Prose

Arthur Schopenhauer - from "On Human Suffering"

“This is the mystery…it reveals to us that all those beings living at the present moment contain within them the actual germ of all which will live in the future, and that these therefore in a certain sense exist already. So that every animal in the full prime of life seems to call to us: ‘Why do you lament the transitoriness of living things? How could I exist if all those of my species which came before me had not died?’

However much the plays and the masks on the world’s stage may change it is always the same people who appear. We sit together and talk and grow excited, and our eyes glitter and our voices grow shriller: just so did others sit and talk a thousand years ago: it was the same thing, and it was the same people: and it will be just so a thousand years hence. The contrivance which prevents us from perceiving this is time.

John Berger, from "Ways of Seeing"

“If we accept that we can see that hill over there, we propose that from that hill we can be seen.
The reciprocal nature of vision is more fundamental than that of spoken dialogue.
And often dialogue is an attempt to verbalize this—an attempt to explain how, either metaphorically or literally, ‘you see things’, and an attempt to discover how ‘he sees things.’”

Rene Magritte - “The Interpretation of Dreams” - 1935

Agnolo Bronzino - “Venus, Cupid, Time, and Love” - 1545

Johannes Vermeer - “Maid with Milk Jug” - 1657

Paul Tillich on Courage (From, "The Courage to Be")

“…The aristocratic element in the doctrine of courage was preserved as well as restricted by Aristotle. The motive for withstanding pain and death courageously is, according to him, that it is noble to do so and base not to do so. The courageous man acts ‘for the sake of what is noble, for that is the aim of virtue.’ ‘Noble,’ in these and other passages, is the translation of kalós and “base” is the translation of aischró, words which usually are rendered by ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly.’ A beautiful or noble deed is a deed to be praised. Courage does what is to be praised and rejects what is to be despised. One praises that in which a being fulfills its potentialities or actualizes its perfections. Courage is the affirmation of one’s essential nature, one’s inner aim or entelechy, but it is an affirmation which has in itself the character of ‘in spite of.’ It includes the possible and, in some cases, the unavoidable sacrifice of elements which also belong to one’s being but which, if not sacrificed, would prevent us from reaching our actual fulfillment. This sacrifice may include pleasure, happiness, even one’s own existence. In any case it is praiseworthy, because in the act of courage the most essential part of our being prevails against the less essential. It is the beauty and goodness of courage that the good and the beautiful are actualized in it. Therefore it is noble.”

Arthur Schopenhauer on the soul, from "On The Suffering of the World"

The present has two halves: an objective and a subjective. The objective half alone has the intuition of time as its form and thus streams irresistibly away; the subjective half stands firm and thus is always the same. It is from this that there originates our lively recollection of what is long past and, despite our knowledge of the fleetingness of our existence, the consciousness of our immortality.

Whenever we may live we always stand, with our consciousness, at the central point of time, never at its termini, and we may deduce from that that each of us bears within him the unmoving mid-point of the whole of endless time. It is fundamentally this which gives us the confidence to live without being in continual dread of death.

He who, by virtue of the strength of his memory and imagination, can most clearly call up what is long past in his own life will be more conscious than others of the identity of all present moments throughout the whole of time. Through this consciousness of the identity of all present moments one apprehends that which is most fleeting of all, the moment, as that alone which persists. And he who, in such intuitive fashion, becomes aware that the present, which is in the strictest sense the sole form of reality, has its source in us, and thus arises from within and not from without, cannot doubt the indestructibility of his own being. He will understand, rather, that although when he dies the objective world, with the medium through which it presents itself, the intellect, will be lost to him, his existence will not be affected by it; for there has been as much reality within him as without.

From Thornton Wilder's "Our Town"

Now there are some things we all know, but we don't take'm out and look at ‘em very often. We all know that something is eternal. Arid it ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth, and it ain't even the stars ...

Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you'd be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There's something way down deep that's eternal about every human being.

You know as well as I do that the dead don't stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they lose hold of the earth ... and the ambitions they had ... and the pleasures they had ... and the things they suffered ... and the people they loved. They get weaned away from earth—that's the way I put it…weaned away.”

- Narrator’s monologue from Act III of “Our Town”, by Thornton Wilder

Mitya's Dream from "The Brothers Karamazov"

A strange, physical exhaustion was gaining mastery over him, growing as the time went by. His eyes were closing with weariness. At last the interrogation of the witnesses was over. They proceeded to the final drafting of the protocol. Mitya stood up, left his chair and went into the corner, over by the curtain, lay down on a large, rug-covered trunk that belonged to the landlord and in an instant fell asleep. He dreamed a strange dream, one quite inappropriate to the place and to the time. There he was, traveling in the steppes somewhere, in the place where he had served in the army long ago, in former days, and he was sitting in a car, drawn by a pair of horses, which a muzhik was driving into the sleet. Only Mitya was cold, it was the beginning of November, and the snow was falling in large wet flakes and falling to earth, instantly melting. And the muzhik was driving him cheerfully, brandishing his whip in marvelous style, his beard long and chestnut-colored, not really an old man, but perhaps about fifty, and wearing a grey muzhik zipun. And there not far away was a peasant village, one could see the izbas, black as black, and half of them had burned to the ground, only charred timbers stuck up here and there. And at the entry barrier there were peasant women standing along the road, many of them, an entire row, all of them thin and emaciated, with faces that looked somehow brownish. There, in particular, at the end of the row was one, a tall and bony woman who looked about forty, but might easily be no more than twenty, with a long, thin face and a baby crying in her arms, for her breasts must have withered and there was not a drop of milk in them. And the baby cried and cried, stretching out its bare little arms with pathetic small fists that were a kind of bluish color all over from the cold.

“Why are they crying? What are they crying for?” Mitya asked as they flew past the women in dashing style.
“It’s a bairn,” the yamshchik answered him, “it’s a bairn crying.” And Mitya was struck by the fact that the man had said it in his own, muzhik way: '“a bairn,” not “a baby.” And he liked it that the muzhik had said “bairn”: there seemed more pity in it.
“But why is it crying?” Mitya kept pressing, like one inane. “Why are its little arms bare, why is it not covered up?”
“Why, the bairn is chilled to the bone, its little clothes have frozen through, and don’t keep it warm.”
“But why has it happened? Why?” Mitya kept asking inanely.
“Why, they’re poor, burned out of everything, they’ve no bread, they’re begging for their burned-down site.”
“No, no,” Mitya said, still appearing not to understand. “What I want you to tell me is: why are those homeless mothers standing there, why is everyone poor, why is the bairn wretched, why is the steppe barren, why do they not embrace one another, kiss one another, why do they not sing songs of joy, why are they blackened so by black misfortune, why is the bairn not fed?”

And he felt to himself that although he was asking these questions wildly, without rhyme or reason, he could not prevent himself asking them in just that form, and that that was the form in which they must be asked. And he also felt rising within his heart a tender piety he had never experienced before, felt that he wanted to weep, that he wanted to do something for them all, so that the bairn should not cry any more, so that the bairn’s withered, poverty-blackened mother should not weep, so that no one should have any tears at all from that moment on, and to do this immediately, without delay and without regard to any obstacle, with all the impetuosity of the Karamazovs.

“And I shall come with you, I shell never leave you now, I shall walk with you all my life,” the dear, heartfelt words of Grushenka sounded beside him.
'“What is it you say? Walk where?” he exclaimed, opening his eyes and sitting up on his trunk, every bit like someone who has recovered from a swoon, and smiling radiantly. Over him stood Nikolay Parfenovich, inviting him to attend the reading of the protocol, and sign it. Mitya realized that he had slept for an hour or more, but he paid no attention to Nikolay Parfenovich. He was suddenly struck by the fact that beneath his head there was a pillow that had not been there when he had subsided in exhaustion upon the trunk.

