Literary Critics

"philosophy can never reconcile itself with science. Science aims at self-evident truths and finds in them that "natural necessity" which, after having proclaimed itself for ever eternal, claims to serve as the foundation of all knowledge and strives to rule over all wanton "suddenly". But philosophy has always been, and will always be, a fight with and a conquest of self-evident truths; philosophy is not looking for any "natural necessity", it sees in naturalness and in necessity alike an evil magic, which, if one cannot quite shake it off (for in this no mortal has ever yet succeeded), yet one must at least call by its right name; and even this is an important step! p. 342"

"The fundamental condition of the possibility of human knowledge consists in the fact that truth can be perceived by any normal man. Descartes had thus formulated it: God neither can nor wishes to cheat. Pascal, on the other hand, maintains that God both can be and wishes to be a cheat. Sometimes, to certain people, He reveals the truth; but He deliberately blinds the greater number of them in order that they should not perceive the truth. Who is right, Pascal or Descartes? p. 317"

"Plotinus and Pascal, each in his day, saw the "supernatural" power and felt it with all their souls. This force was enchanting man by convincing him of the "natural necessity" and the infallibility of reason which offered man eternal and universally valid truths. p. 364"

"We burn with longing to find some firm stance, some ultimate, unshakable basis, on which we may build the tower that can reach up to infinity. But all our foundations crack and earth opens to the abyss. THEREFORE LET US NOT SEEK CERTAINTY OR SECURITY. p. 284-285"

"Pascal feared novelty above all things. All the strength of his restless, yet profound and concentrated mind, was applied to resisting the current of history, preventing himself from being carried forward by it. Is it possible, is it reasonable to fight against history? Of what interest to us can a man be, who tries to make time run backwards? p. 274"

"It is certain that Pascal never passed a day without suffering, and hardly knew what sleep was (Nietzsche's case was the same); it is also certain that Pascal, instead of feeling the solid earth beneath his feet as other men do, felt himself hanging unsupported over a precipice, and that had he given way to the "natural" law of gravity he would have fallen into a bottomless abyss. All his Pensées tell us this, and nothing but this. p. 291"

"Plotinus's assertion that the soul, in so far as it is in the body, rests in deep sleep, now acquires a new meaning for us; Plotinus, like his great predecessors Epictetus, Plato, and Socrates, felt that we must awake out of something, overcome some self-evident truths. We must discover the magician who holds the souls of men under his spell. Where is he? How fight against him? p. 349"

"One may say with some certainty that Pascal would have remained the Pascal of the Provinciales had it not been for the abyss. So long as a man feels the solid earth beneath his feet, he will not risk defying reason and morality. Only exceptional conditions of being can free us from the immaterial and eternal truths which rule the world. Only a "madman" declares war on this rule. Remember the "experience" of our contemporary Nietzsche who begged the gods for "madness", since he had to kill the law, or, to use his own words, to announce to Rome and the world that he was "beyond good and evil". p. 305"

"Walter Hilton, in The Scale of Perfection, one of the most popular books of devotion in England in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, has a long discussion on three ways of loving God."

"Tolstoy himself would not have been able to recognize by day all that had been revealed to him in the darkness. Did he not declare his antagonism to St. Paul and the doctrine of salvation by faith? We know how angry he was with Nietzsche for his formula "beyond good and evil", which had resuscitated the forgotten teaching of the old apostle. And, indeed, in the "world common to all" men cannot live by faith; in this world works are esteemed, and necessary; in it men are justified, not by faith, but by works. p. 123"

"Where is truth, where is reality? Over there at Grichkino, or here on this plain? Grichkino had ceased to exist for ever; must one then doubt the reality of its existence? And with it the reality of the existence of all the old world? Doubt everything? De omnibus dubitandum? But did great Descartes really doubt everything? No, Hume was right: the man who has once doubted all things will never overcome his doubts, he will leave for ever the world common to us all and take refuge in his own particular world. De omnibus dubitandum is useless; it is worse than storm and snow, worse than the fact that Nikita is freezing and that the bay is shivering in the icy wind. p. 131-132"

