I

A
love
of
objects
I
am

Lemon, and Light Across the Floor of the Mind

To the Lighthouse is packed with spaces and rooms that are described through a single vivid detail, such as the "long reddish-brown stocking" dangling from Mrs. Ramsay's hand as her attention leaves the knitting and travels out the window to the landscape of the beach in late day. Woolf gives the reader the physical qualities of the stocking in such detail that the rest of the room feels bleak. In this passage, Mrs. Ramsay has become aware of her solitude in that room overlooking the sea, and in order to rescue herself from it she is hunting for a fact in her landscape on which to fasten her consciousness.

"Always, Mrs. Ramsay felt, one helped oneself out of solitude reluctantly by laying hold of some little odd or end, some sound, some sight. She listened, but it was all very still; cricket was over; the children were in their baths; there was only the sound of the sea. She stopped knitting; she held the long reddish-brown stocking dangling in her hands a moment. She saw the light again. With some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one's relations changed, she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered through the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!"

Excerpt from Eve's Diary by Mark Twain

more Phaedrus

'The natural property of a wing is to carry what is heavy upwards, lifting it aloft to the region where the race of the gods resides, and in a way, of all the things belonging to the sphere of the body, it has the greatest share in the divine, the divine being beautiful, wise, good and everything which is of that kind; so it is by these things that the plumage of the soul is nourished and increased most of all, while the shameful, the bad and in general the opposites of the other things make it waste away and perish. First in the heavens travels Zeus, the great leader, driving a winged chariot, putting all things in order and caring for all; after him there follows an army of gods and divinities, ordered in eleven companies. For Hestia alone remains in the house of the gods; of the rest, all those who alone have their place among the number of the twelve take the lead as commanders in the station given to each. Many, then, and blessed are the paths to be seen along which the happy race of gods turns within the heavens, each of them performing what belongs to him; and after them follows anyone who wishes and is able to do so, for jealousy is excluded from the divine chorus. But when they go to their feasting and to banquet, then they travel to the summit of the arch of heaven, and the climb is steep: the chariots of the gods travel easily, being well balanced and easily controlled, while the rest do so with difficulty; for the horse that is partly bad weighs them down, inclining them towards the earth through its weight, if any of the charioteers has not trained them well. Here it is that the final labour, the final contest, awaits a soul. Those souls that are called immortal, when they are at the top, travel outside and take their stand upon the outer part of the heavens, and positioned like this they are carried round by its revolution, and gaze on the thing outside the heavens.
        'Now the region above the heavens has never yet been celebrated as it deserves to be by any earthly poet, nor will it ever be. But it is like this -- for one must be bold enough to say what is true, especially when speaking about truth. This region is occupied by being which really is, which is without colour or shape, intangible, observable by the steersman of the soul alone, by intellect, and to which the class of true knowledge relates. Thus because the mind of a god is nourished by intellect and knowledge unmixed, and so too that of every soul which is concerned to receive what is appropriate to it, it is glad at last to see what is and is nourished and made happy by gazing on what is true, until the revolution of the whole brings itself around in a circle to the same point. In its circuit it sees justice itself, sees self-control, sees knowledge -- not that knowledge to which coming into being attaches, not the knowledge that strangely differs in different items among the things that we now say are, but that which is in what really is and which is really knowledge; and having feasted on its gaze in the same way on the other things that really are, it descends back into the region within the heavens and goes home. When it arives there, the charioteer stations his horses at their manger, throwing them ambrosia and giving them nectar to drink down with the ambrosia.'

(translation by Christopher Rowe)

where did you sleep/spin last night?

Nirvana, "Where did you sleep last night":



Fred Neil, "Merry-Go-Round":



Leadbelly, "Where did you sleep last night":

from Plato's Phaedrus

"But it is worth while adducing this point: that among the ancients, too, those who gave things their names did not regard madness as shameful or a matter for reproach; for otherwise they would not have connected this very word with the finest of the sciences, that by which the future is judged, and named it the "manic" art. No, they gave it this name thinking madness is a fine thing when it comes by divine dispensation; whereas people now crudely throw in the extra "t" and call it "mantic". So too when the ancients gave a name to the investigation sane men make into the future by means of birds and the other signs they use, they call it "oionoistic", because its proponents in a rational way provide insight (nous) and information (historia) for human thinking (oiêsis); while moderns now call it "oiônistic", making it more high-sounding with the long "o". So the ancients testify that god-sent madness is a finer thing than man-made sanity, by the very degree that mantic is a more perfect and valuable thing than oionistic, both when name is measured against name and when effect is measured against effect. But again, in the case of the great maladies and sufferings that occur in certain families from some ancient causes of divine anger, madness comes about in them and acts as interpreter, finding the necessary means of relief by recourse to prayers and forms of service to the gods; as a result of which it hits upon secret rites of purification and puts the man who is touched by it out of danger for both the present and the future, so finding a release from his present evils for the one who is rightly maddened and possessed. A third kind of possession and madness comes from the Muses: taking a soft, virgin soul and arousing it to a Bacchic frenzy of expression in lyric and other forms of poetry, it educated succeeding generations by glorifying myriad deeds of those past; while the man who arrives at the doors of poetry without madness from the Muses, convinced that after all expertise will make him a good poet, both he and his poetry--the poetry of the sane--are eclipsed by that of the mad, remaining imperfect and unfulfilled."

(excerpt from Socrates' second speech to Phaedrus)

from Swann's Way, pour vous

Like Swann, they would say of Bergotte: "He has a delightful mind, so individual, he has his own way of saying things, which is a little far-fetched, but so agreeable. You never need to look for the signature, you can tell his work at once." But none of them would go so far as to say "He's a great writer, he has great talent." They did not even credit him with talent at all. They did not do so, because they did not know. We are very slow to recognize in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the model which is labelled "great talent" in our museum of general ideas. Simply because that physiognomy is new and strange, we can find in it no resemblance to what we are accustomed to call talent. We say rather originality, charm, delicacy, strength; and then one day we realise that it is precisely all this that adds up to talent.

***

These little eccentricities on my grandfather's part implied no ill-will whatsoever towards my friends. But Bloch had displeased my family for other reasons. He had begun by irritating my father, who, seeing him come in with wet clothes, had asked him with keen interest:
"Why, M. Bloch, is there a change in the weather? Has it been raining? I can't understand it; the barometer was set fair."
Which drew from Bloch nothing more than: "Sir, I am absolutely incapable of telling you whether it has rained. I live so resolutely apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer trouble to inform me of them."
"My poor boy," said my father after Bloch had gone, "your friend is out of his mind. Why, he couldn't even tell me what the weather was like. As if there could be anything more interesting! He's an imbecile."
Next Bloch had displeased my grandmother because once, after lunch, when she complained of not feeling very well, he had stifled a sob and wiped tears from his eyes.
"How can he possibly be sincere," she observed to me. "Why, he doesn't even know me. Unless he's mad, of course."
And finally he had upset the whole household when he arrived an hour and a half late for dinner and covered with mud from head to foot, and made not the least apology, saying merely: "I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as time. I would willingly reintroduce the use of the opium pipe or the Malay kris, but I know nothing about that of those infinitely more pernicious and moreover flatly bourgeois implements, the umbrella and the watch."

***

I could not, it is true, lay down the novel of his which I was reading, but I fancied that I was interested in the subject alone, as in the first dawn of love when we go every day to meet a woman at some party or entertainment which we think is in itself the attraction.