“Who put a pillow under my head? Who was that kind person?” he exclaimed with a kind of ecstatic, grateful emotion and in a voice that almost wept, as though God only knew what boon had been accorded him. The kind person remained unknown even later, though it was possibly one of the muzhiks, or possibly Nikolay Parvenovich’s little scribe who had found him a pillow out of compassion, but Mitya’s entire soul was as if shaken by sobs and tears. He approached the table and declared that he would sign whatever was required.

“I had a good dream, gentlemen,” he declared somehow strangely, with a face somehow new, as though illumined by joy.


- From Book IX of The Brothers Karamazov

Dostoyevsky on Love

“O brothers, love is an instructress, but one must know how to acquire her, for she is acquired with effort, purchased dearly, by long labour and over a long season, for it is not simply for a casual moment that one must love, but for the whole of the appointed season.”

- The Elder Zosima, in “The Brothers Karamazov”

From Martin Buber's "I and Thou"

“Man receives, and what he receives is not a ‘content’ but a presence, a presence as strength…Nothing, nothing can henceforth be meaningless. The question about the meaning of life has vanished. But if it were still there, it would not require an answer. You do not know how to point to or define the meaning, you lack any formula or image for it, and yet it is more certain for you than the sensations of your senses. What could it intend with us, what does it desire from us, being revealed and surreptitious? It does not wish to be interpreted by us—for that we lack the ability—only to be done by us. This comes third: it is not the meaning of ‘another life’ but that of this our life, not that of a ‘beyond’ but of this our world, and it wants to be demonstrated by us in this life and this world. The meaning can be received but not experienced; it cannot be experienced, but it can be done; and this is what it intends with us.”

The Elder's Speech to Alyosha, from "The Brothers Karamazov"

"...What is wrong? For the present you do not belong here. I give you my blessing for your great task of obedience in the world at large. You have much traveling yet to do. And you will have to get married, you will have to. You will have to endure everything before you return again. And there will be much work to do. But I have faith in you, and that is why I am sending you. With you is Christ. Cherish him and he will cherish you. You will behold great woe and in that woe you will be happy. Here is my behest to you: in woe seek happiness. Work, work untiringly.”

On Alyosha, from "The Brothers Karamazov"

“Before anything else I declare that this youth, Alyosha, was in no sense a fanatic, nor even in my opinion at any rate a mystic at all. I shall state in advance my complete opinion: he was simply an early lover of mankind, and if he had struck out along the monastery road it was only because it had at that time made a strong impression on him and presented itself to him, so to speak, as an ideal of deliverance for his soul, straining as it was out of the murk of worldly hatred unto the light of love.”

Hagia Sophia / Matthias Enard's "Compass"

"I was corresponding regularly with Sarah, postcards of the Hagia Sophia, seen from the Golden Horn. As Grillparzer said in his travel journal, 'There may be nothing like it in the whole world.' He describes, enthralled, the succession of monuments, palaces, villages, the power of this site that struck me fully too and filled me with energy, so open is this city, a wound in the sea, a gash engulfed by beauty; to stroll through Istanbul was, whatever the goal of one's expedition, a wrenching of beauty on the frontier--whether you regard Constantinople as the easternmost city in Europe or the westernmost city in Asia, as an end or a beginning, as a bridge or a border, this mixed nature is fractured by nature, and the place weighs on history as history itself weighs on humans."

- From “Compass” - Mathias Enard

From "Sons and Lovers" - D.H. Lawrence

“The Easter holidays began happily. Paul was his own frank self. Yet Miriam felt it would go wrong. On the Sunday afternoon she stood at her bedroom window, looking across at the oak-trees of the wood, in whose branches a twilight was tangled, below the bright sky of the afternoon. Grey-green rosettes of honeysuckle leaves hung before the window, some already, she fancied, showing bud. It was spring, which she loved and dreaded.”

