Conatus

Birth of Venus by Fritz Zuber-Buhler (1877)

"People nowadays think, scientists are there to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc, to entertain them. That the latter have something to teach them; that never occurs to them." — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value[1939-1940], p.87.

“This extremely bitter fatigue of studies, and exceedingly burdensome meditation (pensiero) of the mind,” Alberti [Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472)] complained in his Delle comodità, “always contributes to us something more of self-torment than of rejoicing.” If, on one hand, scholars manage to elicit a certain pleasure from their arduous studies, Alberti pessimistically mused, on the other hand they generally find a way to stifle that pleasure “by their reflections and very great labors.” On this account, Alberti admonished, one who adopts a life of letters is prone to suffer an excruciating “anxiety of studies” (ansietà degli studii), the result being that “he cannot sleep, eat, or rest, takes no pleasure or repose in anything, and, endeavoring to understand all things, constantly remains in a state of bitter thought.” As for those things he has already learned, he is able to retain them only with great effort, with great skill, “and with great anxiety and reflection.” What strikes the reader from this diagnosis of the “scholar's disease” by Alberti is that its symptoms belong to one who, being dis-contented with the pedestrian concerns of everyday life, seeks but fails to find solace in contemplative detachment from those concerns. Moreover, further passages from his treatise inform us, one so inclined to the scholarly life, being dissatisfied with the finite nature of the worldly concerns from which he is attempting to escape, strives to surmount them through an inner drive to the infinite. At bottom, as Alberti further spelled out his diagnosis, the cause of the painful tribulations arising out of intense intellectual inquiry is that “the studious man is never able to find a method of imposing a limit on his desire for learning. Nor is it ever permitted to him to rest his mind until that time when he has wiped away his ignorance of all the most hidden things.” As a result, Alberti warned, a man of letters “has very little or no quiet in either his mind or body, always remains melancholy and solitary (sta sempre malinconico & solitano), and displays bitter weariness, extreme vigilance, curious thoughts, very lofty occupations, and ardent cares.” Such a man, accordingly, “is never able to find pleasure or delight, and throughout his life fails to savor so much as a moment of rest from his labors and vexations. Much as the contemporary mystics prescribed an “infinite cure” for what they diagnosed as an “infinite disease,” so does the same prescription logically apply to the scholarly melancholy characterized by Alberti as “infinite anxiety, infinite strivings, infinite discomfort, infinite harmful injuries, infinite travails, and infinite calamities.” — Noel L. Brann, The Debate Over The Origin Of Genius During The Italian Renaissance.

"The Greeks did not see the Homeric gods as set above them as masters, or themselves set beneath the gods as ser­vants, as the Jews did. They saw as it were only the reflection of the most successful exemplars of their own caste, that is to say an ideal, not an anti­thesis of their own nature. They felt inter-related with them, there exis­ted a mutual interest, a kind of symmetry. "Man thinks of himself as noble when he bestows upon himself such gods, and places himself in a relationship to them such as exists between the lower aristocracy and the higher; while the Italic peoples have a real peasant religion, with contin­ual anxiety over evil and capricious powers and tormenting spirits. Where the Olympian gods failed to dominate, Greek life too was gloom­ier and more filled with anxiety. - Christianity, on the other hand, crushed and shattered man completely and buried him as though in mud: into a feeling of total depravity it then suddenly shone a beam of divine mercy, so that, surprised and stupefied by this act of grace, man gave vent to a cry of rapture and for a moment believed he bore all heaven within him. It is upon this pathological excess of feeling, upon the pro­found corruption of head and heart that was required for it, that all the psychological sensations of Christianity operate: it desires to destroy, shatter, stupefy, intoxicate, the one thing it does not desire is measure: and that is why it is in the profoundest sense barbaric, Asiatic, ignoble, un-Hellenic." — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human.

One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will  have ceased to be -though possibly a coloured canvas and a sheet of  notes will remain- because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone. — Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol 1: Form and Actuality.

The Storm on the Sea of Galilee by Rembrandt Van Rijn.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Abraham's Sacrifice, 1635.

“Free as only one can be who has not himself been entirely swallowed by culture, in his musical vagrancy he picks up a broken glass by the roadside and holds it up to the sun so that all colors are refracted.” “It is not so much that subjectivity is communicated or expressed by music as that in it, as in a theater, something objective is enacted, the identifiable face of which has been obliterated. It is rather that the orchestra plays within musical consciousness than that a consciousness is projected onto the orchestra.” — Theodor Adorno, about Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy

“That the world is not striving toward a stable condition is the only thing that has been proved. Consequently, one must conceive its climatic conditions in such a way that it is not a condition of equilibrium.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche. “The tranquil, economical and well-ordered nature is far behind. For Nietzsche, nature is creative, but the creator is also, by definition, a destroyer; creative nature is a cruel nature, in which the weak, who are also the most numerous, fight against the strong, who affirm their difference and whose eventual triumph destroy those who can not temporize with this affirmation. Becoming is conflict; "The strongest individuals will be those who know how to resist the laws of the species without perishing, the isolated ones. It is from them that the new nobility is formed but, while it is being formed, a great number of isolated individuals will have to perish!, because, isolated, they will lose the law that conserves. "Everywhere we find struggle and not harmony, struggle of cells, tissues, organs, organisms (...) We arrive, therefore, at the idea of systems in indefinite evolution, to the concept that, by definition, no complex system is ever structurally stable. We end up in the impossibility of talking about the end of history, but only the end of histories. In short, we came to a conception quite close to the Eternal Return, in the sense in which Nietzsche's double critique on thermodynamics and mechanics could make us understand. The impossibility of speaking of a finalized evolution, towards a stable state, a state in which "the future is no longer dangerous". An evolution that stops being the quest for identity, of rest, and rather the creation of new problems, the proliferation of new dimensions. Innovation makes the environment in which it is produced more complex, posing unprecedented problems, creating new possibilities for instability and commotion. (...) Nietzsche had justly concluded that, inasmuch as thermodynamics can not describe the evolution of a system if it is not from the point of view of equilibrium, in which differences are annulled and processes are stopped, it can not describe the universe that we know; in this universe, indeed, equilibrium is a very exceptional situation, the evolution of a system towards equilibrium is a very rare evolution, possible only on a planet like ours, at the same time far enough from the sun to make conceivable the isolation of a partial system - there is no possible "container" at solar temperature: that is the whole problem of nuclear fusion - and close enough for irreversible processes to take place. Few "thermally dead" are observed, except in the local systems that we artificially isolate. Rather, what we see, what seems to be the rule, are continuous exchanges of energy and matter between systems, structures that are created, structures that die. Nietzsche said that large numbers favor the weak, that the strong must be protected against this mode of selection that triumphs against the timorous and persecutes the innovators. It is the large numbers that allow us to deduce the stability of the state of equilibrium and that of stationary states beyond stability; but this deduction is not valid unless is valid the hypothesis according to which all the states compatible with the conditions in the limits are equivalent and have the same statistical significance. Within the limits of validity of this hypothesis, the fluctuations are insignificant, the norm is unique and all-powerful. But far from equilibrium, on the contrary, the activity of the constituent units of the system becomes essential.” ― Ilya Prigogine (Nobel Laureate in Chemistry): Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie, XIII (975), 2, 47-72.

ننام أم نسهو؟ الحلم، حدثٌ مؤسف، تقول الذاكرة.

كيف لنا أن ننسى، نحن المنسيون، لم يتبق لنا سوى الذاكرة

إِذا كَشَفَ الزَمانُ لَكَ القِناعا وَمَدَّ إِلَيكَ صَرفُ الدَهرِ باعا فَلا تَخشَ المَنيَّةَ وَاِلقَيَنها وَدافِع ما اِستَطَعتَ لَها دِفاعا وَلا تَختَر فِراشًا مِن حَريرٍ وَلا تَبكِ المَنازِلَ وَالبِقاعا وَحَولَكَ نِسوَةٌ يَندُبنَ حُزناً وَيَهتِكنَ البَراقِعَ وَاللِفاعا يَقولُ لَكَ الطَبيبُ دَواكَ عِندي إِذا ما جَسَّ كَفَّكَ وَالذِراعا وَلَو عَرَفَ الطَبيبُ دَواءَ داءٍ يَرُدُّ المَوتَ ما قاسى النِزاعا وَفي يَومِ المَصانِعِ قَد تَرَكنا لَنا بِفِعالِنا خَبَراً مُشاعا أَقَمنا بِالذَوابِلِ سوقَ حَربٍ وَصَيَّرنا النُفوسَ لَهَ مَتاعا حِصاني كانَ دَلّالَ المَنايا فَخاضَ غُبارَها وَشَرى وَباعَ وَسَيفي كانَ في الهَيجا طَبيباً يُداوي رَأسَ مَن يَشكو الصُداعا أَنا العَبدُ الَّذي خُبِّرتَ عَنهُ وَقَد عايَنتَني فَدَعِ السَماعا وَلَو أَرسَلتُ رُمحي مَع جَبانٍ لَكانَ بِهَيبَتي يَلقى السِباعا مَلَأتُ الأَرضَ خَوفًا مِن حُسامي وَخَصمي لَم يَجِد فيها اِتِّساعا إِذا الأَبطالُ فَرَّت خَوفَ بَأسي تَرى الأَقطارَ باعاً أَو ذِراعا __ عنترة بن شداد العبسي

كانت هناك لعنة الله ثم لعنة الملائكة وآدم ولعنة حواء وسلالتهما ولعنة الوالدين والعالم أجمعين؛ خُلِقت اللعنة أولًا.

To be bored is to feel consubstantial with the world.

the three graces, antonio canova.