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I don’t believe ‘enjoyed’ is the right adjective to describe how I felt reading Lapham’s Quarterly – Fear. What is the right word if you continually want to do something yet it causes anxiety and fear while you do it?
It is not that reading this edition made me afraid; it is that it called attention to the abundant anxiety in my own life which was exacerbated in reading about the anxiety and fear of others in this edition.
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. – Arthur Shopenhauer, 1851
The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it oneself to be acquainted with it. – Philip Dormer Stanhope, 1747
I began to see that among the many universes in which the world of living creatures existed, some where large, some small, but that all, including man’s, were in some way limited or finite. We were creatures of many different dimensions passing through each other’s lives like ghosts through doors.
Just finished Lapham’s Quarterly – Home and here are the things that stood out to me and my thoughts.
“Money is human happiness in abstracto; consequently he who is no longer capable of happiness in concreto sets his whole heart on money.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
I finally finished Lapham’s Quarterly’s Book of Nature yesterday. Work wasn’t too busy, the family was away and I got some serious reading done. Here are my favorites from this edition:
“Here is our long-forgotten family home.
And, having heard now and then the voice of ancestors calling,
Like a grey little forest bird, from far-away centuries,
I fly to you, Belovezhskaya Puschca.”
– Russian ballad by Aleksandra Pakhmutova, 1975
My favorite quotes from Heraclitus:
πολυμαθίη νόον οὐ διδάσκει
Much learning does not teach understanding
ποταμοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐμϐαίνουσιν, ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ.
Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers.
χρὴ γὰρ εὖ μάλα πολλῶν ἴστορας φιλοσόφους ἄνδρας εἶναι
Men that love wisdom must be acquainted with very many things indeed.
τὰ ὄντα ἰέναι τε πάντα καὶ μένειν οὐδέν
All entities move and nothing remains still.
What was scattered gathers.
What was gathered blows apart.
Just as the river where I step is not the same, and is, so I am as I am not.