Hunter Thompson, from "Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl"

“There is some kind of back-door connection in my head between Super Bowls and the Allman Brothers—a strange kind of theme-sound that haunts these goddamn stories no matter where I’m finally forced into a corner to write them. The Allman sound, and rain. There was heavy rain, last year, on the balcony of my dim-lit hotel room just down from the Sunset Strip in Hollywood…And more rain through the windows of the San Francisco office building where I finally typed out “the story.”

And now, almost exactly a year later, my main memory of Super Bowl VIII in Houston is rain and grey mist outside another hotel window, with the same strung-out sound of the Allman Brothers booming out of the same portable speakers that I had, last year, in Los Angeles.”

From "Crossroads" - Jonathan Franzen

“As she sat with him now and received the word of God, muted but not defeated by Dwight Haefle’s delivery of it, she wondered what the purpose of a person’s life was. Almost everything in life was vanity—success a vanity, privilege a vanity, Europe a vanity, beauty a vanity. When you stripped away the vanity and stood alone before God, what was left? Only loving your neighbor as yourself. Only worshipping the Lord, Sunday after Sunday. Even if you lived for eighty years, the duration of a life was infinitesimal, your eighty years of Sundays were over in a blink. Life had no length; only in depth was there salvation.”

- Jonathan Franzen

From "A Fan's Notes" - Frederick Exley

"I tried a number of places in Watertown before settling on The Parrot; though it was not exactly the cathedral I would have wished for, it was--like certain old limestone churches scattered throughout the north country--not without its quaint charms. It was ideally located on a hill above the city; sitting at the bar I was seldom aware of the city's presence, and when I was, I could think of it as a nostalgic place beneath me, a place with elm trees and church towers and bone-clean streets; sitting at the bar, the city could be thought of as a place remembered, and remembered as if from a great distance….

Sunday afternoons, with the music stilled and the blinds thrown open allowing the golden autumn sunlight to diffuse and warm the room, I would stand at the bar and sip my Budweiser, my 'tapering-off' device; munch popcorn from wooden bowls; and in league with the bartender Freddy, whose allegiance to the Giants was only somewhat less feverish than mine, cheer my team home. Invariably and desperately I wished that the afternoon, the game, the light would never end.”  

   - Frederick Exley, 1968

Gaith Abdul-Ahad on the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein

“…So the Americans came to my street, near what is called the National Theatre square, which is just down the road. I started following these American troops, and they all congregated in this square where the statue was standing, but also where all the media were stationed at the time, the big media, and the TV crew. So we were a small group of Iraqis and a much larger group of foreign journalists. The Iraqis were trying to topple the statue, and an hour and a half later, they hadn’t done much beyond smashing some marble tiles. That’s the moment when the Americans decide to reverse one of these huge amphibious vehicles and use the crane on the back to pull down the statue.

And of course, I cringed because anyone who reads history, you realize, this is the moment that should have been the Iraqi moment. It had to be an Iraqi moment if you want to maintain that charade of freedom of the people kind of toppling their own statue. So the Americans pulling the statue was the first cringing moment. The second moment was when the Marine who climbed up and put the big noose around the statue’s head pulled out an American flag and draped it around Saddam’s head.

At that time, I was like, “oh, no, don’t do that.” This is the moment that we’ll be playing again and again on TV cameras. That’s it. This is an American war. Since then, I came to realize that that Marine was more honest than any politician or any pundit ever because he saw the war as a conflict between his army, the United States Army, and Iraq. He didn’t see it as a war of liberation or freedom. It was his right to pull out his own flag as a person who’s been fighting all the way to Baghdad. And I think his act was honest. But of course, that sealed that intention in the eyes of many.”

from https://lithub.com/20-years-after-the-invasion-ghaith-abdul-ahad-on-iraqi-perspectives-on-the-war-and-what-western-media-missed/