06 October 2008

Inner Emigration

"Whenever you experience mental vacillation, cast your mind back to the Greco-Roman mentality as it was before the second century."

Henry de Montherlant

3 comments:

  1. Is this post a rather more elegant way of conveying the sentiment "One nation that manages to lower intelligence, morality, human quality on nearly all the surface of the earth, such a thing has never been seen before in the existence of the planet. I accuse the United States of being in a permanent state of crime against humankind." (Henri de Montherlant 1951) - words which de Montherlant wrote in a novel and had spoken by a journalist, something which in itself would bear careful analysis ?

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  2. "The journey to Hades.— I, too, have been in the underworld, like Odysseus [1], and shall be there often yet; and not only rams have I sacrificed to be able to speak with a few of the dead, but I have not spared my own blood. Four pairs it was that did not deny themselves to my sacrifice: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. With these I must come to terms when I have long wandered alone; they may call me right and wrong; to them will I listen when in the process they call each other right and wrong. Whatsoever I say, resolve, or think up for myself and others—on these eight I fix my eyes and see their eyes fixed on me.

    May the living forgive me that occasionally they appear to me as shades, so pale and somber, so restless and, alas, so lusting for life—while those men then seem so alive to me as if now, after death, they could never again grow weary of life. But eternal aliveness is what counts: what matters "eternal life" or any life!
    My ancestors: Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, Goethe." (Friedrich Nietzsche)

    vB

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