I am midway through Karl Jasper‘s Man in the Modern Age and I’ve been perpetually blown away by the relevance today of literally everything that one man said in 1930. Everything. Every sentence. No exceptions. The fact the this is a library copy and I can’t use my own pen is killing me.
The Wisdom of Not Knowing — an excellent, lovely conversation from Futurology
I … gaze through shade
Folded into shade of slender
Laurel trunks and leaves filled with sun.
The wren broods in her moss domed nest.
A newt struggles with a white moth Drowning in the pool. The hawks scream,
Playing together on the ceiling
Of heaven. The long hours go by.
I think of those who have loved me,
Of all the mountains I have climbed,
Of all the seas I have swum in.
The evil of the world sinks.
My own sin and trouble fall away
Like Christian’s bundle, and I watch
My forty summers fall like falling
Leaves and falling water held
Eternally in summer air.
— Kenneth Rexroth
…
Karl Jaspers: “Such an impulse towards contemporary self-assertion culminates in a trumpeting of the present, a glorification of the passing show—as if there could be no shadow of a doubt as to what the present really is.”
It’s as if I am always hearing some strange, complicated music in the background of my life that grows intensely unpleasant when I ignore it, because it demands the attention I am giving to other things.
Wow, wow, wow! Does Tommy Dixon have my number. I think it all applies equally to reading and thinking even if no writing occurs. I will, perhaps with some irony, be returning to this.
Gilles reached the World Trade Center just before the second tower collapsed. The firemen in the photograph don’t know what’s hit them. The one holding an unlit flashlight, the one with the useless gurney—they stand in their desert of ruin, frozen before the obliteration of their expectations, and ours. There it is: ashes to ashes, dust to dust, no metaphors. And yet, as we sensed in the haze of that moment and see too clearly today, it’s not a picture of an ending but, more truly, of a condition without end.
