Livets ande bor ännu i de döda tingen

Om döda ting älska, om jord och vatten skilja vänner från fiender, ville jag gärna äga deras kärlek. jag ville, att den gröna jorden inte kände mina steg som en tung börda. Jag ville, att hon gärna förläte, att hon för min skull såras med plog och harv, och att hon villigt öppnade sig för min döda kropp. Och jag ville, att vågen, vars blanka spegel sönderslås av mina åror, hade samma tålamod med mig, som en mor har med ett ivrigt barn, när det klättrar upp i hennes knä utan att akta högtidsdräktens oskrynklade siden. Med den klara luften, som dallrar över de blåa bergen, ville jag vara vän och med den blänkande solen och de vackra stjärnorna. Ty det synes mig ofta, som om de döda tingen skulle känna och lida med de levande. Inte är skrankan mellan dem och oss så stor, som människor tro. Vilken del av jordens stoft är det, som inte har varit inne i livets kretsgång? Har inte vägens kringdrivande stoft smekts som mjukt hår, älskats som goda, välgörande händer? Har inte vattnet i hjulspåret fordom strömmat som blod genom klappande hjärtan?

Livets ande bor ännu i de döda tingen. Vad förnimmer han, där han slumrar i drömlös sömn?

Selma Lagerlöf, Gösta Berlings saga (Modernista, 2017) p.328

Skönhet och ingenting annat fordrar vi av livet

Ve mig, ve oss alla, Värmlands barn! Skönhet, skönhet och ingenting annat fordrar vi av livet. Vi, barn av försakelsen, av allvaret, av fattigdomen, höjer våra händer i en enda lång bön och begär detta enda goda, skönhet. Må livet vara som en rosenbuske, blomstra av kärlek, vin och nöjen, och må dess rosor stå varje man till buds! Se, detta önskar vi, och vårt land bär stränghetens, allvarets, försakelsens drag. Vårt land är grubblets eviga symbol, men vi har inga tankar.

Selma Lagerlöf, Gösta Berlings saga (Modernista, 2017) p.285

Wholes precede parts

In semiosis, as in biology, wholes precede parts; similarity precedes difference. Thoughts and lives both begin as wholes – albeit ones that can be extremely vague and underspecified. A single-celled embryo, however simple and undifferentiated, is just as whole as the multicellular organism into which it will develop. An icon, however rudimentary its likeness, insofar as it is taken as a likeness, imperfectly captures the object of its similarity as a whole. It is only in the realm of the machine that the differentiated part comes first and the assembled whole second. Semiosis and life, by contrast, begin whole.

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (University of California Press, 2013) p.64

Life will always be short

Life, however long, will always be short.
Too short for anything to be added.

Wislawa Szymborska, 'Our Ancestors' Short Lives' in View with a Grain of Sand (faber & faber, 1995) p. 144

Death is the fact that ecological thought must encounter

A rigid and thin concept of Life is what dark ecology rejects. That concept can only mean one thing: all three axioms of agrilogistics are in play. Life is the ultimate noncontradictory Easy Think Substance that we must have more and more of, for no reason. A future society in which being ecological became a mode of violence still more horrifying than the neoliberalism that now dominates Earth would consist of a vigorous insistence on Life and related categories such as health.  It would make the current control society (as Foucault calls it) look like an anarchist picnic. If that is what future coexistnce means, beam me up Scotty. The widescreen view of dark ecology sees lifeforms as specters in a charnel ground in which Life is a narrow metaphysical concrete pipe. Death is the fact that ecological thought must encounter to stay soft, to stay weird.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 137-138

I shall love

But in everyone’s life major crises occur, in which the utmost patience and self-control are required. We then realise how silly we are to complain of trivial, daily annoyances, petty aches and pains. I shall love, and I shall do my best, and I shall do my duty by others cheerfully – if we follow this principle, we can cope with anything. Life does not last long, and its pleasures and travails are also constantly changing. Wounds, setbacks, deceptions – it’s hard to bear them lightly; but if we don’t, the burden of life gradually becomes insufferable, and it becomes impossible to fix one’s mind on any goal or ideal. If we fail, if we live in dissatisfaction and tension day after day, in constant conflict with our circumstances, then our lives become completely futile. Great calm, generous detachment, selfless love, disinterested effort: these are what make for success in life. If you can find peace in yourself and can spread comfort around you, you will be happier than an empress. […] Most of our troubles are self-imposed. […] Forgiveness in love and sharing of troubles are true happiness; the satisfaction of personal ambition is not happiness.

Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Short Stories (Penguin Books, 1994) pp. 286-287

Our life is frittered away by detail

Our life is frittered away by detail.

Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived And What I Lived For (Penguin Books, 2005) p. 69

The probability of the actual is absolute

You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability of the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all.

[...]

Our decision do not have some alternative. We may contemplate a choice but we pursue one path only. The low of the world is composed of its entires, but it cannot be divided back into them. And at some point this log must outdistance any possible description of it and this I believe is what the dreamer saw. For as the power to speak of the world recedes from us so also must the story of the world lose its thread and therefore its authority. The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand.

Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (Picador, 2011) pp. 287-288

Life vanishes at its own appearance

But what is your life? Can you see it? It vanishes at its own appearance. Moment by moment. Until it vanishes to appear no more. When you look at the world is there a point in time when the seen becomes the remembered? How are they separate? It is that which we have no way to show. It is that which is missing from our map and from the picture that it makes. And yet it is all we have.

Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (Picador, 2011) pp. 274-275

Death nibbles at everything

Let's get beyond. Everything passes; 'all is vanity and vexation of spirit': we'll be past all this some day. We'll have got beyond the camps, and we'll have got beyond my own existence. It's laughable, this little ephemeral life brooding over those camps which the future had already abolished! History takes care of itself and each one of us into the bargain. Let's just keep quiet, them, each in his own little hole.

Well, then, why don't they keep quiet? That's the question I asked Robert more than twenty years ago, when I was a student. He laughed at me, but I'm not sure today that he ever completely convinced me. They pretended to believe that humanity is a single, immortal person, that one day it will be rewarded for all its sacrifices, and that I, myself, will receive my due. But I don't accept that: death nibbles at everything. The sacrificed generations won't rise from their graves to take part in the final love feasts; what might console them is that the chosen ones will join them under the earth at the end of a very brief interval spent above it. Between happiness and unhappiness, there isn't perhaps as much difference as one might think.

[...]

'I was thinking today that people are really wrong to torment themselves over anything and everything. Things are never as important as they seem; they change, they end, and above all, when all is said and done, everyone dies. That settles everything.'

'That's just a way of escaping from problems,' Robert said.

I cut him off. 'Unless it's that problems are a way of escaping the truth. Of course,' I added, 'when you've decided that it's life that's real, the idea of death seems like escape. But conversely...'

Robert shook his head. 'There's a difference. The fact of living proves that you've chosen to believe in life; if one honestly believes that death alone is real, then one should kill oneself. Actually, though, even suicides don't think that.'

'It may be that people go on living simply because they're scatterbrained and cowardly,' I said. 'It's easier that way. But that doesn't prove anything either.'

'First of all, it's important that suicide be difficult,' Robert said. 'And then continuing to live isn't only continuing to breathe. No one ever succeeds in settling down in complete apathy. You like certain things, you hate others, you become indignant, you admire – all of which implies that you recognize the values of life.'

Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005) pp. 432-433

The manifold phases of consciousness

Consciousness, in anything like the present acceptation of the term, having been once a new thing – a thing, as far as we can see, subsequent even to an individual centre of action and to a reproductive system (which we see existing in plants without apparent consciousness) – why may not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different form all present known phases, as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables?

It would be absurd to attempt to define such a mental state (or whatever it may be called), inasmuch as it must be something so foreign to man that his experience can give him no help towards conceiving its nature; but surely when we reflect upon the manifold phases of life and consciousness which have been evolved already, it would be rash to say that no others can be developed, and that animal life is the end of all things. There was a time when fire was the end of all things: another when rocks and water were so.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1970) pp. 198-199

Stanza of the organic bunkers

Weed, beasts, insects, birds, and legions of organisms unseen: the most promiscuous republic ever declared was here in the urbanic air.

Even plague and pox were never passive folks: invisible architects, they redesigned streets and houses, shaping also our institutions, the form of hospitals and prisons.

Any wall is populated and consumed by the invisible food chains of microbes and mould, where the border between organic and inorganic life blurs.

Buildings breathe and ferment — architecture is the bunker of life.

Wietske Maas & Matteo Pasquinelli, 'Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism' at http://urbanibalism.org/Manifesto_Urban_Cannibalism_Berlin_notes.pdf (2013) p. 4

Life stand still here

What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying "Life stand still here"; Mrs Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent) – this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay said.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Vintage, 2004) pp. 153-154

The way to see how beautiful life is

"If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance – interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."
"That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon – I don't want it! But I'm not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say O lovely! I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don't give a hoot for eternity."
"It's nothing to do with eternity," said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. "All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?"

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 158

To live is to be other

To live is to be other. Even feeling is impossible if one feels today what one felt yesterday, for that is not to feel, it is only to remember today what one felt yesterday, to be the living corpse of yesterday's lost life.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Serpent's Tail, 1991) p. 48

Life does not consist of choices

"You say that if you had to choose between being a professor at a university and being a farm labourer, you would choose to be a professor. But life does not consist of choices. That is where you keep going wrong. Pablo did not start out as some disincarnate soul given a choice between being king of Spain and being the village idiot. He came to earth, and when he opened his human eyes and looked around, behold, he was in San Juan Obispo, and he was the lowest of the low. Life as a set of problems to be solved; life as a set of choices to be made: what a bizarre way of seeing things!"

J.M. Coetzee, 'The Old Woman and the Cats' in Cripplewood (Yale University Press, 2013) pp. 24-25

Life is a serious disorder

I know that we are morose, crypt-faced, inclined to the view that life is a serious disorder which ultimately proves fatal.

Flann O'Brien, The Best of Myles (Picador, 1977) p. 360

We are at the goal constantly

I found through Oriental philosophy, my work with Suzuki, that what we are doing is living, and that we are not moving toward a goal, but are, so to speak, at the goal constantly and changing with it, and that art, if it is going to do anything useful, should open our eyes to this fact.

John Cage, Every Day is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage (Hayward Publishing, 2010) p. 72

Art is not an escape from life

Formerly, one was accustomed to thinking of art as something better organized than life that could be used as an escape from life. The changes that have taken place in this century, however, are such that art is not an escape from life, but rather an introduction to it.

John Cage, Every Day is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage (Hayward Publishing, 2010) p. 56

Yet it all seems limitless

Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

Bernardo Bertolucci, The Sheltering Sky (Warner Bros. 1997)