"When "the light of truth" appeared to Descartes, he immediately imprisoned his discovery within a logical formula: "Cogito, ergo sum." And the great truth perished, it gave nothing either to Descartes or to any one else. Yet it was he himself who taught: "De omnibus dubitandum." But then he ought first of all to have questioned the legitimacy of the pretensions of syllogistical formulae, which claim to be the only, invariable, expert appraisers of truth and error. Directly Descartes began to make deductions he forgot what he had seen. He forgot the cogito, he forgot the sum, in order to be sure of the ergo which has the power to constrain men's minds. p. 110"

"For this solitary man, "chance", so despised and rejected by science and by "our ego", becomes the principal object of his search. He resolves to perceive, to treasure, and even to express that revelation which hides behind the accidental, which is invisible to a reason busied over earthly affairs and subservient to the exigencies of social existence. Such was Plotinus, the last great philosopher of antiquity. Such also was Tolstoy. p. 116"

"We have thus two legends. Man as individual being came into the world in accordance with God's will and with His blessing. Or, individual life appeared in the universe against God's will and is therefore in its essence impious, and death, annihilation, is the just and natural punishment for the sinful self-will. How and by whom shall it be decided where the truth lies? p. 254"

"Everyday experience teaches us that good and ill fortune befall in like measure the godless and the pious, the virtuous and the vicious. This is so, this was so, this will be so. Consequently also, it must be so, for this proceeds from the necessity of the divine nature and there is neither need nor possibility to alter the existing order of things. (Hegel said then: What is real is rational.) Must virtue be rewarded? Virtue is its own reward. p. 268"

"Tolstoy pitilessly stips himself before our eyes. There are few writers who show us truths like these. p. 85"

"The term 'metaphysical poets' came into being long after the poets to whom we apply it were dead. Samuel Johnson, who coined it, did so with the consciousness that it was a piece of literary slang, that he was giving it a kind of nickname."

"The Diary of a Madman is in a sense the key to Tolstoy's work. If it had not been written by Tolstoy himself, we should certainly have looked upon it as a calumny, since we are accustomed to look upon great men as the incarnation of all the civil and even the military virtues. p. 87"

"Unvarnished truth, that truth which runs contrary to the vital needs of human nature, is worse than any lie. This is what Tolstoy thought when he wrote War and Peace, when he was still entirely possessed by Aristotle's ideas, when he was afraid of madness and the asylum and hoped that he would never have to live in an individual world of his own. p. 94"

"Reason, which is based upon the world common to us all, which furnishes us with truths like "twice two is four" and "nothing happens without a cause" - this reason not only cannot justify and explain these new terrors and anxieties of Tolstoy's; it condemns them pitilessly as unreasonable, motiveless, arbitrary, and consequently unreal and visionary. p. 101"

"What was the modern movement in English and American literature has now passed into history. We have to call it the 'modernist movement'. Its great figures—Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, Wallace Stevens—are now well entrenched in academic syllabuses. The vultures and the crows have moved in over the old battlefields. Writers who once aroused a passionate enthusiasm and as passionate a disapproval are now the prey of bibliographers and textual critics, biographers and editors of letters, and students seeking doctorates."

"Dostoievsky was not the first to live though this unimaginably terrible passage from one world to another and to find himself obliged to abandon the stability which “principles’ give. Fifteen hundred years earlier Plotinus, who had also tried to transcend our experience, tells that at the first moment one has an impression that everything is disappearing, and has an overwhelming fear that only pure nothingness is left. P. 28"

"Directly Kant hears the word “law” pronounced he takes his hat off; he neither wishes nor dares to dispute. He who says “law” says “power”; he who says “power” says “submission” – for man’s supreme virtue is to submit himself. P. 23"

