Durer's Eyes

The way in which we draw boundaries around things, how we define the limits, the periphery, tells us what we are, what is.

We need to set up and maintain all that is not-I, all that is of lesser value and reality. How we need those barbarians!

The depth of reason is only realised in the play against what it is not-unreason, madness, precisely. And the supra-rational?

Madness: A new rite of exclusion, an expression of the desire to set apart the impure, the corrupted-whether in body or mind...

Leonardo: he was interested in everything because he was interested in nothing..

Durer: Restless, nervous energy. Lacking all self-repose. A life on the edge of a precipice, and one that understands just how precarious this is; far too aware of itself, in fact, to be at peace.

It's comforting talking about madness-especially if one isn't mad oneself. The genius of the Romantics against the philistines; mountain people vs the plains.

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The problem with mad people is that they look at the world too intensely. Searching for a pattern when they need to let go. How many of Europe's leading lights ended up crazy: Cantor, Nietzsche, Van Gogh...

To be small and stay small

"Assuredly there exists ..work of the kind one can do in a dream? I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese, that is to say, a person who dreams everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid."

From a Boat Trip:

"Odd similarity between things at rest and things flowing occurred to me during the trip that I, too, participated in and would have been delighted to have been as fascinating a storyteller as one person there..here and there fish, driven it seemed by an uncontrollable curiosity, bobbed upward from the depths to visibility, as though wishing to help the listeners be satisfied with the tale. On fish one finds no arms. Is this why they have such huge eyes and expressive mouths?...

A girl sitting with us on the boat compared traveling over the water to the imperceptible gliding and progress of growth, that of fruit for example, which perhaps would have little desire to ripen if it knew to what end."

Walser remains for the last 27 years of his life in an asylum; there is a black and white photograph..'footprints in the snow lead to tall man lying with one arm thrown behind his head, for all the world as if his last gesture had been to toss off the hat that lies a few feet away.'

Smallness, as a way of resisting power, transcending it; but something more: the understanding that a life may always be destined to be small in many ways. A refuge, yes, a way of going unnoticed, yes, but one also wants to be recognized, seek out a witness to the words we scrawl between the lines. Our own personal lives will always be small in the vastness of time. It may be comforting to think that nothing matters, but it may also be a thought full of sadness.

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A common thread: hats, of course! 

Freud's father...anti-semitism