There was very lately a lad in the University of Oxford, who was by his poverty forced to leave his studies there; and at last to join himself to a company of vagabond gypsies. Among these extravagant people, by the insinuating subtility of his carriage, he quickly got so much of their love and esteem as that they discovered to him their mystery. After he had been a pretty while exercised in the trade, there happened to ride by a couple of scholars, who had formerly been of his acquaintance. They quickly spied out their old friend among the gypsies; and he gave them an account of the necessity which drove him to that kind of life, and told them that the people he went with were not such impostors as they were taken for, but that they had a traditional kind of learning among them, and could do wonders by the power of imagination, their fancy binding that of others: that himself had learned much of their art, and when he had compassed the whole secret, he intended, he said, to leave their company, and give the world an account of what he had learned.

___________

Learned Faustus,
To find the secrets of astronomy
Graven in the book of Jove’s high firmament,
Did mount himself to scale Olympus’ top.
Where sitting in a chariot burning bright
Drawn by the strength of yokéd dragons’ necks,
He views the clouds, the planets, and the stars,
The tropics, zones, and quarters of the sky
From the bright circle of the hornéd moon
Even to the height of Primum Mobile; —

___________

I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s
I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.

___________

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I’m coming now, I’m coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan
Then we take Berlin.

___________

La vita nuova.

___________

Gosse on Biathanatos: “There is prefixed an enormous list of nearly a hundred authorities quoted in the body of the work, among them being such names as those of Schlusselburgius and Pruckmannus, at which the modern eye gazes with respectful awe.”

___________

At the Volksschule he had been considered slow; at the Luitpold Gymnasium he was thought impudent. His classmates called him “Biedermeier”, which roughly translated meant “wonk” or “nerd.” The antipathy was mutual.

___________

It hath been observed by wise and considering men that wealth hath seldom been the portion, and never the mark to discover good people; but that Almighty God, who disposeth all things wisely, hath of his abundant goodness denied it — He only knows why — to many whose minds he hath enriched with the greater blessings of knowledge and virtue, as the fairer testimonies of his love to mankind.

___________

Whether it happens that such a principle really exists, and even that we succeed in uncovering it from its cloak of fog, or that it recedes as we pursue it and ends up vanishing like a Fata Morgana, I find in it for my part a force of motivation, a rare fascination, perhaps similar to that of dreams. No doubt that following such an unformulated call, the unformulated seeking form, from an elusive glimpse which seems to take pleasure in simultaneously hiding and revealing itself — can only lead far, though no one could predict where ...

___________

When he worships his favorites among the immortals, Mozart, perhaps, he always looks at him in the long run through bourgeois eyes. His tendency is to explain Mozart’s perfected being, just as a schoolmaster would, as a supreme and special gift rather than as the outcome of his immense powers of surrender and suffering, of his indifference to the ideals of the bourgeois, and of his patience under that last extremity of loneliness which rarifies the atmosphere of the bourgeois world to an ice-cold ether, around those who suffer to become men, that loneliness of the Garden of Gethsemane.

___________

Ahab to Starbuck: “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting though the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall... .”

___________

For, we hardly discover a sin, when it is but an omission of some good, and no accusing act: with this or the former I have often suspected myself to be overtaken; which is, with an overearnest desire of the next life: and, though I know it is not merely a weariness of this, because I had the same desire when I went with the tide, and enjoyed fairer hopes than I now do; yet I doubt worldly troubles have increased it: ’tis now spring, and all the pleasures of it displease me; every other tree blossoms, and I wither; I grow older, and not better; my strength diminisheth, and my load grows heavier; and yet I would fain be or do something; but that I cannot tell what, is no wonder in this time of my sadness; for to choose is to do: but to be no part of any body is as to be nothing: and so I am, and shall so judge myself, unless I could be so incorporated into a part of the world, as by business to contribute some sustentation to the whole. This I made account: I began early, when I understood the study of our laws; but was diverted by leaving that, and embracing the worst voluptuousness, an hydroptic immoderate desire of human learning and languages; beautiful ornaments indeed to men of great fortunes, but mine was grown so low as to need an occupation; which I thought I entered well into, when I subjected myself to such a service as I thought might exercise my poor abilities; and there I stumbled, and fell too; and now I am become so little, or such a nothing, that I am not a subject good enough for one of my own letters.

___________

— Unhappy man, said Candide, I too have had some experience of this love, the sovereign of hearts, the soul of our souls; and it never got me anything but a single kiss and twenty kicks in the rear.

