Adversaria (20)
‘The greatest opportunity anybody can is to live in a free society as one among many who are fully capable of taking advantage of its freedom; but to take advantage of that opportunity, each must develop the cooperative virtues of good faith and benevolence’ —Alan Donagan (‘Spinoza’s Theology’ in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, p. 376)
‘The power of the unconscious requires more respect than logic, tradition and the Constitution of the United States’ —James Hollis (The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife, p. 57)
‘She does not like the exclusion of opposition, the idea of the absolute, the positive distinction between mind and matter; she prefers the notions of complementarity, or circulation, influx, of action at a distance, of a model, and the idea of order as an organic totality’ —Jacques Gernet (A History of Chinese Civilization2, trans. J.R. Foster and Charles Hartman, p. 32)
‘One of the grandest of those illusions is that there is some Ultima Thule called Happiness, a real state which one can discover and in which one can live permanently. Sadly, our lot more often is to wallow in the swamplands of the soul, victimized by sundry dismal denizens’ —James Hollis (The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife, p. 107)
‘Just as history is not made by the brute facts but by the natural dynamism immanent in them which the historian must seek to grasp by intuition, so the true object of painting does not reside in the concrete representation of the visible but in the apprehension of the metamorphoses of being’ —Jacques Gernet (A History of Chinese Civilization2, trans. J.R. Foster and Charles Hartman, p. 344)
‘When a young man who ordinarily presents a particularly blank countenance to the world suddenly lapses into a display of temper, there is undoubtedly something amusing about the exhibition’ —Patricia Wentworth (Weekend with Death, 30%)
‘We won’t hand rehandle or reinterpret it, we’ll create history and forget about it, events will be our instant history, but history as events not history as discourse. We won’t allow you verbiage-mongers to add the water, we‘ll scatter the self-consuming ashes to the winds and move on into the next instant. That’ll be one thing less for kids to break their brains and be made miserable with in competition, and there’ll be others, plenty of other things we’ll drop in the next civilization mark my words’ —Christine Brooke-Rose (Amalgamemnon, trans. p. 109)