Thoughts Under an Oak—A Dream

June 2.—THIS is the fourth day of a dark northeast storm, wind and rain. Day before yesterday was my birthday. I have now enter’d on my 60th year. Every day of the storm, protected by overshoes and a waterproof blanket, I regularly come down to the pond, and ensconce myself under the lee of the great oak; I am here now writing these lines. The dark smoke-color’d clouds roll in furious silence athwart the sky; the soft green leaves dangle all round me; the wind steadily keeps up its hoarse, soothing music over my head—Nature’s mighty whisper. Seated here in solitude I have been musing over my life—connecting events, dates, as links of a chain, neither sadly nor cheerily, but somehow, to-day here under the oak, in the rain, in an unusually matter-of-fact spirit.

But my great oak—sturdy, vital, green—five feet thick at the butt. I sit a great deal near or under him. Then the tulip tree near by—the Apollo of the woods—tall and graceful, yet robust and sinewy, inimitable in hang of foliage and throwing-out of limb; as if the beauteous, vital, leafy creature could walk, if it only would. (I had a sort of dream-trance the other day, in which I saw my favorite trees step out and promenade up, down and around, very curiously—with a whisper from one, leaning down as he pass’d me, We do all this on the present occasion, exceptionally, just for you.)

 

Specimen Days

Thoughts Under an Oak—A Dream

Walt Withman

 

Moment of vision, Thomas Hardy. The unconscious writers.

The unconscious writers, on the other hand, like Dickens and Scott, seem suddenly and without their own consent to be lifted up and swept onwards. The wave sinks and they cannot say what has happened or why. Among them — it is the source of his strength and of his weakness — we must place Hardy. His own word, “moments of vision”, exactly describes those passages of astonishing beauty and force which are to be found in every book that he wrote. With a sudden quickening of power which we cannot foretell, nor he, it seems, control, a single scene breaks off from the rest. We see, as if it existed alone and for all time, the wagon with Fanny’s dead body inside travelling along the road under the dripping trees; we see the bloated sheep struggling among the clover; we see Troy flashing his sword round Bathsheba where she stands motionless, cutting the lock off her head and spitting the caterpillar on her breast. Vivid to the eye, but not to the eye alone, for every sense participates, such scenes dawn upon us and their splendour remains. But the power goes as it comes. The moment of vision is succeeded by long stretches of plain daylight, nor can we believe that any craft or skill could have caught the wild power and turned it to a better use. The novels therefore are full of inequalities; they are lumpish and dull and inexpressive; but they are never arid; there is always about them a little blur of unconsciousness, that halo of freshness and margin of the unexpressed which often produce the most profound sense of satisfaction. It is as if Hardy himself were not quite aware of what he did, as if his consciousness held more than he could produce, and he left it for his readers to make out his full meaning and to supplement it from their own experience.

Virginia Woolf,

The Novels of Thomas Hardy

* Written in January, 1928

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Coeur Fidèle. Jean Epstein (1923)

num vão de escada

 

   

              
                                 

 

 

 

 

Faces. Cassavetes. 1968

A mulher sem sombra

A mulher sem sombra - vinda de um reino longínquo habitado por seres que não conhecem a duração, a impenetrabilidade ou o peso da matéria - por amor, substituiu a ligeireza pelo peso e a transparência pela opacidade, adquiriu um corpo e casou-se com o imperador de um reino de que ignoramos o lugar e o tempo. Mas o corpo da imperatriz guardava ainda vestígios da sua pátria longínqua. Era um corpo que não era afectado pela luz. A mulher sem sombra é a mulher que não pode conceber: é a primeira narrativa de Hofmannsthal em que ouvimos os apelos das crianças que ainda não nasceram, quando estão quase a nascer, que queriam nascer e que pedem que alguém esteja pronto para as ouvir e receber.

C’est un récit absolument incantatoire et d’une violence presque mythique, car tout se passe sur un plan où nous ne savons pas si nous rêvons ou bien si nous sommes dans le rêve d’un autre, sentant que ce qui s’y passe est un secret que cet autre ne peut garder pour soi. Ce sont des plans de réalité séparés par des frontières très fines, à travers lesquelles il y a des transferts constants opérés par des forces oniriques. La femme sans ombre – venue d’un royaume lointain habité par des êtres qui ne connaissent ni la dureté, ni l’impénétrabilité, ni le poids de la matière – est celle qui, par amour, remplace pour toujours la légèreté par le poids, la transparence par l’opacité, acquiert un corps et épouse l’empereur d’un royaume dont nous ignorons.

Maria Filomena Molder, Rue Descartes, n° 39, 2003/1, Wittgenstein et le paradigme de l'art

Bia

Os Songhai, povo do Níger e do Mali, acreditavam que o ser humano consistia em três elementos: ga (carne), hundi (força vital) e bia (o duplo)

 A carne é o nosso elemento material, o corpo. A força vital situa-se no coração, desde o nascimento e dissipa-se no momento da morte. O duplo é o nosso aspecto imaterial: vêmo-lo como um reflexo de nós mesmos na superfície da água ou num espelho. O duplo marca a individualidade do nosso ser. É o duplo que dita o tom das nossas personalidades, dos nossos gostos e desgostos, a qualidade da nossa expressão. É o nosso ser no mundo. Bia é um poder de deslocamento.

Inquietante cinzento. Melville.

Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter’s mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.

(Benito Cereno, início)

Most melancholy of all the hours of earth, is that one long, gray hour, which to the watcher by the lamp intervenes between the night and day; when both lamp and watcher, over-tasked, grow sickly in the pallid light; and the watcher, seeking for no gladness in the dawn, sees naught but garish vapors there; and almost invokes a curse upon the public day, that shall invade his lonely night of sufferance.

The one small window of his closet looked forth upon the meadow, and across the river, and far away to the distant heights, storied with the great deeds of the Glendinnings. Many a time had Pierre sought this window before sunrise, to behold the blood-red, out-flinging dawn, that would wrap those purple hills as with a banner. But now the morning dawned in mist and rain, and came drizzlingly upon his heart. Yet as the day advanced, and once more showed to him the accustomed features of his room by that natural light, which, till this very moment, had never lighted him but to his joy; now that the day, and not the night, was witness to his woe; now first the dread reality came appallingly upon him. A sense of horrible forlornness, feebleness, impotence, and infinite, eternal desolation possessed him. It was not merely mental, but corporeal also. He could not stand; and when he tried to sit, his arms fell floorwards as tied to leaden weights. Dragging his ball and chain, he fell upon his bed; for when the mind is cast down, only in sympathetic proneness can the body rest; whence the bed is often Grief's first refuge. Half stupefied, as with opium, he fell into the profoundest sleep.

(Pierre, or the ambiguities, V, III) 

In sight at gray dawn, the distant vessel, though in reality approaching, recedes from view, as the sun rises higher and higher. This holds true, till its vicinity makes it readily fall within the ordinary scope of vision. And thus, too, here and there, with other distant things: the more light you throw on them, the more you obscure. Some revelations show best in a twilight.

(Mardi, XIX)

It was in the cool of the early morning, at that hour when a man's
face can be known, that we set sail from Diranda; and in the ghostly
twilight, our thoughts reverted to the phantom that so suddenly had
cleared the plain. 

(Mardi, XXXVIII)