___________

Moreover I have felt the pang; and he who has suffered, as they say, is willing to tell his fellow-sufferers only, as they alone will be likely to understand him, and will not be extreme in judging of the sayings or doings which have been wrung from his agony... . Therefore listen and excuse my doings then and my sayings now. But let the attendants and other profane and unmannered persons close the doors of their ears.

___________

Wittgenstein to Russell, 3/25/16: “What I feel is the curse of all those who have got only half a talent; it is like a man who leads you along a dark corridor with a light and just when you are in the middle of it the light goes out and you are left alone.”

___________

Though he was greatly drawn to art and history, he scarcely hesitated over the choice of a career. He thought that art was no more a vocation than innate cheerfulness or melancholy was a profession.

___________

“...to set on foote the opinion of Copernicus, that the earth did goe round and the heavens stand stil; wheras in truth it was his own head which rather did run round, & his braines did not stand stil...”

___________

Le Bret: But this mode of life
Where will it lead you? and what is your plan?

Cyrano: I wandered in a maze; too many courses
And too bewildering, there were to choose.
I’ve chosen—

Le Bret: What?

Cyrano: Oh, far the simplest one.
I have resolved in all things to excel!

___________

These words we say and hear, and we are understood and we understand. They are quite commonplace and ordinary, and still the meaning of these things lies deeply hid and its discovery is still to come.

___________

Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it even with the best right but without inner constraint proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring to the point of recklessness. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life brings with it in any case, not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes lonely, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing one like that comes to grief, this happens so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it nor sympathize. And he cannot go back any longer. Nor can he go back to the pity of men. —

___________

God loved the world, he thought, to have put a girl like that in it.

___________

Johnson to Boswell, 4/5/76: No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

___________

“Do you know that we are both children of the devil?” — “Yes, that is what we are. The devil is the spirit, and we are both his unhappy children. We have fallen out of nature and hang suspended in space. …”

___________

“What can he be doing here, in this Land That Time Forgot?!”

___________

Prince Myshkin on the progress of his illness: “...the logical sequence of my thoughts seemed broken. I could not follow the sequence of events consecutively for more than two or three days. So it seems to me now. But when my attacks abated, I became well again... . I remember I felt terribly sad. I felt like crying. I was in a constant state of wonder and anxiety. What affected me most was that everything seemed strange... . The thing that aroused me was the braying of an ass in the marketplace. I was quite extraordinarily struck with the ass, and for some reason very pleased with it, and at once everything in my head cleared up.”

___________

— ensconced then in Durance Vile, a condominium development upon the east side —

___________

For the intense yearning which each of them has for the other does not appear to be the desire of intercourse, but of something else which the soul desires and can not tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment.

___________

The sensuous awakens, not yet to movement, but to hushed tranquillity, not to joy and gladness, but to a deep melancholy. Desire is not yet awake, it is only a gloomy foreboding. In desire there is always present the object of desire... . The object of desire does not fade away, nor does it elude desire’s embrace, for then indeed desire would awaken; but it is, without being desired, present to desire, which just because of this becomes melancholy because it cannot come to the point of desiring.

___________

— So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein — More, far more, will I achieve: treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore new powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.

I closed not my eyes that night.

___________

Awed by the immensity of the universe, the two at the window were silent, not with the silence of embarrassment but with that of two friends in the presence of a thing far beyond the reach of words. As they stared out into infinity, each felt as never before the pitiful smallness of the whole world they had known, and the insignificance of human beings and their works....

“How stupendous....how unbelievably great this is....” Margaret whispered. “How vastly greater than any perception one could possibly get on Earth....and yet....”

She paused, with her lip caught under two white teeth, then went on, hesitatingly, “But doesn’t it seem to you, Mr. Crane, that there is something in man as great as even all this? That there must be, or Dorothy and I could not be sailing out here in such a wonderful thing as this Skylark, which you and Dick Seaton have made?”

___________

This is the monstruosity in love, lady, that the will is infinite and the execution confin’d, that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit.

___________

But they say that beyond the eighth sphere there are no objects, no places, not even empty space into which the sky could expand —

___________

In that awful moment before Seaton could shut off his power it seemed to him that space itself must be obliterated by the very concentration of the unknowable and incalculable forces there unleashed — must be swallowed up and lost in the utterly indescribable brilliance of the field of radiance driven to a distance of millions upon incandescent millions of miles from the place where the last representatives of the monstrous civilization of the Fenachrone had made their last stand against the forces of Universal Peace.



“Ah! he had the mind of Aristotle, the countenance of Alcibiades, the dork of Hercules...but he picked his nose with his thumb”—

___________

“A former Miss Galaxy; perhaps it had something to do with the prominence of her globular clusters —”

___________

“I travelled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhasa, and spending some days with the head lama. You may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I am sure that it never occurred to you that you were receiving news of your friend.”

___________

Los Angeles is destroyed by an earthquake. It warms my heart to see it. Chaos, conflagration, cataclysm. Broken glass rains down on shattered streets. Woman, children, corporate executives run gibbering through the ruins, pursued by the minions of catastrophe: mad slavering dogs, crazed soldiers with martial-law complexes. A wall of water at the last, as the dam bursts. The storm drains are flooded; I wonder whether this finishes off the last of the giant ants.

And here’s the end. When Charlton Heston dies, you know the movie’s over.

Who was that girl?

___________

[Dear, etc.]

Ah, God’s mercy on a poor hippie boy. — Victoria, Victoria. — an evening lost to ennui, becalmed before the babbling screen of the detested idiot box, and then this, this searing bolt from the ozone. Victoria. Let me breathe your name, though this breath be my last: Victoria. — Am I breathing it correctly? — If I exhaled too quickly, ’twas but a measure of my passion. Victoria.

But ah! your hair, your eyes, your ears, your nose, your throat. And, zounds, what knockers. Ah, Victoria. Perhaps I digress.

And for myself? ah, little can be said. A European adventurer of mysterious antecedents, independently wealthy, though the source of my means must be left in tantalizing obscurity, I am dashingly handsome, a natural athlete, and renowned for my cultivation and my wit in every salon on the Continent. I drive a D Jaguar, play the violin [a Stradivarius given me by Jascha Heifetz], and smoke four packs of Balkan Sobranies a day with no apparent ill effects. I am told my dress displays a casual elegance: my mother was a tailor; she sewed these new blue jeans. My father was a gambler, Lord, but that leads us too far astray. Pursued by the agents of a diabolical genius whose plot against the fabric of civilization I had foiled in the very nick of time, I was forced to travel incognito two years among the Himalayas; you may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson. For a season thereafter I toured from England under the name of Jeff Beck. But what of that. It is said that I hold an uncanny power of attraction over women; this I would not credit, were it not the case that I cannot venture into Woolworth’s, lest the checkout girls attempt to jam their hands down my pants. I never eat muscatel grapes. Myself and a chosen band of twenty, who would, as I guess it, follow me to Hades, yea, Lubbock, gave I but the word, have engaged these last few months in spiriting French aristos from the shadow of the guillotine, this beneath the very noses of Republican agents. I’ve been consulted by Richard P./Murray Gell-Mann had me for tea/Still I’m broken-hearted/How can I get started/With you? Victoria.

What use this senseless overweening passion? What use this facile flow of words you’re destined not to hear? Ah, Victoria. I’ll be all right when the swelling goes down. — But let us meet, though it be at the ends of the Earth. I hope those ends are yours. — Until then I remain:

Your tumescent admirer, etc.

___________

In the blackbody shop, mechanic Max Planck inspects a defective radiator.

___________

Grunthe to Salther: The Pole is a point of relativity. Principles are valid under the assumption that the conditions exist for which they have been established; this is especially relevant to the determination of space and time. At the Pole these conditions do not apply. Or shall we say they are suspended? Here there are no points of the compass. Here there is also no time of the day. Here, therefore, all principles are either valid together or not at all. We have reached the point of complete indifference to definitions, we have arrived at the ideal of impartiality.

___________

When they were one evening together at the Miss Cotterells’, the then Duchess of Argyle and another lady of high rank came in. Johnson thinking that the Miss Cotterells were too much engrossed by them, and that he and his friend were neglected, as low company of whom they were somewhat ashamed, grew angry; and resolving to shock their supposed pride, by making their great visitors imagine that he and his friend were low indeed, he addressed himself in a loud tone to Mr. Reynolds, saying, “How much do you think that you and I could get in a week, if we were to work as hard as we could?” —as if they had been common mechanicks.

___________

Paradox VI. That it is possible to find some virtue in women.

