'...that calm so propitious for work and for discipline of the mind seems to me one of the richest results of love.'
M. Yourcenar.
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Well, finished the book last night. Not going to put (m)any quotes up since I've grown sceptical of the whole process of taking out startling lines, reflections, from their context. It would be a bit like looking at a person and trying to excuse or put to one side all the boring, pedestrian and routine things that person thought and did and instead focus on the more interesting or "best" ones.
I suppose there's a poetic impulse to find the one true word, the revelatory moment, the quintessential. Religion, too, in its own way strives for the 'one thing needful', that magnetic impulse that turns us like a clock, until we point true north. The role of the emperor/emperor-mind is, perhaps, to take it all in, to look back on one's life with a different cast of mind, one that is more capacious, more prone to see the mistakes, the lesser qualities and perhaps even the accidents of time and personality as also somehow being part of the fabric of a lived life and indispensable to the meaning of it.
One looks back and says, yes, this was me. That includes the disorder and the regrets, for sure. Not an acceptance, but not a revolt either. The true image is not one that discards longing...
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Instead, some of her fascinating notes on the composition of the book:
Still living in a past time, a time that has died.
The point of view of the man who accepts all experience.
That break in continuity...was necessary in order to force me into trying to bridge not only the distance which separated me from Hadrian, but, above all, the distance which separated me from myself.
Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one's own self without thought of profit.
Everything that the world, and I, had gone through in the interval now seemed to enrich these chronicles of an earlier age...
A controlled delirium..a constant participation, as intensely aware as possible, in that which has been.
What is ever left but crumbled walls, or masses of shade?
The road of return toward one particular point in time. Keep one's own shadow out of the picture; leave the mirror clean of the mist of one's own breath; take only what is most essential and durable in us, in the emotions aroused by the senses or in the operations of the mind, as our point of contact with those men who, like us, nibbled olives and drank wine...who fought bitter winds and blinding rain, or in summer sought the plane tree's shade; who took their pleasures, thought their own thoughts, grew old, and died.
The human substance and structure hardly change...
M. Yourcenar.
|||
Well, finished the book last night. Not going to put (m)any quotes up since I've grown sceptical of the whole process of taking out startling lines, reflections, from their context. It would be a bit like looking at a person and trying to excuse or put to one side all the boring, pedestrian and routine things that person thought and did and instead focus on the more interesting or "best" ones.
I suppose there's a poetic impulse to find the one true word, the revelatory moment, the quintessential. Religion, too, in its own way strives for the 'one thing needful', that magnetic impulse that turns us like a clock, until we point true north. The role of the emperor/emperor-mind is, perhaps, to take it all in, to look back on one's life with a different cast of mind, one that is more capacious, more prone to see the mistakes, the lesser qualities and perhaps even the accidents of time and personality as also somehow being part of the fabric of a lived life and indispensable to the meaning of it.
One looks back and says, yes, this was me. That includes the disorder and the regrets, for sure. Not an acceptance, but not a revolt either. The true image is not one that discards longing...
|| |
Instead, some of her fascinating notes on the composition of the book:
Still living in a past time, a time that has died.
The point of view of the man who accepts all experience.
That break in continuity...was necessary in order to force me into trying to bridge not only the distance which separated me from Hadrian, but, above all, the distance which separated me from myself.
Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one's own self without thought of profit.
Everything that the world, and I, had gone through in the interval now seemed to enrich these chronicles of an earlier age...
A controlled delirium..a constant participation, as intensely aware as possible, in that which has been.
What is ever left but crumbled walls, or masses of shade?
The road of return toward one particular point in time. Keep one's own shadow out of the picture; leave the mirror clean of the mist of one's own breath; take only what is most essential and durable in us, in the emotions aroused by the senses or in the operations of the mind, as our point of contact with those men who, like us, nibbled olives and drank wine...who fought bitter winds and blinding rain, or in summer sought the plane tree's shade; who took their pleasures, thought their own thoughts, grew old, and died.
The human substance and structure hardly change...
2 comments:
"I've grown sceptical of the whole process of taking out startling lines, reflections, from their context" ---
(taking out this line from its context)
you're right of course, but then again; I find it hard to fight off the urge to mark the 'startling line', to signal (if only to oneself) the flash of insight.
yes, same here, fff. but when i think about it, part of what makes certain lines so arresting is their place in the wider text...it's only against the background, where 'nothing happens', that they really strike one.
but we live in a fragmented age, fragmentary times...
orr?
Hope all is well?
b.
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