second sense

Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; ...for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment,..

With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.

---Walter Pater, cited in Iris M.

In order to be free..you have to have your own hypothesis about what you are called to do, and follow it, not giving in to circumstances or complying with them. But that sort of freedom demands powerful inner resources, a high degree of self-awareness, a consciousness of your responsibility to yourself and therefore to other people.
---Tarkovsky.

Only a very small part of the art of being happy is an exact science.
---Stendhal, cited in Avner Offer.

Second takes, second spaces (Milosz, must I name you?). Not just the immediate sensation, 'experience', but sustained attention, the soft, slow-burning blue flame as well, habitual reflection (Adam Smith), disciplined freedom (Sen), the simple ordinary things,the background work that quietly goes on behind the scenes: goodness as a movement to the absolute, the sigh you don't hear.

The capacity, the fundamental human capacity, of revision, of second thoughts; the ability to distance oneself from one's immediate or urgent perceptions, to evaluate one's likes and dislikes. Or else, we'd just be happiness machines, swayed one way or the other by our 'interests' or pleasures. And could we, then, talk of qualitatively higher pleasures or would we be constrained to talk in terms of quantities (and who, then, would be doing the talking, one wonders)? Is experience, happiness, just mental satisfaction or does it open us out to a love of the world and other people?

I cannot imagine my life being so free that I could do what I wanted; I have to do what seems most important and necessary at any given stage.
---Tarkovsky.

But let's not talk of love and chains, and things we can't untie.