I am not of that seared impudence that I dare defend women, or pronounce them good; yet we see physicians allow some virtue in every poison. Alas! why should we except women? since certainly they are good for physic at least, so as some wine is good for a fever. And though they be the occasioners of many sins, they are also the punishers and revengers of the same sins: for I have seldom seen one who consumes his substance and body upon them, escapes diseases or beggary; and this is their justice —

___________

[Wally:] The life of a playwright is tough. It’s not easy, as some people seem to think. You work hard writing plays, and nobody puts them on. You take up other lines of work to try to make a living — acting, in my case — and people don’t hire you. So you spend your days crossing the city back and forth doing the errands of your trade. Today wasn’t any easier than any other day. I’d had to be up by ten to make some important phone calls, then I’d gone to the stationary store to buy envelopes, and then to the xerox shop. There were dozens of things to do. By five o’clock I’d finally made it to the post office and mailed off several copies of my plays, meanwhile checking constantly with my answering service to see if my agent had called with any acting work. In the morning, the mailbox had been stuffed with bills. What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to pay them? After all, I was doing my best. ... I’ve lived in this city all my life. I grew up on the Upper East Side, and when I was ten years old I was rich, I was an aristocrat, riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort, and all I thought about was art and music. Now I’m thirty-six, and all I think about is money.

___________

The “morbid melancholy”, which was lurking in his constitution, and to which we may ascribe those particularities, and that aversion to regular life, which, at a very early period, marked his character, gathered such strength in his twentieth year, as to afflict him in a dreadful manner. While he was at Lichfield, in the college vacation of the year 1729, he felt himself overwhelmed with a horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience, and with a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery. From this dismal malady he never afterwards was perfectly relieved... . He told Mr. Paradise that he was sometimes so languid and inefficient, that he could not distinguish the hour upon the town-clock.

___________

New Year’s morning at the Flagstaff House


___________

One feels as Cavalieri must have felt, calculating the volume of a pyramid before the invention of the calculus.

___________

Ares at last has quit the field...

___________

But who shall dwell in those vast bodies, earths, worlds, if they be inhabited? “Rational creatures?” as Kepler demands, “or have they souls to be saved? or do they inhabit a better part of the world than we do? Are we or they lords of creation?”

___________

As one broods over these queer collections, it seems easier to understand — with an understanding which is not, I hope, distorted in the other direction — this strange spirit, who was tempted by the Devil to believe at the time when within these walls he was solving so much, that he could reach all the secrets of God and Nature by the pure power of mind — Copernicus and Faustus in one.

___________

The Adventures of Greta Garbonzo:

“Ah, Catrina! Could words but express my feelings at the sight of a familiar face, after so many sweating moons of weary wandering! — Since first I donned my traveling shoes and set forth to seek my fortune, the way has been long and dark and hard and fraught with unending peril — Such Sturm! such Drang! such pitiable Angst! — No sooner had I crossed my doorstep than a malign band of dwarves seized me as hostage and held me for a ransom. I escaped their clammy clutches, but then in the Dardanelles was taken by pirates. In the Andes I stumbled on a Lost City; an ancient prophesy had foretold the coming of a White Goddess from the North, and I was seized upon by the natives as she; made princess, doted on by a wise and ancient Grand Vizier, attended by a loyal guard of batmen, betrayed by a wicked High Priest who sought to twist the ancient truths to his own advantage, swallowed up by a rebellion of the High Priest’s minions, cast then into the stinking dungeons, those reeking pits in the palace depths whence none had ever returned, nay, not in twice ten thousand years, there beset by nameless beasts and creatures of the nether void that ever shun the light; rescued then by a brave European adventurer who flung me onto his dirigible at the last moment as he seemed to be engulfed by a horde of the High Priest’s bestial henchmen. In Columbia I scored ten kilos of cocaine, which with the aid of desperate band of smugglers I brought into this country, making a fortune I then squandered at Monte Carlo, necessitating my becoming a topless baccarat dealer. There it was the Count found me, and made me his mistress; together we dwelt in his summer home upon the Riviera, until one night I awoke, uneasy, troubled to my very bowels by foreboding, and found him humping a sheep in the sauna bath. Then I took the Orient Express to Istanbul, where I was kidnapped and sold in the market as a slave; long did I languish in the harem of Turim Bey, the infamous Buccaneer of Thebes. Nightly was I compelled to tell him a story, lest he cut my throat and feed me to the fishes; then one night I told him the one about Captain Bill and he laughed himself to death. Thus did I escape, joining an expedition to the Himalayas. Atop K2 my fellows were buried by an avalanche; I thought myself lost, and surely would have perished had I not been adopted by a tribe of Yeti, among whom I lived as one of their own until spring, when I bade them farewell, taking only a few of their genuine native handwoven blankets, which I was able to barter in Rangoon for passage on a clipper bound for Hatteras. Near Hawaii we were shipwrecked; for days I lay half-conscious, consumed by thirst and prey to hallucination, lashed to spar broken loose from the wreck; then at last a band of surfers found me, brought me to the shore, and taught me the bass parts to “Pipeline”, “Wipe Out”, and “Help Me Rhonda”. I think I might have lived forever there upon the beach, surfing by day, playing through a Twin Reverb by night, had not an agent from Capitol Records heard us one evening as we played in a small bistro by the shores of Waikiki. He offered us a contract we made haste to accept, as it represented more money than any of us had seen in all our short, sheltered lives. Ere any of us were aware we were living in a small mansion in North Hollywood, smoking hashish, snorting angeldust, bickering about the contents of our next album... . And then one day the lead guitarist showed up in glitter and our world collapsed. The drummer got a job doing the soundtrack for a porno movie. The lead singer split with a former bass player for the band that was formed by the guitar player and the drummer of the band that was started by the erstwhile organist for the band started by the former lead singer for the band that once backed the guitar player from the band formed around the tambourine player who once toured with the band that used to hang out in the East Village with the band that fissioned into either Eileen Dover and the Rhythm Kings and the Yardbirds or Loggins and Messina and Currier and Ives, I forget which. And so you find me here. But still my heart burns within me: where, where is the brave troubadour who farted beneath my window of a soft summer night?”

