[MD] daffy

[John Carl]

yo Adrie,

On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 1:31 PM, Fam. Kintziger-Karaca <
kintziger_karaca at hotmail.com> wrote:

>
> ps, probably of no importance , but i can read Kant in German, because of
> my German ancestors
> and doing my military service in Germany, long time ago.
>
> Regards , Adrie
>
>
>
Caught my eye because at our weekly lunch meeting today it was mentioned, by
Gaetane who speaks French natively, english as a second language and Polish
with some Russian,  that reading Tolstoy in Russian is a far cry from
reading the translations.

Man I wish I spoke Russian; a beautiful language.

However, what I'm really interested in these days is Faust.  Never read it,
never thought much about it except for a passage in ZAMM that caught my eyes
and rang my bell.  Pirsig talking to Chris, talking about pursuing ghosts
and failure.  For some reason it makes me goose pimply.  When I read it and
moreso today.

There's a passage I read tonight in Royce, talking about Faust...

"Faust is a man in whom are combined all the strengths and weakness of the
romantic spirit.  No Excellence he deems of worth so long as any excellence
is beyond his grasp.  Therefore his despair at the sight of the great world
of life.  So small a part of it is his.

He knows that he can never grow great enough to grasp the whole, or any
finite part of the whole.  Yet there remains the hopeless desire for this
wholeness.  Nothing but the infinite can be satisfying.  Hence the despair
of the early scenes of the first part.  Like Byron's Manfred, Faust seeks
death; but Faust is kept from it by no fear of worse things beyond, only by
an accidental re-awakening of old childish emotions.  He feels that he has
no business with life, and is wholly a creature of accident.  He is clearly
conscious only of a longing for a full experience.  But this experience he
conceives as mainly a passive one."

See, what gets me here with Royce's description is "the accidental
re-awakening of childish emotions."

That seems important to me.  That there is something in the re-awakening of
childish emotions that signifies more, much more than Bo's cold-blooded
"reversion to lower levels of hierarchical patterns".  This isn't any sort
of "lowerness".  This is profound.

Royce explains some more:

"The satisfactory pleasure can never be given him, and why?  Because he will
always remain active.  Satisfaction would mean repose, repose would mean
death.  Life is activity.  The meaning of a man is work, and that no one is
wholly lost so long as the power of accomplishment remains his.  But if work
is the essence of life, (head hands and heart-jc) then satisfaction must be
found not in feelings but in deeds.

The world is good if we can make it so.  Not otherwise."

Royce, Pessimism and Modern Thoughts


The world and what we make of it.

Two fountains of knowledge for your aesthetic considerations:

http://www.wimp.com/dubaifountain/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULLHYmz98P0