1
The ultimate unity is a coexistence of unities. The ultimate unity is the ultimate plurality.
2
All of our unities are tenuous delineations, which the mind itself presents as shifting embodiments. Perhaps we wished to preserve in them the sway of self-forgetting acts. To a degree, we have succeeded. The related obsessions with highlighting and erasing the delineations stand in the way.
3
Perhaps there lingers the thought that all human creations can be familiar to us. It is only when one creates oneself, when one crashes against unsuspected limits, that one intuits how much must be made aside truly to apprehend the world, which is to say, infuse it with life.
4
To open our eyes a second time means the cessation of our exile from the world without.
5
To know myself I find the sky, the ocean, a branchlet, a stone. To know these I find the valley, the dew, a leaf, some moss. Knowledge will stubbornly remain approximation, and every segment in the continuum a step forward.
6
There is a moment in our decipherment of the world when we delegate the immersions of body to mind. A feeling of irreality creeps in, and it can be outgrown only through the retrieval of the body. Both mind and body need a triumph that is also a failure before they can work in unison—and even then, their volatile conjunction demands further insulated triumphs and failures. This precarious counterpoint hones the soul, gains the world.
7
Sovereign thoughts have a weight that the body cannot ignore—they become a burden if one refuses to unfurl them.
8
Those self-imposed necessities that appear mind-dependent should arouse suspicion at once—they are the extraneous elements in the notation: a coffee stain that mimics an endless rest. Transgression corresponds to the body. A transgression in which we will feel as those who return to a home that matches memory.
9
The greatest consistency is that which can be found through the discernment of an overarching rhythm.
10
The movements of history that seem closest to those of our own life can reveal the imagery which will sustain us for the interval.
11
All events in our life that remain mute we owe to the commentary of others. For a commentary to be useful a text must exist. Too much of our existence survives through second-hand accounts.
12
The diluted morality of commandments exists as a framework for the child, who is learning to find similarity in dissimilarity, the rudiments of orientation. Agency is an attunement to our caprices, a giving birth to an untried confrontation with the world.
13
When action springs from strength, it is guaranteed to ennoble—strength perpetuates itself through communion. Weakness can only diminish, for it insists upon the isolation of an infinitely repeated I. Cruelty, then, is a form of weakness, always spasmodic in its energies.
14
Optimism is a form of strength when it is luxuriant; pessimism, when it is austere.
15
The forceful circumstance cannot be concocted—it is the unappealable visitation of chance. All energy is better directed to preservation and exploration.
16
One can partake in the ardor of sensuality and in the ardor of purity—no contradiction can resist the unraveling of time. Saintliness and ungodliness are reifications of our heartbeat.
17
Clinging to one of love’s cycles, be it the ecstasy of passion or the assurance of accommodation, is a fundamental disavowal that habituates the soul to duplicity. The heat and the cold, the hunger and the satiety, are always transient. They secure continuance through two common and untended fevers: apathy and obsession.
18
To our soul there is no difference between the work that moves us and the receding wave that caresses us. Both are an abiding inheritance, both are impervious to our innumerable defeats.
19
No failure can be wholly sterile, for it always rouses us to a more intimate understanding of our tempo.
20
All true cooperation is slow, for it must coordinate a plurality of souls. An early efficiency suggests the furor of superficial conformance. To endure in time a collective effort must shun the sacrifices that double as vassalage.
21
The soul is exquisitely layered. At its center, there is a restless desire to live. Why, then, are we so tempted into renunciation? Because renunciation is the simplest allowance of life. Renunciation is a self-effacing conquest of the outer layers of soul; far from the center, it receives the minimum to ensure survival.
22
Personality not as a hammer, which approaches only to impress the familiarity of dust, but as a krater—firm, able to withstand the mixture of everything foreign.
23
If an affinity emerges subdued, return, always return.
24
There is no single tide, and that which will find us prepared may yet have the richest afterglow.
25
Some find grief in the day, joy in the year; others, grief in the hour, joy in the month. Hours, days, months, years: all a relief to memory, a concession to imagination. Yet one is easily trapped in these ascents, believing a peculiar emotional atmosphere forever ours. Let us not forget the obduracy of the second, which by overwhelming our hold, frees us into possibility.
26
Everything we lose becomes ours more fully. It acquires the redeeming miracle of form.
27
How does the artist add to being? Through the radial increment of his vision. How does the man of faith add to being? Through the radial increment of vision. How does the philosopher add to being? Through the architectonics of his order. How does the scientist add to being? Through the architectonics of order. Science and religion can thus captivate an age. Philosophy and art are the perennial refuges of secluded consciousness, the sources of recalcitrant selves.
28
Art and religion yield to time in order to better preserve its substance; form is the surrender to experience that always tames it. Philosophy and science outmaneuver time and thus smuggle the concept, a volatile triumph, a bracket of timelessness. If one speaks of the immortality of a philosophical or scientific work, one must first alter its relation to time. One must impose a form, that is, one must betray it.
29
The vastness to which the philosopher and the scientist respond is, in fact, the generalization of a private quietude—the indifferent universe mirrors their center, which is a state that coordinates emotions to a point of uniformity, regularity. Far different is the vastness of artists and people of faith. It is the individualization of a public disarray. Polytheism, monotheism, panpsychism, pantheism are attempts at consummation, and, at times, mere shortcuts or gestures. Here, coordination is a defeat—there is only a relentless disjunction.
30
The substance of religion is yearning. Its ascetic inclinations surround it with a proper ambience, dictate a proper tempo. Affirmation is the rare, crowning achievement. Luxury, therefore, narrows aspiration and, eventually, extinguishes it.
31
Were the artist to follow the ascetic, he would never match his concentration—his eyes are attuned to the sensual world, which demands dispersion to apprehend its vertiginous turns. The inner rhythms of the artist favor the body and its indulgences—the work of art is rich in organic mechanisms.
32
Material circumstances always impinge upon the fundamental forms of the spirit. Artists have been led to believe that the islet they steal from their workday is the lone moment when they are themselves—productive citizens for most of their lives, creators in the interstices. On-off, like appliances.
33
That caution which reins the will to fastidious activity is an insidious form of hesitation. If only one could avoid criticism, perhaps the uncertainty of our vocation would disappear. It cannot disappear without an expansive will, without a wider view of our exertions.
34
Perfectionism is a long acquaintance with the pleasures of delaying failure—the consummate perfectionist must inadvertently leave all work unfinished. Nothing is as perfect as a ruin.
35
Expression, in its truest sense, is an exacting discipline. The only worthwhile spontaneity is that which consumes the entire organism. Then—the gift of fatigue.
36
The greatest heights and the greatest depths are unsustainable—they transcend style and rival, for an instant, the majesty of nature. In their presence, we acquire the certainty that there are vertices where our soul and the world commune.
37
No, there is never enough creation—there will never be enough creation. Nature rejoices in the stray soul who cannot find sustenance in the magnanimous and so probes every crevice. Oblivion is a temporary misalignment.
38
The weight of tradition cannot overwhelm us: it is dynamic, attuned to the times and interests of our practice. As a cluster of forms acquires force, another recedes into our innermost sensibility. Tradition is the soul’s enactment of the struggle to surmount.
39
The dance of form asks of us a grand receptivity to the past—there lie the premature and the discordant, ready for a truer life.
40
To give everything its due would deprive us of the world within the world that will lead to a joyful death, that is, one surrounded by unexplored abundance, caught in some insolent plan.
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