___________

“From all the given premises, the only valid conclusion is that you love me. Check?”

“The word ‘love’ has so many and such tricky meanings that it is actually meaningless. Thus, I don’t know whether I love you or not, in your interpretation of the term. If it means to you that I will jump off a cliff or blow my brains out if you refuse, I don’t. Or that I’ll pine away and not marry a second best, I don’t. If, however, it means a lot of other things, I do. Whatever it means, will you marry me?”

“Of course I will, Blackie. I’ve loved you a long time.”

___________

A curious thing: the unreason that had been relegated to the distance of confinement reappeared, fraught with new dangers and as if endowed with a new power of interrogation. Yet what the eighteenth century first noticed about it was not the secret interrogation, but only the social effects: the torn clothing, the arrogance in rags, the tolerated insolence whose disturbing powers were silenced by an amused indulgence.

___________

Now, said Christian, let me go hence. Nay, stay, said the Interpreter, till I have shewed thee a little more, and after that thou shalt go on they way. So he took him by the hand again, and led him into a very dark room, where there sat a Man in an Iron Cage.

Now the Man, to look on, seemed very sad; he sat with his eyes looking down to the ground, his hands folded together; and he sighed as if he would break his heart. Then said Christian, What means this? At which the Interpreter bid him talk with the man.

Then said Christian to the Man, What art thou? The Man answered, I am what I was not once.

Chr. What wast thou once?

Man. The Man said, I was a fair and flourishing Professor, both in mine own eyes, and also in the eyes of others; I once was, as I thought, fair for the Cœlestial City, and had then even joy at the thoughts that I should get thither.

Chr. Well, but what art thou now?

Man. I am now a man of Despair, and am shut up in it, as in this Iron Cage. I cannot get out; O now I cannot.

___________

One can give good reasons why reality cannot at all be represented by a continuous field. From the quantum phenomena it appears to follow with certainty that a finite system of finite energy can be completely described by a finite set of numbers (quantum numbers). This does not seem to be in accordance with a continuum theory, and must lead to an attempt to find a purely algebraic theory for the description of reality. But nobody knows how to obtain the basis of such a theory.

___________

It took a long time before I stopped hearing her calling in my head. Asking me, asking me: do you know what love is?

Sure I know.

A boy loves his dog.

___________

Marked thine outlandish garb, thy figure spare
Thy dark vague eyes, and soft abstracted air.

___________

Saxophones. A city street, near dusk. The protagonist stands in a doorway, a cigarette hanging from his lip.

“It was Spring,” he says.

He thinks about that one.

“I didn’t know what love was. Maybe carnal knowledge, but then I wasn’t too sure about carnal knowledge either. Maybe that was just carnal reminiscence.”

He pauses, seeming to reflect.

“I didn’t know what truth was. Maybe adequatio rei et intellectus.”

He seems to smile.

“I had some ideas about beauty, though. I thought they needed work.”

The cigarette is finished.

“It was still pretty early, and I had twenty left. I knew a little bar down Pearl, where they knew their Heraclitus and they drank their whiskey straight. Maybe the Count would be there tonight. Maybe not. But it was worth a try.”

He turns, and walks into the gathering night.

More saxophones.

There enter a chorus of gorillas, bearing cream pies. In a short speech, given with a formal dance, they draw some neat conclusions.

___________

Notes.