A work of literature is not "about" the experience of its characters. It is the experience of the reader while reading.

How much of our culture is merely a distraction from the hogging of the harvest?

The Image Is Easy

It can be seen
without strain
and done
without effort.

You peel it
off the appearance
And stick it
onto the surface.

The image is light:
luminous,
weightless.
It is not hard.

Sometimes it is our honesty that leads us away from the truth.
Sometimes our decency holds us back in the pursuit of justice.

Our wisdom sits uncomfortably with us.
now that the ground has shifted.

Our love looms ominously before us
as the horizon closes in.

Sadness is to feeling as
______ is to thought.

Folly, let us say, is "the wisdom of the heart", the error in thinking that is caused by feeling, the unreasonableness of passion. But it is not simply a defect. Its ground is in something positive: our emotions. And this is why Erasmus was able to sing its praises.

Spinoza talked about "the intellectual love of a thing". What is to passion as folly is to reason? What do we call the loss of feeling that is caused by thinking, the dispassionateness of reason? Melancholy. Dowland would find his composure there.

To champion reason I don't need to degrade passion. My passions are as valid as my reasons.

If we want to know anything at all, said Kant, we must know some things immediately. Similarly, if we are to have any power whatsoever, some people must wield it immediately. We might also say that our knowledge requires that some things sometimes go unquestioned. Our power, likewise, requires that some people are sometimes not questioned.

Nuance is to sense
as impulse to motive.

Tell me how you feel.
Not what, but how.
What techniques, what devices
do you use? By what means do you
hold back your impulses?

Is the desire for truth grounded in the belief that we might say something undeniable?

Is the belief in justice driven by the desire to say something that cannot be denounced?

Nuance is to fact
as impulse to act.

Facts don't make themselves known.

Acts are not committed on their own power.

Facts are discoverable. Acts are decidable.

In the long run, it is better to be rational but mistaken than irrational and correct.
But is it also better, in the moment, to be passionately wrong than dispassionately right?

To take literature seriously is to believe it reveals how language and experience are related. Writing, we imagine, is a sort of controlled experiment in living with meaning, affording precise observations of the connection between words and deeds. Perhaps it is the radical difference between the black marks on the page and the bruised skin of the body that suggests this precision.

Life is a series of simple pleasures foregone in pursuit of superior amusements.

A thing (among other things) is experienced,
immediately and specifically, in intuition.
The object is thought in general
and mediated by the concept.

The self (and the other) is experienced,
immediately and specifically, in institution.
The subject is felt in general
and mediated by the emotion.

In imagination, they are brought together.

It is not easy
to tell a woman
how you feel.