Conatus

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right. — Søren Kierkegaard, either/or.

"Oh, the brilliant wretchedness, the weariness, that one is doomed to witness among the silly people whom we meet in society here! The ambition of rank! How they watch, how they toil, to gain precedence! What poor and contemptible passions are displayed in their utter nakedness!" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"My soul is nothing now but the dream dreamt by matter struggling with itself."

«لسنا نحن من يفهمُ الموسيقى—بل هي التي تفهمُنا. وهذا يصدقُ على الموسيقيّ كما يصدقُ على العامّيّ. وحين نظنّ أنّنا بلغنا منها غايةَ القرب، تُخاطبُنا، وتنتظرُ منّا—بعينين حزينتين—أن نُجيب.» — ثيودور أدورنو.

Every word written here, unless enclosed in quotation marks or attributed to another, is my own. Across the years, no man has been so plundered or plagiarized as I. One must possess a tremendous fountain of productivity and inner wealth not to be troubled by such a spectacle; yet what repulses me more is the childishness of those who, lacking belief in themselves, seek to drape the cloak of sagacity over their shoulders by theft, alas; The insignificance of those who steal compels one to remain silent; yet, on the other hand, I would be almost joyous to witness a significant individual steal—ah!

Sadness, scarab with seven crippled feet, spiderweb egg, scramble-brained rat, bitch's skeleton: No entry here. Don't come in. Go away. Go back south with your umbrella, go back north with your serpent's teeth. A poet lives here. No sadness may cross this threshold. Through these windows comes the breath of the world, fresh red roses, flags embroidered with the victories of the people. No. No entry. Flap your bat's wings, I will trample the feathers that fall from your mantle, I will sweep the bits and pieces of your carcass to the four corners of the wind, I will wring your neck, I will stitch your eyelids shut, I will sew your shroud, sadness, and bury your rodent bones beneath the springtime of an apple tree. — Pablo Neruda

The Aegean Sea (Frederic Edwin Church, c. 1877).

You are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove to you that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your ­pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your broken-down marriages, your birth-control, that is bleeding you from the bottom and killing you off at the top in your brains—I can prove to you that those were characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient States—Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome. — Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West.

Relishing the sound of rain is among the oldest of human joys, a quiet festival once shared by the farmer, who heard in it the extinction of famine, the swelling of rivers, and the universe, as it were, bestowing its own blessing upon itself.

beethoven listening to a muse, ludovic alleaume, 1928.

"I shall seize fate by the throat; it shall certainly never wholly overcome me." — Beethoven.

The power of the word lies not in the objective semantics of its expression, but in the subjective force of the spirit that utters it, within whose presence a delicate web of inward life is crystallized.

prometheus bound by scott eaton.

for a democratic community there is always certain danger of barbarians; but these are sought only down below. There is also another kind of barbarians who come from the heights: a kind of conquering and ruling natures, which are in search of material that they can mould. Prometheus was a barbarian of this stamp.

By indulging in the unrestrained provision of sensory experience, a man becomes increasingly eager, ever more driven to expand the domain of his senses beyond what he has hitherto attained. He begins to seek out the strange, the exotic, and even the morbid within the field of sensation, demanding, as it were, the full compendium of possible human experience. In so doing, he gradually loses his taste for what is merely natural, and his whole life becomes oriented toward the perceptual alone, whose field he strives to exhaust. A spasm of the imagination then takes hold of him, and a gulf is opened between himself and his intellect; for, having surrendered to the manifold excesses of sense, he disturbs the harmony that must subsist between sensation and thought. From this disturbance follows a decline: his intellectual powers grow faint, that is if they have developed to a sufficient degree, and even his imagination, once inflamed, begins to wane, for he no longer exercises it as a living faculty, but only as a passive response to stimuli; he cannot summon it from within, having neglected the discipline required for its growth and refinement. Such a man comes at last to possess only a weakened capacity for reflection or sustained reading, unless words themselves act as crude provocations, summoning coarse and immediate images to his mind. Otherwise, they fail to move him. The sudden and continuous irruption of images, so characteristic of the age of social media, marks, in this sense, not an advance but a regression: an atavistic return to an earlier stage of human development, in which images reigned before the full formation of intellect, of concept, and of the sovereignty of the word, when prehistoric man lived almost entirely within a world of images, a dream world even in its vigilance, such endless eruptions have nothing to do with any higher striving to ennoble perception; rather, they sink indiscriminately to a depth without bottom, absorbing alike the noble and the base without distinction. Deprived of reflection, the very ground by which impressions take root, they do not expand the life of the senses, but vulgarize it.

Arnold Böcklin - "Villa by the Sea".

Arnold Böcklin - "Landscape with Castle Ruins" (1847).

Isle of the Dead Arnold Böcklin.