"Science is objective, indifferent; it does not consider whether a thing matters or not. It coldly casts its eye over the innocent and the guilty alike, knowing neither pity nor anger. But where there is no pity or indignation, where the innocent and the guilty are alike regarded with indifference, where all “phenomena” are merely classified and not qualified, there can be distinctions between the important and the insignificant. Science pretends to the certainty, the universality, and the necessity of its statements. P. 32"

"Plato, too, knew the “underground”, but her called it a “cave” and created his splendid world-famous myth in which men were likened to prisoners in a cave. But he did it in such a way that no one thought of calling Plato’s cave “underground” nor calling Plato himself a sickly, abnormal being, one of those for whom normal men have to invent theories, treatments, etc. p. 13"

"There are no ideals exalting the soul, but only chains, invisible indeed, but binding man more securely than iron. And no act of heroism, no “good work” can open the doors to man’s “perpetual confinement”. Dostoievsky’s barrack vows of “improvement” now appeared to him as a sacrilege. He experience which he underwent was much the same as Luther’s when he remembered with such unfeigned horror and disgust the vows which he had pronounced on entering the convent. P. 10"

"When he was in the settlement Dostoievsky was already especially attracted by these resolute men whom no obstacle could turn from their purpose. He tried by every means in his power to understand their psychology, but he did not succeed. P. 19"

"What happens to the mind of the underground man has no resemblance at all to thinking, nor even to seeking. He does not think, he excites himself desperately, throws himself about, knocks his head against the wall. He inflames himself the whole time, dashing up to unknown heights of fury, to fling himself into God knows what abysses of despair. He has no control of himself; a force far greater than himself has him completely under its sway. P. 42"

"Is it possible to escape from the curse of knowledge? Can man cease to judge and to condemn? Can he cease to be ashamed of his nakedness, ashamed of himself, or of his surroundings, like Adam and Eve before the serpent led them into temptation. This is the subject of the great discussion, which takes place in the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” (The Brothers Karamazov) between the Cardinal Inquisitor, an old man of ninety in whom all human wisdom is incarnate, and God Himself. The old man has long been silent, ninety years long, but at last he can bear it no longer; he must speak. P. 75"

"[Dostoievsky] has taken everything from us; he has left us nothing but “twice two is four”. Will man be able to bear this? Can I bear it myself? Or will my “consciousness”; all human consciousness, be finally crushed under the burden. And then we shall not only feel, but see, if only for a moment, that “here” everything is but beginning, that that what begins here does not finish here, where there is as yet neither beauty, nor ugliness, nor good, nor evil, but only hot and cold, agreeable and disagreeable, where it is not liberty that reigns, but necessity, to which even God Himself is subject, where human will and reason are as unlike the will and reason of the Creator as the dog, the barking animal, is unlike the dog-star. P. 52"

"Suppose Euripides is right, and that indeed no one can be sure whether life is not death and death life; can this truth ever become certain? If all men daily repeated Euripides’ words when they got up and when they went to bed, they would remain as strange and as problematic as on the day when the poet first heard them in the depths of his soul. P. 6"

"One of the outstanding examples of the unfree character of modern philosophical thought is perhaps the famous dispute between Hume and Kant. Kant often declared that Hume had awakened him out of “dogmatic slumber.” And in fact, when we read Hume and those passages of Kant in which he appeals to Hume, we might think that this could not be otherwise, and that what Hume saw and what was visible to Kant also, after Hume, must have awakened not only a sleeper, but even a dead man. Foreword p. xlv"

"What can be more terrible than not to know whether one is alive or dead? “Justice” should insist that this knowledge or this ignorance should be the prerogative of every human being. p. 3"

"Lewis established his reputation as a scholar with his first book, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Traditions (1936). This remains a great and profoundly original contribution to literary history. Whether one agrees or disagrees, in detail or in large, with its thesis, after reading this book one's whole imagination of the past has been extended and changed. Lewis recovered for the ordinary reader what had been lost for centuries, the power to read allegory and to respond to the allegorical mode of thinking. He was able to do so because he was a born allegorist himself."

