Springtime Thoughts

Auden: “I feel about Pascal as Pascal felt about Montaigne. Of all the dualists he is incomparably the noblest and most seductive. Like most of us he exalted the faculty he lacked over the faculty he possessed, the heart over the reason, and fashioned an image out of his opposite. The neurotic who as a child was thrown into fits by the sight of his two parents together was truly a split being with a corrupt heart and an uncorrupt intelligence.” (Prolific 47)

楊牧：「左邊稍遠轉彎是北歐作曲家的半身像 / 四樓高處窗子裏有人深深投入網路 / 議論特殊國與國的問題 / 可懷念的世紀末 / 想像那就是你」

Wittgenstein: “I have a telephone conversation with New York. My friend tells me that his young trees have buds of such and such a kind. I am now convinced that his tree is... Am I also convinced that the earth exists? / The existence of the earth is rather part of the whole picture which forms the starting-point of belief for me. / Does my telephone call to New York strengthen my conviction that the earth exists? Much seems to be fixed, and it is removed from the traffic. It is also so to speak shunted onto an unused siding.” (Über Gewissheit)

Skillman: “What happens to the poem when the poet becomes so vividly conscious of the billions of operations that stay his or her forms of thought, perception, memory, and imagination?” (3, on Ammons)

Durs Grünbein: “Descartes may raise such strong emotions now because contemporary philosophers can’t quite believe or understand why his slender arguments are worth answering” (97)

Kaveh Akbar: "I'm not joking, like, you could get passingly conversational in a new-to-you language in the time it takes for you to read a novel"

Jessica Riskin: “A flow of water could move several machines, play various instruments, even cause words to be pronounced. Descartes drew an analogy between the water that created these diverse effects and the "animal spirits" that he supposed drove living bodies. The nerves through which the animal spirits ran were like fountain pipes, the muscles and tendons like "engines and springs.” (46)

"To become aware one is thinking: this is to enter into Brahman." (175)

Maureen McLane: “For I was in fact out of love with him but not with the globe that had seemingly enclosed us. And the woman I now loved was a darting thing, flickering and uncapturable, given to pronouncements like, Well, that is what one does, no? Marry. Everyone of course feels ambivalent.” (“My Marianne Moore”, My Poets 104)

Ange Mlinko: “after a lifetime of embassies, who’s to say there is a world?”

言淑夏：死亡只是騙局，她從不奉勸人生命誠可貴，她相信：「有人是做不到的。如果沒辦法做到，那也沒有關係。我覺得活著沒有這麼了不起，真的，人活著並沒有那麼了不起。」在不斷延伸的盡頭裡，活下去也像季節嬗遞，每個人有自己的時候。

David Brown: “I am interested in analyzing how abstract spiritual, ethical, or moral distinctions among white people – the kind evident in humanist Renaissance scholar and philosopher Desiderius Erasmus' Weltbild and Christian eurocentrism – can create the appearance of otherness (in relationship to blackness or sin), even in moments where everyone shares the same racial/ethnic makeup, as I reinforce in this book.”

Grünbein on Pascal: "Why, he would often ask, subscribe to only one theory about a universe that consists of so many worlds?"

Christopher Johnson on Foucault: theorizing of the “rupture” between the Renaissance episteme of resemblance and the Enlightenment episteme of representation largely omits what might be termed the intervening Baroque episteme of wit

„Spürst du ihn nicht, den Zauber deiner Einsamkeit?" (Vom Schnee 23)

珞亦：其實我相信在座的各位可能很多人，你身旁的人其實也是這樣的人，只是你可以看看我媽媽就是，她是個這麼棒的人，可是他在政治上曾經做出這麼多年錯誤的選擇，代表說什麼，她其實只差個鑰匙，你把他打開，你讓他看看這個門後裡面的風景市長什麼樣子，她那一瞬間被點通之後他就有可能會做出不一樣的選擇。我想要跟大家講的事情是，在我們身旁很多人的政治立場和我們不一樣，但不代表他們是邪惡的，他們可能比我們還善良，只是他們有一些東西就卡在那邊，我們需要扮演的角色就是把它走在正確路上的絆腳石把它拿開，他就可能會慢慢地跟我們一樣做出正確的選擇。

Flusser: “Poetry is the intellect’s expansion. Poetry is a borderline situation of the intellect. Proper names are products of poetry. The almost extra-linguistic effort demanded by the effort to think and articulate proper names is the poetic effort. It is an effort because something is produced. It is poetic because new words are this something that is produced.”

Descartes on being twenty three years old: “if we consider everything external to be beyond our power, we would have no more regret that we were deprived of something we should have been entitled to at birth through no fault of our own, than we would have at not possessing the kingdom of China or Mexico” (Method 21, ed. Clarke)