July 2022
21.vii.2022
21 July 2022, around 8.57.
‘Arthur Symons was talking of some foreign city, carrying in his waistcoat pocket, as it were, the genius loci, anon to be embalmed in Pateresque prose. I forget whether this time it was Rome or Seville or Moscow or what…’ —Max Beerbohm, ‘First Meetings with W.B. Yeats’
daybreak
21 July 2022, around 9.07.
Philalethes. What is the use of grounds of consolation and peacefulness over which is constantly hanging the Damocles-sword of deception? Truth, my friend, truth alone holds firm, endures and stays steadfast: truth’s consolation is the only solid consolation: it is the indestructible diamond.
Demopheles. Yes, if you had truth in your pocket to favour us with on demand. But all you have are metaphysical systems about which nothing is certain but the head-cudgelling they cost. Before you deprive someone of something you must have something better to put in its place.
- With Mrs. R. Dircks for the first sentence spoken by Philalethes, which Hollingdale omits. [↩]
31.vii.2022
31 July 2022, around 17.41.
‘It is not just a matter of music but of how to live: it is by speed slowness that one slips in among things, that one connects with something else. One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle….’ —Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy