trial will straighten and leave as unimprinted sand.""","",2018-05-21 20:57:35 UTC,""
8287,"","Reading Crispin Sartwell, ""What's So Good About Original Sin?"" The New York Times (May 21, 2018). <Link to NYTimes.com>",2018-05-21 20:59:36 UTC,"A great ethical teacher once wrote words like unto these: ""I have within me the capacity for every crime.""
Few, reading them, believe that he meant what he said. Most take it as the sententious utterance of one who, in an abandonment of generosity, wished to say something large and leveling. But I think he meant exactly what he said. I think with all his purity Emerson had within him the turbid stream of passion and desire; for all his hard-cut granite features he knew the instincts of the weakling and the slave; and for all his sweetness, he had the tiger and the jackal in his soul. I think that within every bit of human flesh and spirit that has ever crossed the enigma bridge of life, from the prehistoric racial morning until now, all crime and all virtue were germinal. Out of one great soul-stuff are we sprung, you and I and all of us; and if in you the virtue has grown and not the vice, do not therefore conclude that you are essentially different from him whom you have helped put in stripes and behind bars. Your balance may be more even, you may be mixed in smaller proportions altogether, or the outside temptation has not come upon you.
(p. 177)",,25206,"","""I think with all his purity Emerson had within him the turbid stream of passion and desire; for all his hard-cut granite features he knew the instincts of the weakling and the slave; and for all his sweetness, he had the tiger and the jackal in his soul.""","",2018-05-21 21:01:12 UTC,""
8300,"",Reading,2018-06-18 18:53:05 UTC,"I find it hard to be properly critical of Miss Miles' poems, because I like them so well. Another person might claim that her subjects were trivial in the face of cataclysmic changes and monumental social upheavals. Not I, to whom the minute object, properly presented, has more importance than an earthquake. Another critic might suggest that she does not let herself go, that she clips off her emotions before they come to flower. Not I, to whom the scraggly, unpruned emotions of many modern poets seem almost indecenly luxurious.
(pp. 23-4)",,25221,"","""Not I, to whom the scraggly, unpruned emotions of many modern poets seem almost indecenly luxurious.""","",2018-06-18 18:53:05 UTC,""