The moment I name it, it is no longer God; it is man, tree, green, black, red, soft, hard, long, short, atom, universe.
The pain is no longer problematic. I feel it, but there is no urge to get rid of it, for I have discovered that pain and the effort to be separate from it are the same thing. Wanting to get out of pain is the pain;
The scientific way of symbolizing the world is more suited to utilitarian purposes than the religious way, but this does not mean that it has any more “truth.” Is it truer to classify rabbits according to their meat or according to their fur? It depends on what you want to do with them. The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually “grasp” reality. And because religion was being misused as a means for actually grasping and possessing the mystery of life, a certain measure of “debunking” was highly necessary.
This is why all philosophical and theological systems must ultimately fall apart. To “know” reality you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, and feel it.
This moving, vital now
To define has come to mean almost the same thing as to understand. More important still, words have enabled man to define himself—to label a certain part of his experience “I.”
We are at war within ourselves—the brain desiring things which the body does not want, and the body desiring things which the brain does not allow; the brain giving directions which the body will not follow, and the body giving impulses which the brain cannot understand.
We are perpetually frustrated because the verbal and abstract thinking of the brain gives the false impression of being able to cut loose from all finite limitations. It forgets that an infinity of anything is not a reality but an abstract concept,
What is true and positive is too real and too living to be described, and to try to describe it is like putting red paint on a red rose.
Principles without sacrifice are easy.
“I never understood her,” he admits. “And I didn’t ever feel like she was being honest or expressing her feelings my whole life. As she was getting older, I begged her: Show your children who you are, because we want to know before you die. She couldn’t do it. So now she’s still just an unfinished person for me.” He rubs his eyes and his spirit seems to lighten, as if suddenly struck with a pleasant memory. “We only have this time, each of us, 70 or 80 years, if we’re lucky. What’s the point of hiding?”
Your kids… They don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.
It is logic and beauty working against each other that makes things progress. My calligraphy teacher used to say that in the history of writing, the mind and the eye are the conservative forces, and the hand is the radical element that would rather be scratching out something with a stick.
This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it.
He saw the physical reality of labor as being, simultaneously, a necessity, an injustice, and the essence of humanity throughout history. The artist’s creative act was for him only one among many such acts. He believed that reality could best be approached through work, precisely because reality itself was a form of production.
When you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you invent the plane crash; & when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution. Every technology carries its own negativity, invented at the same time as technical progress.
What I find far more ominous is how seldom, today, we see the phrase “the 22nd century”
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.
Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials.
When we’re gone, they’ll put the year we were born, and the year we passed on our grave. In between, this life, will be marked by a dash.
Strange to think these daily rhythms constitute a life
We are imperfect lenses trying to resolve our influences onto a new screen, and the mistakes we make in copying we call originality.
One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real.
Be ruthless with systems, be kind with people.
A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable.