I just found this line from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (translated by Burton Pike, 2008, Dalkey Archives):
"I still have not become accustomed to this world, which seems to me good”. This entry is followed a page later by a suggestion that art, poetry, writing could be the tools to escape from this hollow simulacrum of a world, into new, more meaningful worlds. Malte quotes from Baudelaire's Prose Poems, “éloignez de moi le mensonges et les vageurs corruptrices du monde” [remove from me the lies and corrupting vapors of the world]"(39).
For Musil, as well as for Rilke, the question of how to live in the world was not to be answered by coming to terms with the world as it is (or was), but as it could, would, should be in future and subjunctive modes. Thus, failure to assimilate to "this world" is a necessary step toward the successful affirmative creation of new worlds through new visions and new arrangements of possibilities.
"No man, unless he be dead in living, can feel at anchor in this life." --Rene Char, from The Brittle Age
ReplyDeleteAnd Emerson would probably concur that any definition of life or living as static was but a hopeful fiction or, at worst, a willful misrepresentation of the flux and certain change at the basis of reality. What is this persistent need for solidity, stasis, surety? Does anyone really believe it?! While seinesegleichen geschieht (the selfsame happens) over and over again, often to our great dismay, simultaneously ever tiny particle of being is constantly changing, moving, sliding, spinning, dissolving, reforming. A dead weight, yes, anchored perhaps, but to what solid thing? What could even a dead man be chained to that would not move at all? Certainly not even "this life"! So, hold on to your hat (if you have found one that fits by now).
ReplyDeletewhere can i get this picture (of my sweetheart)??
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ReplyDeleteI think you can just copy it from here!
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