Conatus

Façade detail of Palazzo Viviani, also known as Palazzo dei Cartelloni, in Florence, Italy.

The texture of the soul is a liquid That casts a vermilion flood From a wound carved as an oath It fills the river bank a sanguine fog These arms were meant to be lost Hacked, severed, and forgotten.

Common themes in Agalloch's imagery and subject matter were the beauty of nature, winter, melancholy and allusions to ancestral paganism. particularly Norse Mythology is a major influence on the band. their takes on Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophy could be viewed as a kind of worship of nature, but not in a literal sense.

‏كان في صراعٍ مستمرٍّ مع اللغة، ‏هو يطالبها بمفرداتٍ جديدة، وهي تطالبه بإفلات شعور قديم. كان صراعًا يشبه لعب الأطفال، شد الحبل على وجه الدقة، أو شدَّ الروح. إلا أن الفوز في لعبة طرفها الآخر ربة الشعر، لا يعني شيئًا سوى التمزق.

Nymphs Listening to the Songs of Orpheus (1853) by Charles Jalabert

The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves The brilliant moon and all the milky sky And all that famous harmony of leaves Had blotted out man's image and his cry A girl arose that had red mournful lips And seemed the greatness of the world in tears Doomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships And proud as Priam murdered with his peers; Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves A climbing moon upon an empty sky And all that lamentation of the leaves Could but compose man's image and his cry. — Sorrow Of Love, William Butler Yeats

“By Music minds an equal temper know,  Nor swell too high, nor sink too low. If in the breast tumultuous joys arise, Music her soft assuasive voice applies;  Or when the soul is press’d with cares, Exalts her in enlivening airs. Warriors she fires with animated sounds, Pours balm into the bleeding lover’s wounds; Melancholy lifts her head, Morpheus rouses from his bed, Sloth unfolds her arms and wakes, List’ning Envy drops her snakes; Intestine war no more our passions wage, And giddy Factions hear away their rage.” — Alexander Pope, Ode to Music.

“The study of art, like that of the ancient authors, gives us a point of attachment, a pleasure that lies within ourselves. By filling our inner life with grand objects and ideas, it holds our outward-directed impulses in check while cherishing our finer longings within our hearts. Our need of sociality becomes faint; like painters, sculptors, and architects, the lover of art works in solitude, for the sake of enjoyments that he is rarely in a position to share with others.” —J. W. von Goethe, Aus meinem Leben: Campagne in Frankreich.

The Marquise de Seignelay and two of her sons by Pierre Mignard, 1691.

"Our civilization is characterized by the word 'progress'. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves. I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings." — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value.

The Judgement of Paris. Adriaen van der Werff, 1716.

“look at the poet or at the philosopher, in whom reflection has reached such a height, that, instead of being drawn on to investigate any one particular phenomenon of existence, he stands in amazement before existence itself, this great sphinx, and makes it his problem, in him consciousness has reached the degree of clearness at which it embraces the world itself: his intellect completely abandoned its function as the servant of his will, and now holds the world before him, and the world calls upon him much more to examine and consider it, than to play a part in it himself. if, then, the degree of consciousness is the degree of reality, such a man will be said to exist most of all, and there will be sense and significance in so describing him” — Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena

Achilles Receiving the Ambassadors of Agamemnon. Ingres, 1801.

"Triumph of the Marine Venus." Sebastiano Ricci, 1713.

وفي كلِ شيء حين تخبر أمرَه معايب حتى البدرُ أكلفٌ أسفعُ وأيُّ حسامٍ ليس ينبو وَينثني وأيُّ جوادٍ ليس يكبو ويظلع — أبي الهلال العسكري، كتاب جَمهَرة الأمثال