Adversaria (21)
‘The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art’ —Zadie Smith (Intimations, 26%)
‘A man who will decide, on philosophical grounds, to give up speaking and confine himself to pointing must be a man in whom the ordinary interests of intelligent human beings have been completely strangled by the parasitic growth of a philosophy only capable of killing what it feeds on’ —R.G. Collingwood (The Idea of Nature, p. 66)
‘In the absence of these fixed elements, I’d make up hard things to do, or things to abstain from. Artificial limits and so on. Running is what I know. Writing is what I know. Conceiving self-implemented schedules: teaching day, reading day, writing day, repeat. What a dry, sad, small idea of a life. And how exposed it looks, now that the people I love are in the same room to witness the way I do time. The way I’ve done it all my life.’ —Zadie Smith (Intimations, 29%)
‘A world is thus a thing that makes itself wherever a vortex arises in the Boundless; hence a world is also a world-maker or a god. The natura naturata of this world (to anticipate a very much later distinction) is finite in extent and in the duration of its life; but its natura naturans is the creative nature of the Boundless and of its rotary movement, and hence eternal and infinite’ —R.G. Collingwood (The Idea of Nature, p. 35)
‘Back then, I took everything seriously. I studied hard because I genuinely believed it would serve a higher purpose, and I liked the idea of living according to a certain strictness or method’ —Jessica Au (Cold Enough for Snow, p. 61)
‘Its geometrical structure gave the cosmos a kind of organization that was contrary to the one ascribed to it by myth. No longer was any element or portion to be privileged at the expense of the rest; no longer was any physical power to be in the dominant position of a basileus exercising his dynasteia over all things’ —Jean-Pierre Vernant (The Origins of Greek Thought, trans. anon., p. 121)