Sunday, August 28, 2016

Sculpting in Time







“Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.”







“I felt all the time that for the film to be a success the texture of the scenery and the landscapes must fill me with definite memories and poetic associations”




 
 

“My encounter with another world and another culture and the beginnings of an attachment to them had set up an irritation, barely perceptible but incurable-rather like unrequited love, like a symptom of the hopelessness of trying to grasp what is boundless, or unite what cannot be joined; a reminder of how finite, how curtailed, our experience on earth must be”

 
 
 
 
 
“...art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition - otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.”


 
 
 
 
“Art is a meta-language, with the help of which people try to communicate with one another; to impart information about themselves and assimilate the experience of others. Again, this has not to do with practical advantage but with realising the idea of love, the meaning of which is in sacrifice: the very antithesis of pragmatism. I simply cannot believe that an artist can ever work only for the sake of 'self-expression.' Self-expression if meaningless unless it meets with a response. For the sake of creating a spiritual bond with others it can only be an agonising process, one that involves no practical gain: ultimately it is an act of sacrifice. But surely it cannot be worth the effort merely for the sake of hearing one's own echo?”

Andrei Tarkovsky

Sunday, August 21, 2016

Concrete






“Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late;what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.”









“Whatever condition we are in, we must always do what we want to do, and if we want to go on a journey, then we must do so and not worry about our condition, even if it's the worst possible condition, because, if it is, we're finished anyway, whether we go on the journey or not, and it's better to die having made the journey we're been longing for than to be stifled by our longing.”








“Time destroys everything we do, whatever it is.”

Thomas Bernhard

Sunday, August 14, 2016

The Left Hand of Darkness






“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”






“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”








“Truth is a matter of the imagination.”






“Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Sunday, August 7, 2016

Words make pictures of facts



“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.”





“The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.”







“I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.”




“What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.”






“Just improve yourself; that is the only thing you can do to better the world.”





“The world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy.”





“When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote”




“Don't think, but look! (PI 66)”







“Tell me," Wittgenstein's asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?” 


“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein