from the first edition of Fallow magazine.
The struggle between the poetic and the everyday defines Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, which Blanchot describes…in terms of myth: the structure of the novel – its perpetual abstract digressions that interrupt and distract the reader from the story – and its basis in the non-realistic – a world of tempests and foam rather than solid visible objects – ensure its status as myth. This is not a struggle against the whale but against a mythic force, to which the everyday world is destined to succumb.
from Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot by Holly Langstaff
One knows something only if one loves it–or, as Elsa [Morante] would say, ‘only one who loves knows’. The Indo-European root that mean 'to know’ is a homonym for the one that means 'to be born’. To know [conoscere] means to be born [nascere] together, to be generated or regenerated by the thing known. This, and nothing but this, is the meaning of loving. And yet, it is precisely this type of love that is so difficult to find among those who believe they know. In fact, the opposite often occurs–that those who dedicate themselves to the study of a writer or an object end up developing a feeling of superiority towards them, even a sort of contempt. This is why it is best to expunge from the verb 'to know’ all merely cognitive claims (cognitio in Latin is originally a legal term meaning the procedures for a judge’s inquiry). For my own part, I do not think we can pick up a book we love without feeling our heart racing, or truly know a creature or thing without being reborn in them and with them.
from Self-Portrait in the Studio by Giorgio Agamben, translated by Kevin Attell.
What meaning have yesterday’s conclusions today? They have the same meaning as yesterday’s, are true, except the blood is oozing away in the chinks between the great stones of the law.
Kafka, 19 January 1922
– The everyday is our portion of eternity: the eternullity of which Lafargue speaks. The Lord’s Prayer, in this way, would be secretly impious: give us our daily bread, give us to live according to the daily existence that leaves no place for a relation between Creator and creature. Everyday man is the most atheist of men. He is such that no God whatsoever could stand in relation to him. And thus one understands how the man in the street escapes all authority, be it political, moral, or religious.
from The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot
The experience of a poem is the experience both of a moment and of a lifetime. It is very much like our intenser experiences of other human beings. There is a first, or an early moment which is unique, of shock and surprise, even of terror (Ego dominus tuus); a moment which can never be forgotten, but which is never repeated integrally; and yet which would become destitute of significance if it did not survive in a larger whole of experience; [and] which survives inside a deeper and a calmer feeling. The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions: Dante’s is one of those which one can only just hope to grow up to at the end of life.
from Dante by TS Eliot
“Shutting down the monasteries,” he explained in regard to developments in the West after the Reformation, “was like snatching the heart out of Christianity.” He meant that it was in monasteries that the religious experience was systematically cultivated, providing a living witness to the reality of God. By closing down monasteries, the West came to rely exclusively on the intellect in its quest for God. But the way to know God, Father Maximos would say repeatedly, is neither through philosophy nor through experimental science but through systematic methods of spiritual practice that could open us up to the Grace of the Holy Spirit. Only then can we have a taste of the Divine, a firsthand, experiential knowledge of the Creator. Otherwise, he continued, “we remain stuck on the level of mere beliefs and ideologies.” According to Father Maximos, the preservation of the Athonite mystical tradition was of paramount importance for the survival of Christianity.
from The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality by Kyriacos Markides