yo Adrie, On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 1:31 PM, Fam. Kintziger-Karaca < [email protected]> wrote:
> > ps, probably of no importance , but i can read Kant in German, because of > my German ancestors > and doing my military service in Germany, long time ago. > > Regards , Adrie > > > Caught my eye because at our weekly lunch meeting today it was mentioned, by Gaetane who speaks French natively, english as a second language and Polish with some Russian, that reading Tolstoy in Russian is a far cry from reading the translations. Man I wish I spoke Russian; a beautiful language. However, what I'm really interested in these days is Faust. Never read it, never thought much about it except for a passage in ZAMM that caught my eyes and rang my bell. Pirsig talking to Chris, talking about pursuing ghosts and failure. For some reason it makes me goose pimply. When I read it and moreso today. There's a passage I read tonight in Royce, talking about Faust... "Faust is a man in whom are combined all the strengths and weakness of the romantic spirit. No Excellence he deems of worth so long as any excellence is beyond his grasp. Therefore his despair at the sight of the great world of life. So small a part of it is his. He knows that he can never grow great enough to grasp the whole, or any finite part of the whole. Yet there remains the hopeless desire for this wholeness. Nothing but the infinite can be satisfying. Hence the despair of the early scenes of the first part. Like Byron's Manfred, Faust seeks death; but Faust is kept from it by no fear of worse things beyond, only by an accidental re-awakening of old childish emotions. He feels that he has no business with life, and is wholly a creature of accident. He is clearly conscious only of a longing for a full experience. But this experience he conceives as mainly a passive one." See, what gets me here with Royce's description is "the accidental re-awakening of childish emotions." That seems important to me. That there is something in the re-awakening of childish emotions that signifies more, much more than Bo's cold-blooded "reversion to lower levels of hierarchical patterns". This isn't any sort of "lowerness". This is profound. Royce explains some more: "The satisfactory pleasure can never be given him, and why? Because he will always remain active. Satisfaction would mean repose, repose would mean death. Life is activity. The meaning of a man is work, and that no one is wholly lost so long as the power of accomplishment remains his. But if work is the essence of life, (head hands and heart-jc) then satisfaction must be found not in feelings but in deeds. The world is good if we can make it so. Not otherwise." Royce, Pessimism and Modern Thoughts The world and what we make of it. Two fountains of knowledge for your aesthetic considerations: http://www.wimp.com/dubaifountain/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULLHYmz98P0 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
