1
We would find in a sublime calculus that nature is prodigal and our consciousness reticent. Perhaps the arduous labyrinth of our body is home to all correspondences, otherwise too subtle and intractable.
2
Goethe, Emerson, Coleridge, and Swedenborg assimilate the vocabulary of the sciences with ease. They profess the belief that human beings are the sum of creation and, therefore, free to understand themselves through any of its parts.
3
When we grow aware of the path that nature has outlined for us, we can traverse it from beginning to end. Otherwise, persisting disorientation will leave us stranded on some bend.
4
Where is vigor to be found? In the refinement of our form. All that is foreign to it makes us lethargic, approximates us to a sterile melancholy. There is nothing heroic in pursuing that which diminishes us.
5
If I persist in my being, what can be lost? That being harbors everything, possesses everything in the strictest sense. Only if one is oneself can there be contact with the outside world.
6
One can be another in continuity or in discontinuity. On this decision depends the amplitude and consolidation of a vision or its renouncement.
7
In the swiftness of others’ movement there is no answer. Only flowering communicates, so that the present will always strike us as an enigma. Decipherment begins when we become past, and then we will communicate for as long as souls exist. Indeed, the swiftness of others and our own belongs to the sphere of the private and the inscrutable, to the sphere of that which time is incapable of transporting.
8
For all beings, there is a living world and a dead world. Emotions enable reason to differentiate them indefinitely. What instinct gains in efficacy it loses in range.
9
Do the images we choose converge with those that choose us? In the answer to this question lies the mortality or immortality of a style.
10
In our transit, the whole of creation has spoken. If one suspects the musicality of certain inflections, one should listen.
11
To become worthy of our affinities is the sole labor that transforms.
12
What is there, then, in the aggregate of all human desires? A vagueness that constricts even in its diffuse contours. The bright image exists in the aggregate of all my desires.
13
Everything that is our authentic possession remains. Abandoning a spiritual demand on account of a possible loss is a fundamental misunderstanding.
14
The varieties of fullness encompass the organism yet fail to surpass it. In the soft demarcation of the I, there is a long-lasting, consistent energy.
15
All living morality is a conciliation between the exigencies of the body and the insinuations of consciousness.
16
External law circumscribes generic acts; its domain ceases where an act is a creation, where an act is a metonymy of the spirit.
17
To act as a physical cause is to act with complete attention to our rhythms. One could talk of controlled spontaneity. The impulse is born and is then exposed to the climate of our constitution, in which it will either dry up or flourish.
18
The mean is a period of repose. Activity inhabits the extremes. Thus, a perpetually moderate human being does not act, hardly lives. Everything will be given to the possessed.
19
Both physical and mental effort vivify if precision and resistance regulate them—extremes of the pendular health of the soul.
20
Great necessities belong to the spiritual order: completion of our expansive orbits. Small necessities correspond to the material order: hunger for bread, for contact, for attention. Hunger yet never a call.
21
Only they who find in transience one of our greatest prerogatives will approach that self-control which is never coercion.
22
Grand ethics: to live in what makes abandon feasible and refuse what exacerbates the spurious interiority of the insatiable I.
23
An extraordinary specialization has no place in the rhythmic use of our organism. The body has its times, and in them a superabundance of energy.
24
Anarchy is both a transitory and a necessary state. It endures in those who have not found the direction of their spirit.
25
Persistence in memory is not arbitrary: it is a call to inquire about the significance of an image. Only then can it permeate our being and shed its obsessive character.
26
Not infrequently impatience deforms the branch that awaits the fruit, not infrequently it mutilates it with hopes of forcing a compensatory beauty.
27
Hope blooms seasonally in our spirit—proof of the cyclical nature of our interiority, which so often has been detached from “the material domain” and its processes.
28
Melancholy is not sudden in its workings; they are meticulous and prolonged, subterraneous and silent. When we become aware of it, we understand too late that a part of us has ceased to be ours.
29
Behind hate there is always an invitation to unreality, to the bartering of oneself for the anonymity of the animal.
30
Humanity is always loved through analogy, hence the dependence of the survival of this love on a ritualization that is foreign to most spirits.
31
The lover’s gaze, in its infinite indulgence, is the only one that bestows unity. We owe to it the persistence of faith.
32
To take advantage of the subtle artifice of evasion, first we must essay abandon.
33
One cannot speak of the possession of a virtue or the possession of a vice. Only the irruption of the act in time exalts or degrades. Reverberation is a memento.
34
What do the approval and censorship of others mean? A stimulus to delve into the exteriority of our acts. Reward and punishment assist in the conceptualization of this exteriority. But affliction and bliss are of a different order, arbitrary insofar as we ignore our vital rhythm.
35
There is a chiaroscuro that completes all our impressions. Dejection trails enjoyment; restitution, pain. The viewpoint must shift: both closeness and distance merge in the apprehension of form. Even so, the question remains whether one is a miniaturist or a landscapist.
36
The artist understands the artist; the man of faith, the man of faith; the scientist, the scientist; the philosopher, the philosopher. A long sojourn with foreign sensibilities undermines this precarious understanding. And yet there is an expansion that is otherwise lost.
37
It is precisely the adaptability of superstition which reveals a certain spiritual temperature. In the artist and in the religious man it proliferates, it feeds indefinitely; in the scientist and in the philosopher it searches for recesses, it digs in. It should be understood, then, that superstition spans the duration of life, be it in an exuberance of metamorphosis or in an indurate identity.
38
In the experience of faith there is an exacerbation of emotion that derives a cosmos. Even the theologian builds his metaphysical system amid a fog that certifies the familiarity of the world, that certifies, perhaps, its porosity to the mind.
39
Reality becomes plastic in contact with the imagination. Every external law can be subverted. But the vibrance of our play falters, and the privilege of its sustainment belongs only to art. In the act, reality grows more real through its union with consciousness.
40
Genius is a constant and vertiginous immersion. Genius is also the accretion of favorable responses, the birth in other hearts. To the creator, only one of these definitions holds life.
41
Before they begin their song, poets must read. They will then be capable of organizing their experience and, eventually, of binding it to the immemorial strain of tradition.
42
To become purely sight, to become purely ear, to become purely tact, to become purely smell, to become purely taste for an instant, so that one becomes everything in the hour and in the day: the resonance of art.
43
The interval of true activity decreases with the passing years. But this same loss sharpens our ability to detect it.
44
Only that transcendence which does not oppress will discover the excess of meaning in the accelerating precarity of immanence.
45
Centuries have weaved epics from the thoroughly documented life of Goethe. It is possible to imagine that there is in this essay an anticipation: through observation and spiritual affinity human beings can learn to integrate every transit, every itinerary, because even failure carries a secret consistency of its own.
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