Without Lifting A Finger

Of course I'm hoping the read will bear fruit in me. Keats has been complaining (off and on) re a sore throat since his journey to Scotland and Northern Ireland. Seems to be a sign (though, in googling this morning, apparently there is some disagreement re the jots and tittles of Keats' consumption). * An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people — it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the Burden of the Mystery, a thing which I begin to understand a little, and which weighed upon you in the most gloomy and true sentence in your Letter. The difference of high Sensations with and without knowledge appears to me this: in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep and being blown up again, without wings, and with all horror of a bare-shouldered Creature — in the former case, our shoulders are fledged, and we go through the same air and space without fear. This is running one’s rigs on the score of abstr...

Should've been reading Yeats in Ireland, I suppose. But, sort of aping last year's reading of Coleridge's Letters in Scotland, I went with Keats (not really into his poetry, but his letters are quite poignant -- especially knowing the end of the story -- and at times quite interesting re content and language) because his letters are "new to me" and they were already drawing me in, i.e., I had already started them and liked them (Zagajewski had pointed the way). Though Keats occupied most of my reading time in Ireland (and of course the focus was "Seeing Ireland" not "Reading Keats"), I also continued pecking away at (deliciously pecking away at) Szymborska's poems. * Clips: You perhaps at one time thought there was such a thing as worldly happiness to be arrived at, at certain periods of time marked out, — you have of necessity from your disposition been thus led away — I scarcely remember counting upon any Happiness — I look not for...

          

                                                

                          

                    

                                                        

Flew into Shannon. Limerick: First two nights. Saw very little the first day, then took a day trip to the Cliffs of Moher, Etc. I'm reading Keats' letters and the occasional Szymborska poem; of course googling all things Irish that come to mind: Yeats, Synge, dolmens, high crosses, etc. *                         

Brueghel's Two Monkeys This is what I see in my dreams about final exams: two monkeys, chained to the floor, sit on the windowsill, the sky behind them flutters, the sea is taking a bath. The exam is History of Mankind.  I stammer and hedge. One monkey stares and listens with mocking disdain, the other seems to be dreaming away -- but when it's clear I don't know what to say he prompts me with a gentle clinking of his chain. ***       Two Monkeys by Brueghel [From Wikipedia]                        



Re the painter/writer Jozef Czapski: He had many friends, who loved and admired him unreservedly to the end. He was in essence, though, a solitary man. He was my friend and master. The master of my not-knowing. And what is not-knowing but thought? Re an "inner life": Contemporary mass culture, entertaining and at times harmless as it may be, is marked by its complete ignorance of the inner life. Not only can it not create this life; it drains it, corrodes it, undermines it. Science, caught up in other problems, likewise neglects it. Thus only a few artists, philosophers, and theologians are left to defend this fragile, besieged fortress. Defending the spiritual life is not merely a sop thrown to the radical aesthetes. I see the spiritual life, the inner voice that speaks to us, or perhaps only whispers, in Polish, English, Russian, or Greek, as the mainstay and foundation of our freedom, the indispensable territory of reflection and independence shielding us from ...

Two "clips": Our great reality obviously contains many other elements as well. Can we count them all? Should we?   They include not only darkness, tragedy, and madness but also joy. Not long ago I was rereading the essays of Jerzy Stempowski, a major Polish essayist who spent the second half of his life as a humble émigré in Switzerland, in Berne, where he died in 1969. And I came upon a surprising quotation from Maupassant—surprising, since you don’t expect metaphysical gifts from naturalists! I must have come across it earlier, but its force struck me this time. From time to time I experience strange, intense, short-lived visions of beauty, an unfamiliar, elusive, barely perceptible beauty that surfaces in certain words or landscapes, certain colorations of the world, certain moments … I’m not able to describe or communicate it, I can’t express it or portray it. I save these moments for myself … I have no other reason for continuing, no other cause for keeping on … “S...