"The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman are distinguished from Eliot's earlier plays by their author's obvious desire to accomodate himself to the conventions of the stage at their most conventional level. In the earlier plays, Sweeney Agonistes, Murder in the Cathedral, and The Family Reunion, Eliot was working in the experimental theatre of the 'thirties, using such devices as the chorus, the direct appeal to the audience, soliloquy, lyrical solos and duets, and ritual and symbolic acts. In these last plays he deliberately wrote within the limits of what has been contemptuously called the "West End Play", or what Mr. Terence Rattigan called "Plays for Aunt Edna"."

"Di queste case non è rimasto che qualche brandello di muro Di tanti che mi corrispondevano non è rimasto neppure tanto Ma nel cuore nessuna croce manca È il mio cuore il paese più straziato."

"Chiuso fra cose mortali (Anche il cielo stellato finirà) Perché bramo Dio?"

"Il vero amore è come una finestra illuminata in una notte buia. Il vero amore è una quiete accesa."

"Diana’s powerful analysis of the complex human interaction of the writers never stays merely abstract, but is infused with a very thorough knowledge of what can be discovered of the group and its often eccentric members."

"We are curious, we ask questions, we read and research and connect with others who know more than we do. Then we fumble to record the answers the best we can, and we discover that we understand things better because we try to write about them with candor and clarity. Questions just keep bubbling up all the time."

"When I was young, I said to Sorrow, "Come and I will play with thee!" He is near me now all day, And at night returns to say, "I will come again to-morrow— I will come and stay with thee.""

"Look up! the proof is round you written large; Your Faith is in the balance wanting found; Your shipless seas confess it; bridgeless streams; Your wasted wealth of ore, and moor, and bay. Beneath the Upas shade of Faith depraved All things lie dead -- wealth, comfort, freedom, power."

"Softly, O midnight hours! Move softly o'er the bowers Where lies in happy sleep a girl so fair: For ye have power, men say, Our hearts in sleep to sway And cage cold fancies in a moonlight snare."

"The warrior for the True, the Right, Fights in Love's name; The love that lures thee from that fight Lures thee to shame: That love which lifts the heart, yet leaves The spirit free,— That love, or none, is fit for one Man-shaped like thee."

"A great teacher and a great writer need not be an efficient supervisor."

"we could do a great deal worse than look back across the drift to the great reader Lewis. We need to try to recall what literature was; what it meant, and can still mean, to grasp literary works in memory."

"When man, in the exercise of his mechanical function, puts together a structure, he does it by adding one part to another, so that they lie side-by-side in space, and the whole is made up of all the parts added together. But when nature constructs, she follows a different principle – one which man also, when he is functioning not as mechanic but as artist or poet, must strive to follow. In an organic structure it will be found that the parts interpenetrate and, as it were, express each other in a characteristic way, and that often a single part will seem at the same time to be the whole, or to be potentially the whole. And this is the structural principle which, at all levels from the highest to the lowest, Anthroposophy reveals to us as present in the universe itself."

"I argue, then, that we might do well to attempt what is surely impossible—to withdraw our allegiance, however compulsory, from a reality based on the Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism."

"The various positivities produced ... by the logic of political hope depend on the mathematical illusion that negated negations might somehow escape, and not redouble, such negativity."

"Such "self-evident" one-sidedness—the affirmation of a value so unquestioned, because so obviously unquestionable, as that of the Child whose innocence solicits our defense—is precisely, of course, what distinguishes public service announcements from the partisan discourse of political argumentation. But it is also, I suggest, what makes such announcements so oppressively political—political not in the partisan terms implied by the media consultant, but political in a far more insidious way: political insofar as the fantasy subtending the image of the Child invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought. That logic compels us, to the extent that we would register as politically responsible, to submit to the framing of political debate—and, indeed, of the political field—as defined by the terms of what this book describes as reproductive futurism: terms that impose an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations."