While reading on Metaphysics, Parerga and Paralipomena (Vol.1) by Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher quotes some obscure authors and books from the nineteenth century, but today those writers are either out of print or relegated to the shelves of oblivion.
By the nineteenth century, European writers have already covered everything in the purview and scope of human experiences, from the worst to the best, they have already fleshed out the human heart's deepest sentiments in the outer reaches of the soul; and what is humanly possible to be conceivable as existing in the power of imagination and inspiration, have already found expression in the fabulous literary rivers of antiquity...
Even Goethe, in conversations with Johann Peter Eckermann, admitted that former writers have already plumbed the depth and width of the human experience, and all he could do was to arrange his poetic writings in the form of aphorism, meditation and reflections. True, Goethe produced his Magnus Opus, Faust, but one could only appraise it as a compilation of poesy, philosophy, wise counsels and aphorism. I shall post something on the Faust of Goethe at a latter point.
Therefore, ye good writer, if you are an honorable fellow, then admit your ideas and indebtedness, as rightly belonging to previous writers: the Ancient Bards of yore.
And if you are humble enough, like Goethe or Henry D. Thoreau (check Walden Pond, On Reading, page 81), then perhaps you would duly pay your high respects to those great scribes of antiquity.
No one would dispute the irrefutable fact that today there is to be found a generation of very gifted writers out there, "the world of literature and letters" --as great as Homer, Goethe and Thoreau. These folks could even write in various languages, Latin and Greek, as did Schopenhauer and Thoreau.
What is a burning furnace to the smelting of ores and alloys resulting in precious metals, whose scummy dregs and shreds could reach the shining surface of fame and success, so it is the testing-passage of time to vetting out what's good from the mere common-place: the average talent today dubbed a "genius," is but a passing fad in the roisterous carousel of fashion and profitability.
This is the main reason why Henry D. Thoreau, as an honest writer, heartedly embraced the Ancient Bards as the best authors, because time, like the best teacher, is the wisdom of age. This impartial judgement has nothing to do with incurable atavism or any obsession with the past: Hellenic Culture. Great writers are simply timeless, anachronistic, and their moral lessons could change our lives for the better.
Humility is not the case with some writers out there. Some fellows would quietly abhor anything to do with the dear children of Beatrice and Aurora. Nay, they would continue forever and ever their tasteless drollness and farce against the decent lady who gathers the daintiest autumn leaves in the crystal lake of her noble being (the Soul). And so they would call other geniuses to gnash their rankling teeth and hatred for the Beatrice of Dante and the enigmatic smile of Mona Lisa. They may forget that Dante Alighieri had to pay his due to Virgil, the illustrious master.
Chortling, disparaging, they may go on mocking my poor beautiful lass Andromeda beyond any recognition.
We may achieve excellence but only through a very careful comparison of our shaped ideas as recast in the clear-lake of those time-tested works of previous writers; and then we may go on to subject ourselves to see our own conception and works (better still in the rigorous hours of early morning, when the vigor, power "puissance" and retention of the mind is at its highest pitch) with that sound, razor-sharped self-criticism and forgiveness, which is no other way than the Ninth Circle of Dante's Inferno!
Steps by steps we move on, confidently climbing the Mountain Inspiration, always having at our disposal those literary devices and priceless tools, accruing our swaddling developing style to thrive upward and upward, always faring through Homeric odysseys in the daintiest selection of gem-like words, pearly phrases and sublime passages coming from the dream-time of Pristine History, the time when the divine gods and giants were still walking the surface of this old planet.
But let me remind you, we cannot do so without that propitious, and ever-caring hand of Ms. Sophia: constant revision, corrections, placid retrospection, introspection, reshaping stiff sentences, but also re-modeling the transition of those odd passages, however sweet and quaint, they may impede the natural flow of more genial bubbles --bursting droplets of ingenuity and touching nays-- which are the eddying modes and attitudes in this mysterious stream of your reflections and my meditations!
Our mind is, indeed, that bottomless fountain of the baffled philosopher, gushing forth in endless strings of impressions and sensations --the most mysterious phenomenon and wonder of all our inquiries! And there is no doubt, that we (all) can reach the solemn, magnificent heaven of Milton, Thoreau and Goethe --the Adventurous Lass (the Soul) of our moving stories and odysseys, the true landmark of those great thinkers and intrepid souls after the Squirrel Parsifal in the wild wood... (Parsifal is figurative of Wagner's hero).
Some fine writers, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Schopenhauer, et al., can offer so many levels of subtleties and nuances, interpretations, revelations, slants etc., that it may seem possible to construe so many overlapping layers of meaningful probabilities, if perhaps very entangled path-ways to undertake for any easy fare-well with them.
And yet, however surprisingly fresh and delightful, these manifold writers may please the widest audience out there! Therefore, they are, in the judicious eyes of impartial judgment and posterity, the dear children of Aurora.
Finally, with some thinker-writers we may be at a loss to finally and conclusively settle in any given time or place. However objective in their appraisal of this most deceptive reality of fleeting shades, they are, verily, amusingly anachronistic yes-men-women, timeless wayfarers in the Twilight of Existence...
On Reading Edward Gibbon: the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Post-America
—-To a great Latin soul, may my writings inspire you to rise early.
By the nineteenth century, European writers have already covered everything in the purview and scope of human experiences, from the worst to the best, they have already fleshed out the human heart's deepest sentiments in the outer reaches of the soul; and what is humanly possible to be conceivable as existing in the power of imagination and inspiration, have already found expression in the fabulous literary rivers of antiquity...
Even Goethe, in conversations with Johann Peter Eckermann, admitted that former writers have already plumbed the depth and width of the human experience, and all he could do was to arrange his poetic writings in the form of aphorism, meditation and reflections. True, Goethe produced his Magnus Opus, Faust, but one could only appraise it as a compilation of poesy, philosophy, wise counsels and aphorism. I shall post something on the Faust of Goethe at a latter point.
Therefore, ye good writer, if you are an honorable fellow, then admit your ideas and indebtedness, as rightly belonging to previous writers: the Ancient Bards of yore.
And if you are humble enough, like Goethe or Henry D. Thoreau (check Walden Pond, On Reading, page 81), then perhaps you would duly pay your high respects to those great scribes of antiquity.
No one would dispute the irrefutable fact that today there is to be found a generation of very gifted writers out there, "the world of literature and letters" --as great as Homer, Goethe and Thoreau. These folks could even write in various languages, Latin and Greek, as did Schopenhauer and Thoreau.
What is a burning furnace to the smelting of ores and alloys resulting in precious metals, whose scummy dregs and shreds could reach the shining surface of fame and success, so it is the testing-passage of time to vetting out what's good from the mere common-place: the average talent today dubbed a "genius," is but a passing fad in the roisterous carousel of fashion and profitability.
This is the main reason why Henry D. Thoreau, as an honest writer, heartedly embraced the Ancient Bards as the best authors, because time, like the best teacher, is the wisdom of age. This impartial judgement has nothing to do with incurable atavism or any obsession with the past: Hellenic Culture. Great writers are simply timeless, anachronistic, and their moral lessons could change our lives for the better.
Humility is not the case with some writers out there. Some fellows would quietly abhor anything to do with the dear children of Beatrice and Aurora. Nay, they would continue forever and ever their tasteless drollness and farce against the decent lady who gathers the daintiest autumn leaves in the crystal lake of her noble being (the Soul). And so they would call other geniuses to gnash their rankling teeth and hatred for the Beatrice of Dante and the enigmatic smile of Mona Lisa. They may forget that Dante Alighieri had to pay his due to Virgil, the illustrious master.
Chortling, disparaging, they may go on mocking my poor beautiful lass Andromeda beyond any recognition.
We may achieve excellence but only through a very careful comparison of our shaped ideas as recast in the clear-lake of those time-tested works of previous writers; and then we may go on to subject ourselves to see our own conception and works (better still in the rigorous hours of early morning, when the vigor, power "puissance" and retention of the mind is at its highest pitch) with that sound, razor-sharped self-criticism and forgiveness, which is no other way than the Ninth Circle of Dante's Inferno!
Steps by steps we move on, confidently climbing the Mountain Inspiration, always having at our disposal those literary devices and priceless tools, accruing our swaddling developing style to thrive upward and upward, always faring through Homeric odysseys in the daintiest selection of gem-like words, pearly phrases and sublime passages coming from the dream-time of Pristine History, the time when the divine gods and giants were still walking the surface of this old planet.
But let me remind you, we cannot do so without that propitious, and ever-caring hand of Ms. Sophia: constant revision, corrections, placid retrospection, introspection, reshaping stiff sentences, but also re-modeling the transition of those odd passages, however sweet and quaint, they may impede the natural flow of more genial bubbles --bursting droplets of ingenuity and touching nays-- which are the eddying modes and attitudes in this mysterious stream of your reflections and my meditations!
Our mind is, indeed, that bottomless fountain of the baffled philosopher, gushing forth in endless strings of impressions and sensations --the most mysterious phenomenon and wonder of all our inquiries! And there is no doubt, that we (all) can reach the solemn, magnificent heaven of Milton, Thoreau and Goethe --the Adventurous Lass (the Soul) of our moving stories and odysseys, the true landmark of those great thinkers and intrepid souls after the Squirrel Parsifal in the wild wood... (Parsifal is figurative of Wagner's hero).
Some fine writers, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Schopenhauer, et al., can offer so many levels of subtleties and nuances, interpretations, revelations, slants etc., that it may seem possible to construe so many overlapping layers of meaningful probabilities, if perhaps very entangled path-ways to undertake for any easy fare-well with them.
And yet, however surprisingly fresh and delightful, these manifold writers may please the widest audience out there! Therefore, they are, in the judicious eyes of impartial judgment and posterity, the dear children of Aurora.
Finally, with some thinker-writers we may be at a loss to finally and conclusively settle in any given time or place. However objective in their appraisal of this most deceptive reality of fleeting shades, they are, verily, amusingly anachronistic yes-men-women, timeless wayfarers in the Twilight of Existence...
On Reading Edward Gibbon: the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Post-America
—-To a great Latin soul, may my writings inspire you to rise early.
As we bear witness to the decline of post-America, my current meditations may be reprised as an attempt to escaping the pernicious gloom and dejection of a stagnant economy, the black swans of a protracted pandemic, whose morbid effects I have been able to ward-off through the healing powers of literature.
Today I am hale and happy, but I can hardly shake-off a persistent uncertainty, an unshakable foreboding in the whirlwinds of our times.
Optimistically, I am looking forward to seeing you in the blissful winds of the Spring. May the lush greeneries of Mother Nature grant your soul new wings, new dreams, new places and verve. And like the brave ancient peoples beyond the Alps, let us find vim and joy even in the inclemencies of the elements. The nipping cold has only tempered my spirit in the serious business of existence, and I wish to retreat back into the wilderness to be left alone with my thoughts.
It is the irony of history, that a Latin man should be at home with an Englishman such as Edward Gibbon, or the other lofty spirit, John Milton, whose archaism could grant me but a veritable treasured storehouse of Latinized English from such glorious an era.
Las palabras latinas son nuestro patrimonio intelectual (Latin words are our patrimony), and while there are so many words as yet unkown to me, their meanings could be checked by their recurrent repetitions.
This is the secret of intuitive understanding, because our mind, all the while, seems to labor quietly in the profoundest lucubration (mediation) of the conscious and unconscious: the slumberous secretary (memory) ought to be the submissive maidservant in the tidy office of reason, and with some stern authority, she shall comply to our orders.
Retention is a self-conscious act of the will, but it is an excellent practice to associate words with one another, to compare and square their roots, to relate their etymologies to the most distant relatives with our mother tongue, Latin.
True! With these Anglo-Saxon authors, whose writings are full-fraught with a veritable storehouse of monosyllables (the literary patrimony of the Northern Europeans) a Latin reader could scarcely “plod” through the woods of yore without carrying a dictionary. Such monosyllables could test the patience and mettle of the fiercest legions of our times.
In the last resort, the margins (or blank pages) of a book should be used for such purposes, and even the underscoring of obscure words and phrases could avail the memory (our inner secretary) to greater retention and understanding.
This is the main reason why hard-paged books are the best repository of information, because we may fancy to feel the texture, shades and shades of abstract things otherwise existing in the realm of thoughts, ideas and concepts.
Therefore, the impressive lexicon and brilliance of an obdurate thinker such as E. Gibbon, is often checked on his foxed books’ personal notes, time-stricken papers and journals resuming the labors of decades.
The impressive brilliance of former writers could be due to their accumulations of books for reference.
It is noteworthy that the distinct style of Edward Gibbon is not only of form, or of inordinate length —rarely verging on lackadaisical euphuism— he has a penchant for poesy and philosophy, which could cast the unrolling theaters of history, the individual and the transiency of things, into an inexplicable timelessness and heroic grandeur.
Therefore it is fair to say that Gibbon’s writings could set us free from the fetters of times, and that unlike a visual documentary of the past, timelessness and magnificence are accesible through the poetic wings of the written word.
The visual images, however vivid and colorful, may have a tinge of fleeting sensuality, which, nonetheless, could have a striking immediacy and directness to our senses of sight and hearing, but their after-effects seem to lose the luster and power of the first impressions, and so the visual images, however presented with high definition, could not hold sway the higher faculties of our mind to the same effects as the unfettered paths of great literature.
In this manner, the visual images fail to transform us into contemplative witnesses of existence. While winning our attention for the present time, the unrolling scenes of motion pictures may fall behind the enduring delights of the Decline and Fall of E. Gibbon, because his thoughts could thunder even across the pavilions of millennia.
The inner eye of so rich an imagination has a greater scope of action, intellectual dexterity and freedom in the higher spatial realms of thoughts, whose boundless expansiveness cannot frame our mind to the narrow limits and constraints of the physical world. This is the main reason why Gibbon’s narratives could be so uplifting.
His lexicon rarely loses the delicate tincture, glint, freshness and luster of the choicest dictions (e.g., lucubration, acquiesce, specious, moiety, and so on) quite often leaving ample space for the most diverse interpretations, unfettered nays, yeas and plausible conjectures.
Such great a writer would spur our mind, sort of speak, to the daily improvement of our faculties (diligence, productivity and probity), to soar higher and higher in the interpretation and meaning of history, to construe the moral lessons of the past, and to diligently apply ourselves to the study of those mysterious forces believed to be the main culprits behind the decline of peoples and nations.
“...History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” --Edward Gibbon.
That such heights of superior literature are inaccessible from the niveau of our times could point to a gradual descent of “civilization and culture,” not on the medium of language itself, but on this fateful recurrence (Decline and Fall of Times) somehow sapping our noblest strivings and aspirations.
This is the tragedy of our times. While surrounded by a mountain of books, the best ones are often left unread in the shelves of oblivion, as indecipherable hieroglyphs to a passerby spectator from another time, their cumbersome stock of archaic lexicons and awkward locutions, may prove to be an insurmountable hurdle to a modern reader unrooted from his mother tongue Latin.
With the advent of the Internet (Google), I have often purchased the best classics from a book-vendor peddling the best of humanities in the streets of New York.
With the outbreak of COVID-19, sometime on April of the year 2020, I purchased an excellent abridged edition (as compressed by Dero. A Saunder, March, 1952) of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon.
Upon opening its time-stricken pages, I felt confronted with a voluminous conundrum, a mysterious book that stirred me up to the diligent labor of an archeologist. Every digging into this mine of human treasures reassured me that my labors were not in vain.
Like Heinrich Schliemann in search of Troy, an inner assurance dictated my reason, the gentle voice of silence guided my thoughts to a clearer understanding, and so the solemn hour unveiled her mysteries as though by the grace of God! A blessed illumination is often granted by this inner scribe of our inquiries, the unconscious operations of the mind, whose mysterious processes could crack open the meanings of words.
Perhaps the ineluctable forces of decadence and nihilism had disrupted a missing link between the past and present; or, perhaps the insidious usurpation of our most beloved values had left us all but strangers and orphans to our own history; from her formidable womb, a new people is born unreceptive to the writings of Edward Gibbon.
Accordingly, one should not just marvel at the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, one should even inquire on the decline of the classics (English Literature in America) in the unfortunate desertion and neglect of the romantic languages, especially in the United States of America.
********************************************
This rather lengthy comment on the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire would be magnified at a latter point. Edward Gibbon is such a great writer that any criticism could be deemed as impertinent and nonsensical:
Therefore, I am not here presuming to be such snarky a critic. True, while commenting on Gibbon’s stylistic distinction, I felt tempted to emulating his quaint English still smacking of medievalism.
“Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius”
A scholar (the teacher would rather use a pseudonym when posting videos on YouTube) has called to my attention Gibbon’s seeming lacunae when surveying the desultory events of human history. The said scholar, while admitting Gibbon’s intellectual rigor to conveying narratives in the most lucid style, could not always praise his rhetorics in reference to the reader’s niveau and power of comprehension.
Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Today I am hale and happy, but I can hardly shake-off a persistent uncertainty, an unshakable foreboding in the whirlwinds of our times.
Optimistically, I am looking forward to seeing you in the blissful winds of the Spring. May the lush greeneries of Mother Nature grant your soul new wings, new dreams, new places and verve. And like the brave ancient peoples beyond the Alps, let us find vim and joy even in the inclemencies of the elements. The nipping cold has only tempered my spirit in the serious business of existence, and I wish to retreat back into the wilderness to be left alone with my thoughts.
It is the irony of history, that a Latin man should be at home with an Englishman such as Edward Gibbon, or the other lofty spirit, John Milton, whose archaism could grant me but a veritable treasured storehouse of Latinized English from such glorious an era.
Las palabras latinas son nuestro patrimonio intelectual (Latin words are our patrimony), and while there are so many words as yet unkown to me, their meanings could be checked by their recurrent repetitions.
This is the secret of intuitive understanding, because our mind, all the while, seems to labor quietly in the profoundest lucubration (mediation) of the conscious and unconscious: the slumberous secretary (memory) ought to be the submissive maidservant in the tidy office of reason, and with some stern authority, she shall comply to our orders.
Retention is a self-conscious act of the will, but it is an excellent practice to associate words with one another, to compare and square their roots, to relate their etymologies to the most distant relatives with our mother tongue, Latin.
True! With these Anglo-Saxon authors, whose writings are full-fraught with a veritable storehouse of monosyllables (the literary patrimony of the Northern Europeans) a Latin reader could scarcely “plod” through the woods of yore without carrying a dictionary. Such monosyllables could test the patience and mettle of the fiercest legions of our times.
In the last resort, the margins (or blank pages) of a book should be used for such purposes, and even the underscoring of obscure words and phrases could avail the memory (our inner secretary) to greater retention and understanding.
This is the main reason why hard-paged books are the best repository of information, because we may fancy to feel the texture, shades and shades of abstract things otherwise existing in the realm of thoughts, ideas and concepts.
Therefore, the impressive lexicon and brilliance of an obdurate thinker such as E. Gibbon, is often checked on his foxed books’ personal notes, time-stricken papers and journals resuming the labors of decades.
The impressive brilliance of former writers could be due to their accumulations of books for reference.
It is noteworthy that the distinct style of Edward Gibbon is not only of form, or of inordinate length —rarely verging on lackadaisical euphuism— he has a penchant for poesy and philosophy, which could cast the unrolling theaters of history, the individual and the transiency of things, into an inexplicable timelessness and heroic grandeur.
Therefore it is fair to say that Gibbon’s writings could set us free from the fetters of times, and that unlike a visual documentary of the past, timelessness and magnificence are accesible through the poetic wings of the written word.
The visual images, however vivid and colorful, may have a tinge of fleeting sensuality, which, nonetheless, could have a striking immediacy and directness to our senses of sight and hearing, but their after-effects seem to lose the luster and power of the first impressions, and so the visual images, however presented with high definition, could not hold sway the higher faculties of our mind to the same effects as the unfettered paths of great literature.
In this manner, the visual images fail to transform us into contemplative witnesses of existence. While winning our attention for the present time, the unrolling scenes of motion pictures may fall behind the enduring delights of the Decline and Fall of E. Gibbon, because his thoughts could thunder even across the pavilions of millennia.
The inner eye of so rich an imagination has a greater scope of action, intellectual dexterity and freedom in the higher spatial realms of thoughts, whose boundless expansiveness cannot frame our mind to the narrow limits and constraints of the physical world. This is the main reason why Gibbon’s narratives could be so uplifting.
His lexicon rarely loses the delicate tincture, glint, freshness and luster of the choicest dictions (e.g., lucubration, acquiesce, specious, moiety, and so on) quite often leaving ample space for the most diverse interpretations, unfettered nays, yeas and plausible conjectures.
Such great a writer would spur our mind, sort of speak, to the daily improvement of our faculties (diligence, productivity and probity), to soar higher and higher in the interpretation and meaning of history, to construe the moral lessons of the past, and to diligently apply ourselves to the study of those mysterious forces believed to be the main culprits behind the decline of peoples and nations.
“...History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” --Edward Gibbon.
That such heights of superior literature are inaccessible from the niveau of our times could point to a gradual descent of “civilization and culture,” not on the medium of language itself, but on this fateful recurrence (Decline and Fall of Times) somehow sapping our noblest strivings and aspirations.
This is the tragedy of our times. While surrounded by a mountain of books, the best ones are often left unread in the shelves of oblivion, as indecipherable hieroglyphs to a passerby spectator from another time, their cumbersome stock of archaic lexicons and awkward locutions, may prove to be an insurmountable hurdle to a modern reader unrooted from his mother tongue Latin.
With the advent of the Internet (Google), I have often purchased the best classics from a book-vendor peddling the best of humanities in the streets of New York.
With the outbreak of COVID-19, sometime on April of the year 2020, I purchased an excellent abridged edition (as compressed by Dero. A Saunder, March, 1952) of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon.
Upon opening its time-stricken pages, I felt confronted with a voluminous conundrum, a mysterious book that stirred me up to the diligent labor of an archeologist. Every digging into this mine of human treasures reassured me that my labors were not in vain.
Like Heinrich Schliemann in search of Troy, an inner assurance dictated my reason, the gentle voice of silence guided my thoughts to a clearer understanding, and so the solemn hour unveiled her mysteries as though by the grace of God! A blessed illumination is often granted by this inner scribe of our inquiries, the unconscious operations of the mind, whose mysterious processes could crack open the meanings of words.
Perhaps the ineluctable forces of decadence and nihilism had disrupted a missing link between the past and present; or, perhaps the insidious usurpation of our most beloved values had left us all but strangers and orphans to our own history; from her formidable womb, a new people is born unreceptive to the writings of Edward Gibbon.
Accordingly, one should not just marvel at the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, one should even inquire on the decline of the classics (English Literature in America) in the unfortunate desertion and neglect of the romantic languages, especially in the United States of America.
********************************************
This rather lengthy comment on the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire would be magnified at a latter point. Edward Gibbon is such a great writer that any criticism could be deemed as impertinent and nonsensical:
Therefore, I am not here presuming to be such snarky a critic. True, while commenting on Gibbon’s stylistic distinction, I felt tempted to emulating his quaint English still smacking of medievalism.
“Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius”
A scholar (the teacher would rather use a pseudonym when posting videos on YouTube) has called to my attention Gibbon’s seeming lacunae when surveying the desultory events of human history. The said scholar, while admitting Gibbon’s intellectual rigor to conveying narratives in the most lucid style, could not always praise his rhetorics in reference to the reader’s niveau and power of comprehension.
Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Little occurred to me that an abridgment is liable to incongruous reductiveness, inevitable cracks and unwitting mutilations, which the aforementioned teacher of letters (sic, “lack of backup stories”) should rather infer as the errors of unwitting licentiousness from less cautious editors, whose hermeneutics and contractions of the said literature, could have, unfortunately, marred the original train of thoughts anymore than an incompetent translation of the Bible.
By reducing or adulterating such turgid literature to the comprehension of the lay student, we may assume occasional violations to the syntactic integrity of the original.
Instead of blaming such apparently disjointed narratives on the author’s lack of intellectual cohesiveness, one should either plead our case before the tribunal of our intellectual inadequacy, or bring an injunction against this ever-growing alluvion of bad books and novellas passing for literature, whose noxious influences have perhaps crippled our faculties in the comprehension and enjoyment of the enduring classics of yore.
Of course, it behooves me to say that some writers (such as Frederick Nietzsche and Thomas Mann), two minds of the first order, had expressed themselves in a prose style one may reluctantly appraise as the acme of Western Literature. However great writers, one is tasked to plod through an insurmountable plethora of archaisms and hifalutin verbosity which could easily find the sanction of a less capable modern writer.
Why are these ancient writers so great?
We should sorely regret the current state of things in post-America, for even their once supreme authors are becoming obsolete (a fossilized classical genre on the verge of extinction) whereas more and more inferior authors, with an effusion of superlative praises of mutual support and solidarity, are holding in contempt the authority of the classics.
Therefore, my friend scholar was right when comparing the Decline of Rome (USA) with the neglect of the classics, the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as the best education in the improvement of modem society and its citizens.
Are they relevant?
Their masterworks in dereliction, would require a new branch of classical studies and preservation, like those old pipe organs from medieval times, whose size and magnificence could attest to their once glorious times, and could even win our admiration, but their jarring sounds are said to be out of tune, cacophonous, uneven and even disjointed.
But it is more disheartening when few can understand or enjoy the ineffable works of former authors.
Today we may even blame Gibbon’s lack of thoroughness, that is to say, his little regard for the reader’s expected capacity to fill-in the superfluous materials and references. Consequently, Gibbon’s literature is alike turgid and recondite.
Nay, the teacher of our times, while holding an abridgment of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, may even fail to separate the ancient author from the modern editor’s own liberties to clipping materials “thereof” thus inevitably altering the integrity and logical sequels of such classics.
We are lucky if such lofty thoughts could hold sway the best faculties of our mind.
Like a vast river ever receding with nostalgia amidst the ponderous but somewhat entertaining scenes of human history, Gibbon’s literature could even cast the fleetingness of our transient existence with an inexplicable sense of timelessness, nay, a wondrous sense of elation almost reaching the metaphysical realms of the fantastic and divine.
Make me happy while longing for a distant past.
His chapters, like a covey of passing clouds forming and disbanding amidst a most serene welkin of lucubration so I felt my mind to be filled with things glorious and beautiful, and from such symposium of lofty spirits, there emerges an inexplicable love for the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
From 2020-to the present, Edward Gibbon has become my educator, and through him I have learned to appraise the English Language as a remarkable repository of foreign words (from the most ancient Latinism to the most commonly loaned French dictions at home), which, as being the language of the educated thinkers of Europe in the eighteenth century (French), my teacher has simply expressed himself as befitting a philosopher of the highest rank, alongside the other giants, Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau, in the literary heights of the Age of Reason and Enlightenment.
Dear scholar of today, you have done an excellent job! And you deserve my admiration and high respects. Like a free thinker, nonetheless, I may agree with my friend Philo, that at times you seem to judge the classics from the niveau (platform) and ethos of your times , and by so doing, your pithy analysis of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, while praising and recommending Edward Gibbon’s Magnus Opus, may rather seem to dismiss him as an outdated writer and irrelevant historian.
Gibbon’s genius lies in his remarkable imagination and insights to surmising facts from the universal stuff of human nature, where evidence is lacking to purport the truth of history, a brilliant historian, or a divinely gifted poet such as Shakespeare, as aided by his intuitive powers, could furnish us with the missing lacunae beyond the testimony of the eye-witnesses, nay, beyond the scarce remnants in the provinces of archeology.
While your snarky criticism of Gibbon’s archaism and liberalism may win my sympathy, you have failed to be guided by his humble confessions and reasonings:
Chapter V (A.D. 248-285)
“...The confusion of the times and the scarcity of authentic memorials oppose equal difficulties to the historian who attempts to preserve a clear and unbroken thread of narration. Surrounded with imperfect fragments, always concise, often obscure, and sometimes contradictory, he is reduced to collect, to compare, and to conjecture (watchword); and though he ought never to place his conjectures in the rank of facts, yet the knowledge of human nature, and of the sure operation of its fierce and restrained passions, might on some occasions supply the want of historical materials.”
Nevertheless, yours is a brilliant analysis of Edward Gibbon’s masterpiece. Why it is so difficult to understand Gibbon’s English?
His prose writing is the mark of genius, and with some patience and intellectual exertion, one could finally rise to his lofty heights.
Is his English outdated? I would say that master works of such extraordinary excellence are simply timeless, and our difficult task is to emulate what time has tested to be the work of genius.
Once again Sir, you have done a wonderful job!
Gibbon’s English, like any great work demanding a broad lexicon, has a goodly stock of foreign words, Latin, French, Scandinavian, which could cast his thoughts and prose writings in the mold of Great Classical Literature. In other words, Gibbon is an indefatigable smith when smelting, blending and substituting the most diverse resources and tools of the English language at his disposal.
Pusillanimity, lack of courage, would not apply to an anachronistic man, whose amazing genius seems to rise above the decadence and mediocrity of our times.
This teacher is very helpful, but some of his comments on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire could be faulty in premises, inferences and propositions, like an astronomer led astray by a mirage of erroneous postulates and figments assuming the form of facts.
The word “pusillanimity,” for example, is often used by Edward Gibbon, which the commenter, somewhat facetiously, may even demur as an outdated word in the rich classical literature of the English Language. It is like saying that Dante’s Divine Comedy is antiquated because it was fashioned after the Aeneid of Virgil, an ancient author which lived more than one thousand years prior to the renown Italian poet.
Great writings could not be demeaned by the employment of a cheap language (hackneyed) to please an average reader, or an easy language that’s to be understood by less capable minds.
Another example of prose writing used by Gibbon, “Libidinous Complexion,” (when making references to the high libido of the Arabs and dark skin Moors) which the modern scholar once again misunderstood in a literal interpretation.
During the eighteen century, and even today, some hold the theories that the darker races are believed to have a higher libido than the white Europeans.
Sybaritism, complacency, hubris, schism, the ravages of a protracted pandemic, the loss of moral compass, and a teetering economy, could warn us all of decadence and decline, but the most obvious symptoms of decomposition and decay are those of Sodom and Gomorrah’s hideous binges: depravities, sexual perversity, unnatural practices, galore, and with a libidinous complexion, a new refractory people is born out of the cesspool of anarchy and degeneration.
The heaving-up of such degenerate symptoms could finally overwhelm the once wholesome fabrics and institutions of a nation.
Resources are soon depleted to keeping a precarious sense of safety and peace, but from without, along the unguarded borders of our complacency, there comes the unrooted hordes of chaos and decline...
The question is not of decline but of fortitude. Can the American Empire withstand the tides of our times?
By reducing or adulterating such turgid literature to the comprehension of the lay student, we may assume occasional violations to the syntactic integrity of the original.
Instead of blaming such apparently disjointed narratives on the author’s lack of intellectual cohesiveness, one should either plead our case before the tribunal of our intellectual inadequacy, or bring an injunction against this ever-growing alluvion of bad books and novellas passing for literature, whose noxious influences have perhaps crippled our faculties in the comprehension and enjoyment of the enduring classics of yore.
Of course, it behooves me to say that some writers (such as Frederick Nietzsche and Thomas Mann), two minds of the first order, had expressed themselves in a prose style one may reluctantly appraise as the acme of Western Literature. However great writers, one is tasked to plod through an insurmountable plethora of archaisms and hifalutin verbosity which could easily find the sanction of a less capable modern writer.
Why are these ancient writers so great?
We should sorely regret the current state of things in post-America, for even their once supreme authors are becoming obsolete (a fossilized classical genre on the verge of extinction) whereas more and more inferior authors, with an effusion of superlative praises of mutual support and solidarity, are holding in contempt the authority of the classics.
Therefore, my friend scholar was right when comparing the Decline of Rome (USA) with the neglect of the classics, the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as the best education in the improvement of modem society and its citizens.
Are they relevant?
Their masterworks in dereliction, would require a new branch of classical studies and preservation, like those old pipe organs from medieval times, whose size and magnificence could attest to their once glorious times, and could even win our admiration, but their jarring sounds are said to be out of tune, cacophonous, uneven and even disjointed.
But it is more disheartening when few can understand or enjoy the ineffable works of former authors.
Today we may even blame Gibbon’s lack of thoroughness, that is to say, his little regard for the reader’s expected capacity to fill-in the superfluous materials and references. Consequently, Gibbon’s literature is alike turgid and recondite.
Nay, the teacher of our times, while holding an abridgment of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, may even fail to separate the ancient author from the modern editor’s own liberties to clipping materials “thereof” thus inevitably altering the integrity and logical sequels of such classics.
We are lucky if such lofty thoughts could hold sway the best faculties of our mind.
Like a vast river ever receding with nostalgia amidst the ponderous but somewhat entertaining scenes of human history, Gibbon’s literature could even cast the fleetingness of our transient existence with an inexplicable sense of timelessness, nay, a wondrous sense of elation almost reaching the metaphysical realms of the fantastic and divine.
Make me happy while longing for a distant past.
His chapters, like a covey of passing clouds forming and disbanding amidst a most serene welkin of lucubration so I felt my mind to be filled with things glorious and beautiful, and from such symposium of lofty spirits, there emerges an inexplicable love for the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
From 2020-to the present, Edward Gibbon has become my educator, and through him I have learned to appraise the English Language as a remarkable repository of foreign words (from the most ancient Latinism to the most commonly loaned French dictions at home), which, as being the language of the educated thinkers of Europe in the eighteenth century (French), my teacher has simply expressed himself as befitting a philosopher of the highest rank, alongside the other giants, Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau, in the literary heights of the Age of Reason and Enlightenment.
Dear scholar of today, you have done an excellent job! And you deserve my admiration and high respects. Like a free thinker, nonetheless, I may agree with my friend Philo, that at times you seem to judge the classics from the niveau (platform) and ethos of your times , and by so doing, your pithy analysis of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, while praising and recommending Edward Gibbon’s Magnus Opus, may rather seem to dismiss him as an outdated writer and irrelevant historian.
Gibbon’s genius lies in his remarkable imagination and insights to surmising facts from the universal stuff of human nature, where evidence is lacking to purport the truth of history, a brilliant historian, or a divinely gifted poet such as Shakespeare, as aided by his intuitive powers, could furnish us with the missing lacunae beyond the testimony of the eye-witnesses, nay, beyond the scarce remnants in the provinces of archeology.
While your snarky criticism of Gibbon’s archaism and liberalism may win my sympathy, you have failed to be guided by his humble confessions and reasonings:
Chapter V (A.D. 248-285)
“...The confusion of the times and the scarcity of authentic memorials oppose equal difficulties to the historian who attempts to preserve a clear and unbroken thread of narration. Surrounded with imperfect fragments, always concise, often obscure, and sometimes contradictory, he is reduced to collect, to compare, and to conjecture (watchword); and though he ought never to place his conjectures in the rank of facts, yet the knowledge of human nature, and of the sure operation of its fierce and restrained passions, might on some occasions supply the want of historical materials.”
Nevertheless, yours is a brilliant analysis of Edward Gibbon’s masterpiece. Why it is so difficult to understand Gibbon’s English?
His prose writing is the mark of genius, and with some patience and intellectual exertion, one could finally rise to his lofty heights.
Is his English outdated? I would say that master works of such extraordinary excellence are simply timeless, and our difficult task is to emulate what time has tested to be the work of genius.
Once again Sir, you have done a wonderful job!
Gibbon’s English, like any great work demanding a broad lexicon, has a goodly stock of foreign words, Latin, French, Scandinavian, which could cast his thoughts and prose writings in the mold of Great Classical Literature. In other words, Gibbon is an indefatigable smith when smelting, blending and substituting the most diverse resources and tools of the English language at his disposal.
Pusillanimity, lack of courage, would not apply to an anachronistic man, whose amazing genius seems to rise above the decadence and mediocrity of our times.
This teacher is very helpful, but some of his comments on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire could be faulty in premises, inferences and propositions, like an astronomer led astray by a mirage of erroneous postulates and figments assuming the form of facts.
The word “pusillanimity,” for example, is often used by Edward Gibbon, which the commenter, somewhat facetiously, may even demur as an outdated word in the rich classical literature of the English Language. It is like saying that Dante’s Divine Comedy is antiquated because it was fashioned after the Aeneid of Virgil, an ancient author which lived more than one thousand years prior to the renown Italian poet.
Great writings could not be demeaned by the employment of a cheap language (hackneyed) to please an average reader, or an easy language that’s to be understood by less capable minds.
Another example of prose writing used by Gibbon, “Libidinous Complexion,” (when making references to the high libido of the Arabs and dark skin Moors) which the modern scholar once again misunderstood in a literal interpretation.
During the eighteen century, and even today, some hold the theories that the darker races are believed to have a higher libido than the white Europeans.
Sybaritism, complacency, hubris, schism, the ravages of a protracted pandemic, the loss of moral compass, and a teetering economy, could warn us all of decadence and decline, but the most obvious symptoms of decomposition and decay are those of Sodom and Gomorrah’s hideous binges: depravities, sexual perversity, unnatural practices, galore, and with a libidinous complexion, a new refractory people is born out of the cesspool of anarchy and degeneration.
The heaving-up of such degenerate symptoms could finally overwhelm the once wholesome fabrics and institutions of a nation.
Resources are soon depleted to keeping a precarious sense of safety and peace, but from without, along the unguarded borders of our complacency, there comes the unrooted hordes of chaos and decline...
The question is not of decline but of fortitude. Can the American Empire withstand the tides of our times?
On Caustic Writers | Prose-Writing-José María Vargas Vila-Frederick Nietzsche | On A. Schopenhauer-Baltasar Gracián | On Goethe’s Faust and Junot Díaz’ Oscar Wao
Publishing any material criticizing other authors could win me enemies, because best-sellers are often in demand due to the roisterous carousel of fad and fashion. The present essay is a continuation on another article titled Reflections On Literature and the Ethos of Yesteryears, whereat I advise the reader to be careful with the pernicious literature of our times as essentially nihilistic.
Of course, it is time to teach our youth to be selective, and as forewarned by A. Schopenhauer, to be on guard against this literary establishment that, for the last decades, has, time and time again, celebrated "the orgies of geniuses" with flippant contempt for the healthy principles of morality, integrity and character.
The results have been catastrophic, because young people, the millennial, have grown up in an apocalyptic society where literature is no longer promoted for the improvement of the human type. Daily, the loftiest sentiments are buried in the murky world of literature.
Unfortunately, nihilism (que la vida no tiene sentido), has even infiltrated the sacred office of the church's library, and even there one could come across a book, the Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao, whose content, full-fraught with vulgarities, could be said to depict the Dominican people as the outcome of a fuku, an euphemism for "fuck-you."
And this is how the current state of things stand in the world of literature, because our youth, unlike the American people of Norman Rockwell, cannot enjoy the crystalline waters of the Walden Pond by Henry Thoreau.
The streamlines of literature have been sullied by a new generation of writers, hacks of success, scribblers, ink-slingers, hellbent on destroying the most sacred feelings of humanity in the elevation of our human nature.
Colombian author Jose Maria Vargas Vila, whose controversial liberal views --and misogynistic attacks on the cult of womanhood in Latin America-- made him the quintessential Satan of the Catholic Church, the Machiavelli of platonic love in some literary circles, was also celebrated for his incomparable prose brushstrokes and caustic genius. El hombre es uno en millones. Vargas Vila is the Nietzsche of Latin America.
While Vargas' style could be deemed bawdy, lecherous, salacious and sensual, his remarkable creative puissance rarely veers into inferior literary brushstrokes of gross vulgarity. You are fortunate if you can find an English translation of Ibis, or Aura o Las Violetas by the same author. Like Baltasar Gracian, Vargas Vila's prose writings are simply the signature of genius!
Where is Arthur Schopenhauer to translate the genius of Colombia to the American English audience?
Another great writer whose prose-writing and incomparable psychology could well make some current behemoth-writers retreat with terror and dread is Frederick Nietzsche. When reading Nietzsche in other languages, his writings and multi-layered insights do not lose the vigor, niter and fire of the original German.
Why? Simply because Nietzsche penned down his multi-layered mind with substance! And his thoughts are indeed the loftiest!
Accordingly, Nietzsche's writings cannot be justly appraised alla prima, for like the oak-trees, such thoughts and insights could only take root but only in the right soil and milieu. Consequently, while alive, Nietzsche's Magnus Opus, the Will to Power, was relegated to the shelves of oblivion.
-/-Profitability may explain the success of some authors in every generation.
On La Maravillosa Vida de Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz en el Idioma Español (Spanish Translation of the Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)
As a Dominican-born reader, why this book did not receive my approval in the Spanish language?
If you translate this book into the Spanish language, what the author achieves in the keyboard of his English language, is soon revealed to be less effective, nay inadequate, incompatible when the essential, the substance, the kernel and the thought-material can no longer capture the reader whose chief delight is merely on the form, the prose, the oxymoron but not the gist of the subject-matter.
When straddling between two different languages, English and Spanish, one cannot avoid linguistic incompatibilities finding acceptance in the keywords of our concept-sphere and logics, and from such cultural collision and queer awkwardness, there emerges new interesting hybrids, mutations, collisions, oxymoronic cancelations, and sometimes, even utter mutilation of the language is totally acceptable as long as it brings profits...
https://www.onehourtranslation.com/translation/blog/linguistic-equivalence-translation
According to A. Schopenhauer, entire generations of writers could become mentally befuddled and finally crippled by the insidious power of toxic literature (On Judgement and Criticism, etc., Parerga and Paralipomena Volume 2).
19th-Century German Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer Presages the Economics and Ethics of the Web and Modern Publishing – Brain Pickings
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/13/schopenhauer-on-authorship/
Indeed, I could not explain the said prose-writer's genius as always effective when the vehicle of expression, train of thoughts are simply marred or hampered in another language's configuration, but much is lost with translation (John Fiske on the Translation of the Divine Comedy by Dante); and if the writer lacks substance for any moral elevation of the mind, then we better save our brain from frittering away our precious faculties with very recondite literature.
Therefore, when translating the literary work, the behemoth-genius is soon revealed to be a great guest but in his own house USA: outside of the English Language the prose-wizardry of Mr. Diaz cannot thunder to the same flashy effects in the Spanish language.
When Dominican people like me denounce this book as foreign to the great language of Miguel Cervantes or José María Vargas Vila, we are simply speaking on the form and not on the content. But when we further delve into the gist of the niter that thus set the entire American literary world ablaze, we are the more appalled and disappointed by the gross nature of such humor, such free-for-all shit, unworthy of men who call themselves educators in the world of letters.
Salacious Dominican words such as (e.g. toto podrido, culo, ripio, among other extremely vulgar ones) which could have little effects in the mind of an English-speaking decent college-lass, could prove to be very blasphemous for a Dominican reader schooled in the Don Quixote of Miguel Cervantes Saavedra.
The Spanglish of such hacks of success does not hold ground for those versed in the luscious prose and beauty of writers the likes of Henry D. Thoreau, Baltasar Gracian, F. Nietszche, or José María Vargas Vila.
How do we save our youth from the alluvion of nihilism?
Of course, there are the writings whose meaning and gist could not so easily be construed or parsed by a simple cursory preamble, the cohesiveness of the work is inseparable of every other constituent part, especially the finale (e.g. Faust by Goethe is still confined to this category).
What tenuous thread may link Faust Part One and Part Two? Is it desultory?
Sometimes one simply understands the development of an essay or writing but in relation to every other part and in its entirety, and it is said of some authors (Faust Part 1 and 2 by Goethe) the cohesiveness of such masterwork is to be found but in the ever-recurrent motifs of unsatisfied longings, the dynamics of unfulfilled hankerings and dissatisfaction with life,followed by the prickly stings of desire and ennui (A. Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy)
These are the watchwords, i. e., dissatisfaction, desires, ennui, to understanding Faust, but the thematic sequel, as observed by some critics, is definitely lost in Faust Part 2, hence why this work is often read like aphoristic insights, maxims, reflections, poetry.
****************************************
In this essay I would like touch upon my high regards for Dominican writer Junot Diaz
When I first heard the news that a writer of the caliber of Junot Diaz has been crowned with the laurels of genius, I felt proud of my brother, and many Dominican compatriots, spread the good tidings --a triumphant feat-- in the literary claques and cliques dominating the prestigious institutions of USA.
From this perspective, one must concede a revolution in the World of Literature in the United States of America for the promotion of multiculturalism, education, the flower of culture and aesthetics as the greatest moral forces for social justice and humanities.
Nevertheless, while immersed in the Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I was soon aware that what the writer achieved in the promotion of culture and social justice for people of color, could not tally the prodigious reservoir of Oscar Wow's prolific mind to spinning corrosive tales as vulgar as they are offensive in the Spanish Language --especially to people of Dominican descent.
My admiration for Junot Diaz is a literary one, but as a Dominican born person, I cannot sympathize with an impudent man who has thus resorted to the defamation of his own people --the selling or bribing of his primogeniture and birthright-- in exchange for mundane glory as accorded by those who may relish in the "avant-garde literature of scurrilousness and nihilism."
As much as I admire his prose-writings, I cannot sympathize with his bawdy abuse of the English language, and would say that the author, however a gifted writer, has done a wonderful job to presenting the Dominican people with little regards to Juan Pablo Duarte, Sanchez y Mella (founders of the Dominican Republic), and I don't think they would be happy with Mr. Diaz.
La Vida Marvillosa de Oscar Wao, por el escritor Dominicano Junot Diaz, me parece un obra genial y maestra! Junot Diaz, no hay duda, y esto a pesar de los muchos detractores de este humilde genio Dominicano, es un tremendo talento!
His caustic prose is just fueled with fire, wit and poetic distinction.
Diría que en La Segunda Parte (II) de esta controversial obra, mi hermano en patria, Junot Díaz, demuestra tener el ferviente fuego de un gran escritor.
That said, one can only wish that the whole “shit--thing” could have been expressed in such elevated and dignified style.
And it is here where one stumbles upon a most remarkable "Dominican sancocho" of intelectual incongruities and wit, a "mottled hotchpotch" of disparate things expressed in a literary style that is for the most part vulgar and bawdy.
Nevertheless, this hybrid monstrous masterpiece, (which could easily collide the nadir and the acme in the hellish of genius) is not wanting of every single motley element which could provoke, alternately, irresistible abhorrence mixed with reluctant admiration. Therefore, we have to admit that Mr. Junot Diaz' oxymoronic devices are indeed fired with genius and originality.
The work is reprehensible as it is also fascinating to an incomprehensible extent, but sometimes we are tasked to plod through a veritable alluvion of basest things expressed in a vulgar style.
Of course, I am not denying Mr. Diaz a surprising depth of "Goethean immeasurableness" in the non-spatial twilight of our existence, but I wish the great writer could have kept his poetic flight without veering away into some tasteless profanity and vulgarity. Luckily, this Dominican sancocho is held together by the backbones of sex, race and violence.
It is easier to contrive one thousand fucku-stories plagiarized from local newspapers than to soar with little digression into the heaven of writers the likes of Henry D. Thoreau, F. Nietzsche or Arthur Schopenhauer.
Unquestionably, there is indeed genius in a man who has neither qualms, nor scruples, to speaking thus of sex and race in such scandalous head-scratching literary style.
Where is the niter to set the whole shit-thing ablaze?
And here Los Gringos of post-America, have found their favorite genius who could thus speak so openly and unreservedly on the color of a black skin in the Dominican Republic. From the color-line perspective, the historic parallels between the Dominican Republic and USA are simply striking!
Therefore, perhaps I was too quick to praising Junot Diaz for his fire-prose writing and thematic development --the true mark of genius. El final es un poco unintelligible, and lengthy to Hegelian proportion. I would deem the whole thing as a comedy, albeit a tragic one… for Junot Diaz, Pulitzer-award winner, while praised by Los Gringos, "un genio," may have brought out the worst of the Dominican people.
*This Is How You Lose La Hispaniola*
As I start reading this book at Barnes and Noble, and I have to confess rarely encountering something more vulgar, filthy and detrimental to the true goal of any great writer, Oscar Wow once again charges with all the literary wiles of obscenity, vulgarity and sensuality.
The hybrid-book, which for sure would bring profitable gains due to its sexually-fueled content, seems to have been concocted in the cesspool of our traumatic latrines in a Latin America still beset with the demons of benighted colonialism...
Compare this hellish book with F. Nietzsche's volcanic master work "The Will to Power"...and you will understand me; and yet, while alive, Nietzsche, like Thoreau, could not find an audience for his books!
The greatest books are left unread in the shelves of America...America the Beautiful I Cannot Recognize Thee.
Once again, we are appalled at how things are ejaculated in the literary world of geniuses in America.
Of course, secretly, this well-educated audience may have found a writer whose genius is to stir-up a formidable surge of bilirubin. Indeed, ours is a society traumatized by the legal imps of sexual harassments and lawsuits, and to express oneself so bawdily would require, undoubtedly, not only talent but also courage, but also a community of writers and readers striking kindred thereof.
And so, this brilliant writer is the devil of nihilism in a society which has finally become suicidal and apocalyptic.
It is just incredible how little respect for anything noble, honorable and sacred...our generation of writers reminds me the wincing monkeys in the Witch's Kitchen (Goethe, Faust Part 1).
Of course, such salacious stuff would find a sure public out there --let them have their potion to their heart's content. If we wish to corroborate Jose Ortega y Gasset's observations (The Revolt of the Masses) on the current state of thing for the intellectually crippled society of post-American, one would read the new generation of writers and hacks of quick success today, and how they shock-and-awe with their ever-present unfetchingly bombastic high-flown jargon full of obscenities and vulgarities.
We may substitute the despicable word shit for swills, and we would perhaps show some modicum of respectability for the language of John Milton.
The great merit of such book is that it would task us to seek the help of an Oxford Thesaurus Dictionay!
I just cant believe we have reached such low a nadir --pit-decadence in the America of Obama-- to allowing our beautiful youth to be fed-up and finally traumatized on such nauseous hotch-potch oozing forth from the bowels of USA and the Dominican Republic.
And so we would conclude that USA is very tolerant to admitting some people to be called geniuses....great minds!
Of course, Mr. Junot, undoubtedly, has great talent for prose-writing, but how can a great writer debase us with bawdiness and fucku-stories so unworthy of great writers?
For my part, I am not interested to finding audience in a world incapable to enjoying Mozart or Goethe's Faust. Agreeing with Australian philosopher David Stove, Everything Goes, I am very pleased but only reading the great writers of yesteryears. For, even Goethe, who was such great writer, had already expressed this view: that so many writers have written before him, and that there is nothing new under the sun.
Furthermore, I could take the Daily News and jot down a long list of Fuku-stories, because, with such writers and thinkers, we are to remain forever "manacled" in the Pit of Hell. But the flight of ascension to a Bravo-Finale may require the fine mind of a true genius! And here, unfortunately, we are wretchedly left in the cesspool of our times...
Junot Diaz may remind me of a Moorish polymath, and his Magnus Opus, the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, may hint at the Tragedy of Othello for pursuing a saucy white chic among the upper-crusty Britons of Shakespeare. In some ways, we cannot win the white chic's favor without some treason to our beloved homelands and ancestry.
Again, the issue of race is the incendiary niter in the bosky wild woods of humanity. From another psychological perspective, Oscar Wao is the new child of America!
And so, like the Othello of Shakespeare, in a unparalleled feat of remarkable literary triumph --even through the abuse of sexually explicit language and content-- my inspiring Brown man Oscar Wao has embarked on a most arduous perilous task: to prove that he deserves an honorable seat next to Henry D. Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Ralph Emerson.
That a man of mixed background could write so well may be breaking-news in USA. But keep in mind, were not the Persians, the Sumerians, the Mayan a people of mixed ancestors and great pyramids?
Great divine literature once flowed from the now parched lands of Egypt, Ethiopia and India. We read Homer, and wonder, what a divine writer! But in all likelihood, Homer probably read and nurtured his poetic impetus from the ancient literary rivers of Sumer and Egypt.
Publishing any material criticizing other authors could win me enemies, because best-sellers are often in demand due to the roisterous carousel of fad and fashion. The present essay is a continuation on another article titled Reflections On Literature and the Ethos of Yesteryears, whereat I advise the reader to be careful with the pernicious literature of our times as essentially nihilistic.
Of course, it is time to teach our youth to be selective, and as forewarned by A. Schopenhauer, to be on guard against this literary establishment that, for the last decades, has, time and time again, celebrated "the orgies of geniuses" with flippant contempt for the healthy principles of morality, integrity and character.
The results have been catastrophic, because young people, the millennial, have grown up in an apocalyptic society where literature is no longer promoted for the improvement of the human type. Daily, the loftiest sentiments are buried in the murky world of literature.
Unfortunately, nihilism (que la vida no tiene sentido), has even infiltrated the sacred office of the church's library, and even there one could come across a book, the Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao, whose content, full-fraught with vulgarities, could be said to depict the Dominican people as the outcome of a fuku, an euphemism for "fuck-you."
And this is how the current state of things stand in the world of literature, because our youth, unlike the American people of Norman Rockwell, cannot enjoy the crystalline waters of the Walden Pond by Henry Thoreau.
The streamlines of literature have been sullied by a new generation of writers, hacks of success, scribblers, ink-slingers, hellbent on destroying the most sacred feelings of humanity in the elevation of our human nature.
Colombian author Jose Maria Vargas Vila, whose controversial liberal views --and misogynistic attacks on the cult of womanhood in Latin America-- made him the quintessential Satan of the Catholic Church, the Machiavelli of platonic love in some literary circles, was also celebrated for his incomparable prose brushstrokes and caustic genius. El hombre es uno en millones. Vargas Vila is the Nietzsche of Latin America.
While Vargas' style could be deemed bawdy, lecherous, salacious and sensual, his remarkable creative puissance rarely veers into inferior literary brushstrokes of gross vulgarity. You are fortunate if you can find an English translation of Ibis, or Aura o Las Violetas by the same author. Like Baltasar Gracian, Vargas Vila's prose writings are simply the signature of genius!
Where is Arthur Schopenhauer to translate the genius of Colombia to the American English audience?
Another great writer whose prose-writing and incomparable psychology could well make some current behemoth-writers retreat with terror and dread is Frederick Nietzsche. When reading Nietzsche in other languages, his writings and multi-layered insights do not lose the vigor, niter and fire of the original German.
Why? Simply because Nietzsche penned down his multi-layered mind with substance! And his thoughts are indeed the loftiest!
Accordingly, Nietzsche's writings cannot be justly appraised alla prima, for like the oak-trees, such thoughts and insights could only take root but only in the right soil and milieu. Consequently, while alive, Nietzsche's Magnus Opus, the Will to Power, was relegated to the shelves of oblivion.
-/-Profitability may explain the success of some authors in every generation.
On La Maravillosa Vida de Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz en el Idioma Español (Spanish Translation of the Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)
As a Dominican-born reader, why this book did not receive my approval in the Spanish language?
If you translate this book into the Spanish language, what the author achieves in the keyboard of his English language, is soon revealed to be less effective, nay inadequate, incompatible when the essential, the substance, the kernel and the thought-material can no longer capture the reader whose chief delight is merely on the form, the prose, the oxymoron but not the gist of the subject-matter.
When straddling between two different languages, English and Spanish, one cannot avoid linguistic incompatibilities finding acceptance in the keywords of our concept-sphere and logics, and from such cultural collision and queer awkwardness, there emerges new interesting hybrids, mutations, collisions, oxymoronic cancelations, and sometimes, even utter mutilation of the language is totally acceptable as long as it brings profits...
https://www.onehourtranslation.com/translation/blog/linguistic-equivalence-translation
According to A. Schopenhauer, entire generations of writers could become mentally befuddled and finally crippled by the insidious power of toxic literature (On Judgement and Criticism, etc., Parerga and Paralipomena Volume 2).
19th-Century German Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer Presages the Economics and Ethics of the Web and Modern Publishing – Brain Pickings
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/13/schopenhauer-on-authorship/
Indeed, I could not explain the said prose-writer's genius as always effective when the vehicle of expression, train of thoughts are simply marred or hampered in another language's configuration, but much is lost with translation (John Fiske on the Translation of the Divine Comedy by Dante); and if the writer lacks substance for any moral elevation of the mind, then we better save our brain from frittering away our precious faculties with very recondite literature.
Therefore, when translating the literary work, the behemoth-genius is soon revealed to be a great guest but in his own house USA: outside of the English Language the prose-wizardry of Mr. Diaz cannot thunder to the same flashy effects in the Spanish language.
When Dominican people like me denounce this book as foreign to the great language of Miguel Cervantes or José María Vargas Vila, we are simply speaking on the form and not on the content. But when we further delve into the gist of the niter that thus set the entire American literary world ablaze, we are the more appalled and disappointed by the gross nature of such humor, such free-for-all shit, unworthy of men who call themselves educators in the world of letters.
Salacious Dominican words such as (e.g. toto podrido, culo, ripio, among other extremely vulgar ones) which could have little effects in the mind of an English-speaking decent college-lass, could prove to be very blasphemous for a Dominican reader schooled in the Don Quixote of Miguel Cervantes Saavedra.
The Spanglish of such hacks of success does not hold ground for those versed in the luscious prose and beauty of writers the likes of Henry D. Thoreau, Baltasar Gracian, F. Nietszche, or José María Vargas Vila.
How do we save our youth from the alluvion of nihilism?
Of course, there are the writings whose meaning and gist could not so easily be construed or parsed by a simple cursory preamble, the cohesiveness of the work is inseparable of every other constituent part, especially the finale (e.g. Faust by Goethe is still confined to this category).
What tenuous thread may link Faust Part One and Part Two? Is it desultory?
Sometimes one simply understands the development of an essay or writing but in relation to every other part and in its entirety, and it is said of some authors (Faust Part 1 and 2 by Goethe) the cohesiveness of such masterwork is to be found but in the ever-recurrent motifs of unsatisfied longings, the dynamics of unfulfilled hankerings and dissatisfaction with life,followed by the prickly stings of desire and ennui (A. Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy)
These are the watchwords, i. e., dissatisfaction, desires, ennui, to understanding Faust, but the thematic sequel, as observed by some critics, is definitely lost in Faust Part 2, hence why this work is often read like aphoristic insights, maxims, reflections, poetry.
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In this essay I would like touch upon my high regards for Dominican writer Junot Diaz
When I first heard the news that a writer of the caliber of Junot Diaz has been crowned with the laurels of genius, I felt proud of my brother, and many Dominican compatriots, spread the good tidings --a triumphant feat-- in the literary claques and cliques dominating the prestigious institutions of USA.
From this perspective, one must concede a revolution in the World of Literature in the United States of America for the promotion of multiculturalism, education, the flower of culture and aesthetics as the greatest moral forces for social justice and humanities.
Nevertheless, while immersed in the Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I was soon aware that what the writer achieved in the promotion of culture and social justice for people of color, could not tally the prodigious reservoir of Oscar Wow's prolific mind to spinning corrosive tales as vulgar as they are offensive in the Spanish Language --especially to people of Dominican descent.
My admiration for Junot Diaz is a literary one, but as a Dominican born person, I cannot sympathize with an impudent man who has thus resorted to the defamation of his own people --the selling or bribing of his primogeniture and birthright-- in exchange for mundane glory as accorded by those who may relish in the "avant-garde literature of scurrilousness and nihilism."
As much as I admire his prose-writings, I cannot sympathize with his bawdy abuse of the English language, and would say that the author, however a gifted writer, has done a wonderful job to presenting the Dominican people with little regards to Juan Pablo Duarte, Sanchez y Mella (founders of the Dominican Republic), and I don't think they would be happy with Mr. Diaz.
La Vida Marvillosa de Oscar Wao, por el escritor Dominicano Junot Diaz, me parece un obra genial y maestra! Junot Diaz, no hay duda, y esto a pesar de los muchos detractores de este humilde genio Dominicano, es un tremendo talento!
His caustic prose is just fueled with fire, wit and poetic distinction.
Diría que en La Segunda Parte (II) de esta controversial obra, mi hermano en patria, Junot Díaz, demuestra tener el ferviente fuego de un gran escritor.
That said, one can only wish that the whole “shit--thing” could have been expressed in such elevated and dignified style.
And it is here where one stumbles upon a most remarkable "Dominican sancocho" of intelectual incongruities and wit, a "mottled hotchpotch" of disparate things expressed in a literary style that is for the most part vulgar and bawdy.
Nevertheless, this hybrid monstrous masterpiece, (which could easily collide the nadir and the acme in the hellish of genius) is not wanting of every single motley element which could provoke, alternately, irresistible abhorrence mixed with reluctant admiration. Therefore, we have to admit that Mr. Junot Diaz' oxymoronic devices are indeed fired with genius and originality.
The work is reprehensible as it is also fascinating to an incomprehensible extent, but sometimes we are tasked to plod through a veritable alluvion of basest things expressed in a vulgar style.
Of course, I am not denying Mr. Diaz a surprising depth of "Goethean immeasurableness" in the non-spatial twilight of our existence, but I wish the great writer could have kept his poetic flight without veering away into some tasteless profanity and vulgarity. Luckily, this Dominican sancocho is held together by the backbones of sex, race and violence.
It is easier to contrive one thousand fucku-stories plagiarized from local newspapers than to soar with little digression into the heaven of writers the likes of Henry D. Thoreau, F. Nietzsche or Arthur Schopenhauer.
Unquestionably, there is indeed genius in a man who has neither qualms, nor scruples, to speaking thus of sex and race in such scandalous head-scratching literary style.
Where is the niter to set the whole shit-thing ablaze?
And here Los Gringos of post-America, have found their favorite genius who could thus speak so openly and unreservedly on the color of a black skin in the Dominican Republic. From the color-line perspective, the historic parallels between the Dominican Republic and USA are simply striking!
Therefore, perhaps I was too quick to praising Junot Diaz for his fire-prose writing and thematic development --the true mark of genius. El final es un poco unintelligible, and lengthy to Hegelian proportion. I would deem the whole thing as a comedy, albeit a tragic one… for Junot Diaz, Pulitzer-award winner, while praised by Los Gringos, "un genio," may have brought out the worst of the Dominican people.
*This Is How You Lose La Hispaniola*
As I start reading this book at Barnes and Noble, and I have to confess rarely encountering something more vulgar, filthy and detrimental to the true goal of any great writer, Oscar Wow once again charges with all the literary wiles of obscenity, vulgarity and sensuality.
The hybrid-book, which for sure would bring profitable gains due to its sexually-fueled content, seems to have been concocted in the cesspool of our traumatic latrines in a Latin America still beset with the demons of benighted colonialism...
Compare this hellish book with F. Nietzsche's volcanic master work "The Will to Power"...and you will understand me; and yet, while alive, Nietzsche, like Thoreau, could not find an audience for his books!
The greatest books are left unread in the shelves of America...America the Beautiful I Cannot Recognize Thee.
Once again, we are appalled at how things are ejaculated in the literary world of geniuses in America.
Of course, secretly, this well-educated audience may have found a writer whose genius is to stir-up a formidable surge of bilirubin. Indeed, ours is a society traumatized by the legal imps of sexual harassments and lawsuits, and to express oneself so bawdily would require, undoubtedly, not only talent but also courage, but also a community of writers and readers striking kindred thereof.
And so, this brilliant writer is the devil of nihilism in a society which has finally become suicidal and apocalyptic.
It is just incredible how little respect for anything noble, honorable and sacred...our generation of writers reminds me the wincing monkeys in the Witch's Kitchen (Goethe, Faust Part 1).
Of course, such salacious stuff would find a sure public out there --let them have their potion to their heart's content. If we wish to corroborate Jose Ortega y Gasset's observations (The Revolt of the Masses) on the current state of thing for the intellectually crippled society of post-American, one would read the new generation of writers and hacks of quick success today, and how they shock-and-awe with their ever-present unfetchingly bombastic high-flown jargon full of obscenities and vulgarities.
We may substitute the despicable word shit for swills, and we would perhaps show some modicum of respectability for the language of John Milton.
The great merit of such book is that it would task us to seek the help of an Oxford Thesaurus Dictionay!
I just cant believe we have reached such low a nadir --pit-decadence in the America of Obama-- to allowing our beautiful youth to be fed-up and finally traumatized on such nauseous hotch-potch oozing forth from the bowels of USA and the Dominican Republic.
And so we would conclude that USA is very tolerant to admitting some people to be called geniuses....great minds!
Of course, Mr. Junot, undoubtedly, has great talent for prose-writing, but how can a great writer debase us with bawdiness and fucku-stories so unworthy of great writers?
For my part, I am not interested to finding audience in a world incapable to enjoying Mozart or Goethe's Faust. Agreeing with Australian philosopher David Stove, Everything Goes, I am very pleased but only reading the great writers of yesteryears. For, even Goethe, who was such great writer, had already expressed this view: that so many writers have written before him, and that there is nothing new under the sun.
Furthermore, I could take the Daily News and jot down a long list of Fuku-stories, because, with such writers and thinkers, we are to remain forever "manacled" in the Pit of Hell. But the flight of ascension to a Bravo-Finale may require the fine mind of a true genius! And here, unfortunately, we are wretchedly left in the cesspool of our times...
Junot Diaz may remind me of a Moorish polymath, and his Magnus Opus, the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, may hint at the Tragedy of Othello for pursuing a saucy white chic among the upper-crusty Britons of Shakespeare. In some ways, we cannot win the white chic's favor without some treason to our beloved homelands and ancestry.
Again, the issue of race is the incendiary niter in the bosky wild woods of humanity. From another psychological perspective, Oscar Wao is the new child of America!
And so, like the Othello of Shakespeare, in a unparalleled feat of remarkable literary triumph --even through the abuse of sexually explicit language and content-- my inspiring Brown man Oscar Wao has embarked on a most arduous perilous task: to prove that he deserves an honorable seat next to Henry D. Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Ralph Emerson.
That a man of mixed background could write so well may be breaking-news in USA. But keep in mind, were not the Persians, the Sumerians, the Mayan a people of mixed ancestors and great pyramids?
Great divine literature once flowed from the now parched lands of Egypt, Ethiopia and India. We read Homer, and wonder, what a divine writer! But in all likelihood, Homer probably read and nurtured his poetic impetus from the ancient literary rivers of Sumer and Egypt.
On Literature Part 2 | Some Reflections on the Sublime, the Grotesque, the Sense of Dread, Immeasurable and Awesome
After all these years, from 2009-2016, I was bound to revise this essay anew, and I thank you greatly for taking the time to re-reading my thoughts on literature and aesthetics. Such long years of quiet investigation, philosophy and religion, led me to place Art and Mother Nature as having a sedative-dose of healing power in the conflicting music of existence.
For footnotes, quotations, references and other marginal lines, I felt the need to further re-work this short essay into a fine paper, which, at some latter point, may find the gracious revision of a respected authority. As I said in previous e-mails, it is very important to support our writings by quoting other authorities, and having the auspice of a great teacher, we may be able to fare well with the hostile winds of snarky criticism. Alas, there are too many great writers out there, and perhaps you could find an audience!
Additional corrections were made in placid reflections. Moreover, I have inserted or deleted other lines, comas or periods, which may add lucidity to those long recondite passages. Even the greatest writers (like you) must pay their high respects to the caring hand of Sophia: a punctilious secretary (proof-reader) is always helpful. Recasting our writings in the furnace of introspection and retrospection, like those quiet writers of yesteryears, who are not in haste or goaded by the whipping stick of Mammon-Profitability, would more likely win a fairer criticism and approval in the impartial verdict of posterity.
Prolixity is often demoted to unwitting pedantry, but the subject of the Sublime and Grotesque, within the framework of aesthetic configuration, cannot be expressed in purely human terms, the narrow milieu of urban society, for to experience the grandeur-conception of an artist the likes of Frederick Church, Albert Biestardt or Thomas Cole, we would be required to step out of the confines of civilization: laxity and complacency. We are, henceforth, tasked to retreat back to the wilderness, or into the celestial shores of sidereal distance where the mind-eyes may further relish the strangest cosmic spectacles.
It has been observed that the sublime (and to a certain extent, the dreadful), however paradoxical to our sense-perceptions and delight, may seem to withhold our being in an incomprehensible suspension, a sudden stall in the lower strokes of the will-to-exist; and when the solemn view is of the grandest scope, stretching far into terrible vastness, revealing but bare spots here and there, a difficult thoroughfare with nature, thereat, the sublime holds tightly the mind apprehended, above the upper zones of the beautiful or merely pleasant; it is also felt when scanning amidst the most sterile, unshaped forms and outcrops, where nascent life, in any striving, has not yet won the battle against the frightening duel of darkness and light.
Nevertheless, all this would be of little effect if our mind is not fully filled with a sense absolute space, either the dread sublimity of the dark-wined sea, or the high-paved ways to sidereal distance.
At this point our mind seems to be transfixed with the gravest questions of existence, a mysterious sense of awe, terror and insignificance may strike the poor soul as a tiny speck in this spatial realm, and yet, remaining ecstatic in a X=all-unifying connection with Immeasurable Allness!
From the cozy dwelling of a propitious ledge, the Sublime may seem a safe journey for the soul in constant danger (e.g. Dante in Hell), a great fortification rising from the moat of fetid water --the habitation of hidden adversaries and devils; and from there, the contemplation of some dangerous perspective, a precipitous truth casting its silhouette on the wall-turret of fortitude and struggle; perhaps it is a deep sense of oneness in non-destructiveness, somehow living in yonder spot hostile, the untrodden path for immortal thoughts, yet unyielding the tired feet any easy climb into infinity.
Enthralled by the meaning of such stillness and mysteries, one may be willing to come to grips with the other sombre aspect of night and light --some intoxicating self-awareness--- may even spur us forward, amidst waste lands and places with the God of Abraham, to feeling a greater sense of "I am" in the sublime drama of existence.
The greater still if the "scene and grandeur" is partially illumined, a "chiaroscuro," here and there, thus unfolding the prospect of unknown possibilities lying in the depths our souls: the most uplifting golden beams of light-consciousness in immortality!
A remarkable explanation of the Sublime is afforded by Edmund Burke (On the Beautiful and the Sublime) also a terrific elucidation could be found in A. Schopenhauer's Magnus Opus the World As Will and Idea, Third Book "On Aesthetics."
Of course, there are sundry levels and veering slants when experiencing the Sublime, for, I would like to say that, even the tender sputtering flames of a candle's joyous flickering light, may have such healing side-effect in my conscience-aisles; and one wonders, whether such Sublime Light would not have the power to overcoming the gloom of dejection or any other mental vacuity?
The sublime and the beautiful may seem to be agreeable to our consciousness, but how to explain the chilly sense of dread?
How can we find aesthetic delight in the dismal, hideous, waste, unshaped, deserted and informis --the Tartarus of endless woes and pains?
--Even the terrible God of the Old Testament, Jehovah, seems to be at home but atop Mount Sinai.
The pre-fixes of Awe And the Sense of Immortality
At this point, we are now confronted with the limitation of reason to apprehending certain phenomena, i.e., the chilly words "death or deathlessness" may precede certain conditions for apprehending certain baffling aesthetic pre- sentiments; that is to say, in order to further incite our mind into another aesthetic flight, a pre-fixed sense of a higher "vital impulse" may be required to successfully bringing our consciousness to "a deeper sense of non-destructiveness"in the brink of potential annihilation.
Of course, however paradoxical, this "sense of brinkmanship" would not imply the complete cancellation of suffering, but we all could experience this deep-rooted "pre of non-destructiveness," that in spite of the utter decomposition of my physical body, I am entirely safe, nay, free and united with the imperishable X (noumena) of Kant: in line with the Christian religion!
This may explain why we all enjoy chilly ghost-stories, because, in the last analysis, we all partake of the same phantasmagoria, deceptive masquerades, fleeting figments and vaudeville in the sublime comedy of existence!
Defying the limits of the Critique of Pure Reason of Immanuel Kant, we all have our pre-fixes and pre-sentiments, and for reasons that are quite beyond the province of philosophy and science, occasionally, there is an odd operation to our mind, our sensory-perceptions may be thrown back in suspended intervals with this deceptive reality; forthwith, a deeper level of consciousness may seem to bring us closer, contiguous to new worlds interspersed with this one in the physics of Euclides; perhaps these are non-spatial realms, other dimensions, other laws and causation thereof --free from the fetters of time and space!
It is here that the Sense of Dread arises more pungently, because we are neither inured, nor used to such new ultra-states, and new pre-fixes of sense-perceptions may strike us in non-conformity to habits, drudgeries, customs (Hume's Matrix). Moreover, our reasoning faculties along with our silly epistemology may prove to be powerless, erroneous, faulty. Indeed, we are like foreigners in a stranger world!
Strangers in the Night:
Little by little, we relapse timorous, like a draft horse overcome with perspiration and perplexity, so we may feel, like strangers in the night, when coming to grips with those deceptive shades and figments spawned in the unfathomable womb of the unconscious: the unplumbed depths of the human mind.
In this manner, the soul's profoundest impulses and feelings are convicted, nay, brought up to a higher pitch, a more vivid reality in the conscience of his-her personal life with the question of good and evil.
At times, we may experience this unusual sense of resurrecting (resurrective) powers in the threshold of our consciousness, and some dreams may touch a remarkable level of contiguity with our daily experiences.
Those who have seen a person dying on the deathbed could confirm these solemn words: the grave aspect of the surrounding aura, the most piercing feeling of judgment-day, but also, a spiritual rapport in doleful intervals of silence and contrition may be deeply felt... This is what we mean by sincere condolence.
If the said person was a good soul, then there is no need to be anxious, or to be pangs-stricken when entering the ashen gates of the Spirit Realm. But if the said human being was a devil, then watch out, the bed is a-rocking, shaking, trembling, because underneath lies a shaggy dog panting and growling...
The Sense of Dread In Nature:
Nevertheless, the sense of aesthetic dread could be apprehended at lower levels of pre-fixes and other awesome feelings with Mother Nature. For instance, a sudden thunderclap on dark ominous clouds could warm us of imminent danger (Omens and Augury), whereas less frightful than a thunderbolt, would be the awesome spectacle of an enormous cataract, plunging its terrifying turbulent waters and foams amid dangerous jagged rocks and high-rising cliffs. Forthwith, at this point, our mind is thrown back in a state of fear and apprehension, for our greater dread would be to fall headlong into the all-devouring cleaving teeth of such barbed rocks, or to be honed-out and transfixed by the inexorable raging powers of falling waters.
Likewise, and to a lesser degree aesthetically challenging, would be the swelling waters of an impetuous river in haste, crushing and destroying in its terrifying juggernaut anything on its way. Incredible as it may seem, the Sense of Dread is, to a certain extent, a highly maximized sense of the Sublime in the unfathomable depths of our own imperishable being!
Of course, it is a type of sublimity more in poetic latitudes than in the magnitude of unpalatable pains, losses and costs the said horrendous event may have incurred; for, in our normal state and sensitivity, we could neither hold, nor enjoy, any tragedy as worth contemplating, but only in great literary or artistic master-pieces, and this homework would require great skill and patience.
If the said furious river carries in its precipitating water the discarded trunks, splinters, branches, stems and split torsos of mutilated people, animals and trees, then, we are placed, and rightly so, in greater demand with the adroit creative artist-writer, to reconcile, nay embellish, such astonishingly irretrievable losses and tragedy with the power of genius --conveying such awful scenario into something worth our admiration (e.g., the Raft Of Medusa by Theodore Gericault, 1818-1819, A River Travail, Men, Beasts and Gods, Chapter VI, pages 26, 27, 28 by F. Ossendowski, the Iliad by Homer, Book XXI, Achilles fighting with the River Xanthos).
Furthermore, if the said artist fails in one of these tasks: power of elucidation, sparking imagination and technical execution to carry out his-her ideas with great force, fire and lucidity, we are then, little apt to sympathize with such dreadful narration or artistic representation as aesthetically appealing...
Another type of aesthetic-dread or subliminal: is due to suggestive associations with forms, odors and colors; for under the chain and whim of many circumstances pertaining to our lives, certain forms and colors may immediately connote something else in the deepest recesses of our consciousness --or conversely, they may scarcely hint at something else, if perhaps dimly, which, our weak mind, enervated by constant exertion and drudgeries, may distort into the most grotesque effigies, monstrous gargoyles, and lo! not far-off in view, a phantom rises to touch rapport with our being perplexed. Herein, once again, we fumble and grope in vain with the question of good and evil (peruse George Santayana's treatise on the Sense of Beauty, page 52 on Form, he scarcely touches on the dreadful or grotesque).
The subliminal may speak more directly to the inner self or the unconscious, and this is where our conscious mind may fail to grasp the subtlest thought-impression-trysts of both, the objective and subjective, sundry images springing from the womb-X of Kant's thing-in-itself or the depth of our subconsciousness --and where is the thread that inter-weave the two together?
But when the suspected subject, furtive specter or rancid odor in question do not conform to the laws of causation, and there is little evidence of its origination or obvious manifestation in this visible realm, at that moment, we may experience the Sense of Dread.
Such low-keyed colors as buff, dark, dull neutral grays with occasional streaks of vermilion tints, but also pale yellows and ochers (earth colors which resemble the sallow complexion of certain human beings in livid and lurid hues) and some opaque white pigments would do well to depict the appalling complexion of some soul-less Caucasian people as they saunter late in the night (pallor of some dead people and bloodless corpses as found in a morgue); these low-chroma colors may invoke many ideas associated with the lower circles of the Florentine bard, indeed, reprehensible, sad and gloomy (take a look at the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Inferno III, lines 84 to 136).
Likewise scary would be such returning thuds and thumps as heard in a hollow wood, a coffin or cave, or the other creaking sounds of a cord or knot being loosened for some serious matters (peruse the Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, page 110).
But more ineffably moving than hollow sounds, is the disheartening howling of winds as they buffet and smite the sore gullets of rocks and groves in a cloudy day (like those chilly winds and wolves as heard in the arid wolds and waste lands of the Sahara desert).
These daunting ethereal sounds could bring the lost wayfarer to standstill, an unspeakable nostalgia and dread; the more acutely piercing, if from some nearby ravine or rock's cavity, the wailing winds could vent, furiously, their unquenchable wrath upon the broad path of perdition: sometimes one may hear these piteous souls whimpering in periodic crescendos of sighs for their unexpiated guilt; or, if at intervals, the sentinels of time, remaining aloof, like those left behind, could make us aware of their prowling presence, nearing and encamping, like those nightly interlopers, nigh to our secured places, while slamming and banging the ajar doors of some hoary church forlorn; or, in the meaninglessness of many an accursed existence, sometimes I may harken at those wailing gales, in quasi human voices and despair, they are at pain to joining this awful chorus of lost souls, and perhaps make headways through unspeakable mossy moors of suffering and destruction, hither and thither, meanwhile, roaring, moaning, wailing and cursing the most breath-taking music ever heard in the baffling outcries of Mother Nature (peruse Faust by Goethe, Part 1, Walpurgis Night)...
The Sense of Dread, simply stated, arises when our reason is overcome by any phenomena that withstand our comprehension. Of course, I am referring to the cobweb of consciousness, as perceived in other seen or unseen human beings (ghosts).
According to some stories on Mozart's superhuman powers, the supreme composer may have written his sad music as a pre (fixed) mass to his own obituary! Mozart may have intuited the awful visitation of Death in the deepest strokes of consciousness and the potential annihilation of the physical body.
Like Gustave Dore, the musical genius seemed to have heard the daunting echoes of the Spirit Realm. If you have any doubt concerning the mysterious pre-sentiments that once tuned and defined the hearts of former generations in the wood of yore, you should listen to Mass in C Minor by W. A. Mozart (Kyrie, Gratias and Qui Tollis) and wonder whether such awful music does not have power to raise Lazarus (dehumanization in the difficult times we are living) from the Valley of Dry Bones --materialism and noise.
That we cannot enjoy this music may be due to the grim spell of King Nihilo or the Klingsor of Wagner (nihilism) and Lilith (the distraction of our senses in fleeting things and forms). The truth is, that ours is a generation of dehumanization and nihilism in the nadir of John Milton's Paradise Lost. Of course, there are many fine feelings waiting for those souls who may knock at the door:
--Question?
Where is the puissance of the soul? Did Mozart suffer the throes of depression or the sting of ennui?
The man must have had herculean power to write such tomes of musical master-pieces in such short a life.
Another dreadful, squirrel-like man who seemed to be a tireless artist, days and nights working was Raphael, residence artist at the Sistine Chapel. Through the divine mind of genius, everything is beautiful --even the grotesque and dreadful is sublime!
True. Raphael did not touch on the dreadful and sublime as did Delacroix or Gustave Dore --or Franz Liszt, but his serene art is terribly perfect, in both requisite for superb greatness: symmetry and balance!
It is just amazing that John Milton in the sixteenth-seventeenth century was ahead of most Renaissance visual artists in the North of Europe, for the obdurate man, like Shakespeare, dealt with the broadest range and spectrum in the preview and registration of human nature on aesthetic sensibilities: from the worst conceivable hell, up to the loftiest ideas of beauty and divinity in the heaven of his stunning mind, John Milton's genius towards above artists and musicians!
We may be tempted to place Rembrandt or Caravaggio as superb Miltonic artists, but they scarcely touched on the dreadful, sublime and majestic as did the divine English bard in his poetic brush-strokes: the devils building Pandemonium in Hell (Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 755...).
Equally great was Milton's ideas of the ugly, beautiful and celestial (Book IV, starting in lines 135 to 355), which with due justice, Gustave Dore, and to a certain extent, William Adolf Bouguereau, and even American artist Maxfield Parrish, could have appropriated for a greater forcible juxtaposition of unlike elements within the framework of a composition, thus inciting a compelling sense of aesthetic delight in complementary nuances, nay, cohesiveness in subject matter: the roughest rocks, knotted, gnarled trees, beetling rocks and jagged cliffs against the most tranquil whirlpools and peaceful skies; or, vice versa, a plus warm next to a minor hue or shade, and many other "oxymoronic devices" in configuration.
Artists who are well read in the classics could paint well! This is the case with Salvador Dali and Peter Paul Ruben. The Nietzschean men dealt with the most grotesque ideas as well with the most sublime and beautiful conceptions of form, color and texture in the association with the profoundest human experiences.
For instance, in Dali's Christ, St. John of the Cross, we are, forthwith, on the precipitous verge of a dreadful fall, fearful perspective due to Christ's body, tensed, forced position, and yet, suspended in the sublime expanses of spatial realm, whereat heaven and earth may convene peacefully with fisher men (more effective with chiaroscuro); and finally, gloriously beautiful, the perfect anatomy of the Master, the idea of the crucifixion of the noblest human being, his place in the universe and our hope! Verily, a terrible composition that is kept together within the frame-work of balance, harmony and symmetry on a painful cross of ecstatic suffering!
The pre-fixes of Gustave Dore, His Stunning Imagery and Remote Viewing
For footnotes, quotations, references and other marginal lines, I felt the need to further re-work this short essay into a fine paper, which, at some latter point, may find the gracious revision of a respected authority. As I said in previous e-mails, it is very important to support our writings by quoting other authorities, and having the auspice of a great teacher, we may be able to fare well with the hostile winds of snarky criticism. Alas, there are too many great writers out there, and perhaps you could find an audience!
Additional corrections were made in placid reflections. Moreover, I have inserted or deleted other lines, comas or periods, which may add lucidity to those long recondite passages. Even the greatest writers (like you) must pay their high respects to the caring hand of Sophia: a punctilious secretary (proof-reader) is always helpful. Recasting our writings in the furnace of introspection and retrospection, like those quiet writers of yesteryears, who are not in haste or goaded by the whipping stick of Mammon-Profitability, would more likely win a fairer criticism and approval in the impartial verdict of posterity.
Prolixity is often demoted to unwitting pedantry, but the subject of the Sublime and Grotesque, within the framework of aesthetic configuration, cannot be expressed in purely human terms, the narrow milieu of urban society, for to experience the grandeur-conception of an artist the likes of Frederick Church, Albert Biestardt or Thomas Cole, we would be required to step out of the confines of civilization: laxity and complacency. We are, henceforth, tasked to retreat back to the wilderness, or into the celestial shores of sidereal distance where the mind-eyes may further relish the strangest cosmic spectacles.
It has been observed that the sublime (and to a certain extent, the dreadful), however paradoxical to our sense-perceptions and delight, may seem to withhold our being in an incomprehensible suspension, a sudden stall in the lower strokes of the will-to-exist; and when the solemn view is of the grandest scope, stretching far into terrible vastness, revealing but bare spots here and there, a difficult thoroughfare with nature, thereat, the sublime holds tightly the mind apprehended, above the upper zones of the beautiful or merely pleasant; it is also felt when scanning amidst the most sterile, unshaped forms and outcrops, where nascent life, in any striving, has not yet won the battle against the frightening duel of darkness and light.
Nevertheless, all this would be of little effect if our mind is not fully filled with a sense absolute space, either the dread sublimity of the dark-wined sea, or the high-paved ways to sidereal distance.
At this point our mind seems to be transfixed with the gravest questions of existence, a mysterious sense of awe, terror and insignificance may strike the poor soul as a tiny speck in this spatial realm, and yet, remaining ecstatic in a X=all-unifying connection with Immeasurable Allness!
From the cozy dwelling of a propitious ledge, the Sublime may seem a safe journey for the soul in constant danger (e.g. Dante in Hell), a great fortification rising from the moat of fetid water --the habitation of hidden adversaries and devils; and from there, the contemplation of some dangerous perspective, a precipitous truth casting its silhouette on the wall-turret of fortitude and struggle; perhaps it is a deep sense of oneness in non-destructiveness, somehow living in yonder spot hostile, the untrodden path for immortal thoughts, yet unyielding the tired feet any easy climb into infinity.
Enthralled by the meaning of such stillness and mysteries, one may be willing to come to grips with the other sombre aspect of night and light --some intoxicating self-awareness--- may even spur us forward, amidst waste lands and places with the God of Abraham, to feeling a greater sense of "I am" in the sublime drama of existence.
The greater still if the "scene and grandeur" is partially illumined, a "chiaroscuro," here and there, thus unfolding the prospect of unknown possibilities lying in the depths our souls: the most uplifting golden beams of light-consciousness in immortality!
A remarkable explanation of the Sublime is afforded by Edmund Burke (On the Beautiful and the Sublime) also a terrific elucidation could be found in A. Schopenhauer's Magnus Opus the World As Will and Idea, Third Book "On Aesthetics."
Of course, there are sundry levels and veering slants when experiencing the Sublime, for, I would like to say that, even the tender sputtering flames of a candle's joyous flickering light, may have such healing side-effect in my conscience-aisles; and one wonders, whether such Sublime Light would not have the power to overcoming the gloom of dejection or any other mental vacuity?
The sublime and the beautiful may seem to be agreeable to our consciousness, but how to explain the chilly sense of dread?
How can we find aesthetic delight in the dismal, hideous, waste, unshaped, deserted and informis --the Tartarus of endless woes and pains?
--Even the terrible God of the Old Testament, Jehovah, seems to be at home but atop Mount Sinai.
The pre-fixes of Awe And the Sense of Immortality
At this point, we are now confronted with the limitation of reason to apprehending certain phenomena, i.e., the chilly words "death or deathlessness" may precede certain conditions for apprehending certain baffling aesthetic pre- sentiments; that is to say, in order to further incite our mind into another aesthetic flight, a pre-fixed sense of a higher "vital impulse" may be required to successfully bringing our consciousness to "a deeper sense of non-destructiveness"in the brink of potential annihilation.
Of course, however paradoxical, this "sense of brinkmanship" would not imply the complete cancellation of suffering, but we all could experience this deep-rooted "pre of non-destructiveness," that in spite of the utter decomposition of my physical body, I am entirely safe, nay, free and united with the imperishable X (noumena) of Kant: in line with the Christian religion!
This may explain why we all enjoy chilly ghost-stories, because, in the last analysis, we all partake of the same phantasmagoria, deceptive masquerades, fleeting figments and vaudeville in the sublime comedy of existence!
Defying the limits of the Critique of Pure Reason of Immanuel Kant, we all have our pre-fixes and pre-sentiments, and for reasons that are quite beyond the province of philosophy and science, occasionally, there is an odd operation to our mind, our sensory-perceptions may be thrown back in suspended intervals with this deceptive reality; forthwith, a deeper level of consciousness may seem to bring us closer, contiguous to new worlds interspersed with this one in the physics of Euclides; perhaps these are non-spatial realms, other dimensions, other laws and causation thereof --free from the fetters of time and space!
It is here that the Sense of Dread arises more pungently, because we are neither inured, nor used to such new ultra-states, and new pre-fixes of sense-perceptions may strike us in non-conformity to habits, drudgeries, customs (Hume's Matrix). Moreover, our reasoning faculties along with our silly epistemology may prove to be powerless, erroneous, faulty. Indeed, we are like foreigners in a stranger world!
Strangers in the Night:
Little by little, we relapse timorous, like a draft horse overcome with perspiration and perplexity, so we may feel, like strangers in the night, when coming to grips with those deceptive shades and figments spawned in the unfathomable womb of the unconscious: the unplumbed depths of the human mind.
In this manner, the soul's profoundest impulses and feelings are convicted, nay, brought up to a higher pitch, a more vivid reality in the conscience of his-her personal life with the question of good and evil.
At times, we may experience this unusual sense of resurrecting (resurrective) powers in the threshold of our consciousness, and some dreams may touch a remarkable level of contiguity with our daily experiences.
Those who have seen a person dying on the deathbed could confirm these solemn words: the grave aspect of the surrounding aura, the most piercing feeling of judgment-day, but also, a spiritual rapport in doleful intervals of silence and contrition may be deeply felt... This is what we mean by sincere condolence.
If the said person was a good soul, then there is no need to be anxious, or to be pangs-stricken when entering the ashen gates of the Spirit Realm. But if the said human being was a devil, then watch out, the bed is a-rocking, shaking, trembling, because underneath lies a shaggy dog panting and growling...
The Sense of Dread In Nature:
Nevertheless, the sense of aesthetic dread could be apprehended at lower levels of pre-fixes and other awesome feelings with Mother Nature. For instance, a sudden thunderclap on dark ominous clouds could warm us of imminent danger (Omens and Augury), whereas less frightful than a thunderbolt, would be the awesome spectacle of an enormous cataract, plunging its terrifying turbulent waters and foams amid dangerous jagged rocks and high-rising cliffs. Forthwith, at this point, our mind is thrown back in a state of fear and apprehension, for our greater dread would be to fall headlong into the all-devouring cleaving teeth of such barbed rocks, or to be honed-out and transfixed by the inexorable raging powers of falling waters.
Likewise, and to a lesser degree aesthetically challenging, would be the swelling waters of an impetuous river in haste, crushing and destroying in its terrifying juggernaut anything on its way. Incredible as it may seem, the Sense of Dread is, to a certain extent, a highly maximized sense of the Sublime in the unfathomable depths of our own imperishable being!
Of course, it is a type of sublimity more in poetic latitudes than in the magnitude of unpalatable pains, losses and costs the said horrendous event may have incurred; for, in our normal state and sensitivity, we could neither hold, nor enjoy, any tragedy as worth contemplating, but only in great literary or artistic master-pieces, and this homework would require great skill and patience.
If the said furious river carries in its precipitating water the discarded trunks, splinters, branches, stems and split torsos of mutilated people, animals and trees, then, we are placed, and rightly so, in greater demand with the adroit creative artist-writer, to reconcile, nay embellish, such astonishingly irretrievable losses and tragedy with the power of genius --conveying such awful scenario into something worth our admiration (e.g., the Raft Of Medusa by Theodore Gericault, 1818-1819, A River Travail, Men, Beasts and Gods, Chapter VI, pages 26, 27, 28 by F. Ossendowski, the Iliad by Homer, Book XXI, Achilles fighting with the River Xanthos).
Furthermore, if the said artist fails in one of these tasks: power of elucidation, sparking imagination and technical execution to carry out his-her ideas with great force, fire and lucidity, we are then, little apt to sympathize with such dreadful narration or artistic representation as aesthetically appealing...
Another type of aesthetic-dread or subliminal: is due to suggestive associations with forms, odors and colors; for under the chain and whim of many circumstances pertaining to our lives, certain forms and colors may immediately connote something else in the deepest recesses of our consciousness --or conversely, they may scarcely hint at something else, if perhaps dimly, which, our weak mind, enervated by constant exertion and drudgeries, may distort into the most grotesque effigies, monstrous gargoyles, and lo! not far-off in view, a phantom rises to touch rapport with our being perplexed. Herein, once again, we fumble and grope in vain with the question of good and evil (peruse George Santayana's treatise on the Sense of Beauty, page 52 on Form, he scarcely touches on the dreadful or grotesque).
The subliminal may speak more directly to the inner self or the unconscious, and this is where our conscious mind may fail to grasp the subtlest thought-impression-trysts of both, the objective and subjective, sundry images springing from the womb-X of Kant's thing-in-itself or the depth of our subconsciousness --and where is the thread that inter-weave the two together?
But when the suspected subject, furtive specter or rancid odor in question do not conform to the laws of causation, and there is little evidence of its origination or obvious manifestation in this visible realm, at that moment, we may experience the Sense of Dread.
Such low-keyed colors as buff, dark, dull neutral grays with occasional streaks of vermilion tints, but also pale yellows and ochers (earth colors which resemble the sallow complexion of certain human beings in livid and lurid hues) and some opaque white pigments would do well to depict the appalling complexion of some soul-less Caucasian people as they saunter late in the night (pallor of some dead people and bloodless corpses as found in a morgue); these low-chroma colors may invoke many ideas associated with the lower circles of the Florentine bard, indeed, reprehensible, sad and gloomy (take a look at the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Inferno III, lines 84 to 136).
Likewise scary would be such returning thuds and thumps as heard in a hollow wood, a coffin or cave, or the other creaking sounds of a cord or knot being loosened for some serious matters (peruse the Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, page 110).
But more ineffably moving than hollow sounds, is the disheartening howling of winds as they buffet and smite the sore gullets of rocks and groves in a cloudy day (like those chilly winds and wolves as heard in the arid wolds and waste lands of the Sahara desert).
These daunting ethereal sounds could bring the lost wayfarer to standstill, an unspeakable nostalgia and dread; the more acutely piercing, if from some nearby ravine or rock's cavity, the wailing winds could vent, furiously, their unquenchable wrath upon the broad path of perdition: sometimes one may hear these piteous souls whimpering in periodic crescendos of sighs for their unexpiated guilt; or, if at intervals, the sentinels of time, remaining aloof, like those left behind, could make us aware of their prowling presence, nearing and encamping, like those nightly interlopers, nigh to our secured places, while slamming and banging the ajar doors of some hoary church forlorn; or, in the meaninglessness of many an accursed existence, sometimes I may harken at those wailing gales, in quasi human voices and despair, they are at pain to joining this awful chorus of lost souls, and perhaps make headways through unspeakable mossy moors of suffering and destruction, hither and thither, meanwhile, roaring, moaning, wailing and cursing the most breath-taking music ever heard in the baffling outcries of Mother Nature (peruse Faust by Goethe, Part 1, Walpurgis Night)...
The Sense of Dread, simply stated, arises when our reason is overcome by any phenomena that withstand our comprehension. Of course, I am referring to the cobweb of consciousness, as perceived in other seen or unseen human beings (ghosts).
According to some stories on Mozart's superhuman powers, the supreme composer may have written his sad music as a pre (fixed) mass to his own obituary! Mozart may have intuited the awful visitation of Death in the deepest strokes of consciousness and the potential annihilation of the physical body.
Like Gustave Dore, the musical genius seemed to have heard the daunting echoes of the Spirit Realm. If you have any doubt concerning the mysterious pre-sentiments that once tuned and defined the hearts of former generations in the wood of yore, you should listen to Mass in C Minor by W. A. Mozart (Kyrie, Gratias and Qui Tollis) and wonder whether such awful music does not have power to raise Lazarus (dehumanization in the difficult times we are living) from the Valley of Dry Bones --materialism and noise.
That we cannot enjoy this music may be due to the grim spell of King Nihilo or the Klingsor of Wagner (nihilism) and Lilith (the distraction of our senses in fleeting things and forms). The truth is, that ours is a generation of dehumanization and nihilism in the nadir of John Milton's Paradise Lost. Of course, there are many fine feelings waiting for those souls who may knock at the door:
--Question?
Where is the puissance of the soul? Did Mozart suffer the throes of depression or the sting of ennui?
The man must have had herculean power to write such tomes of musical master-pieces in such short a life.
Another dreadful, squirrel-like man who seemed to be a tireless artist, days and nights working was Raphael, residence artist at the Sistine Chapel. Through the divine mind of genius, everything is beautiful --even the grotesque and dreadful is sublime!
True. Raphael did not touch on the dreadful and sublime as did Delacroix or Gustave Dore --or Franz Liszt, but his serene art is terribly perfect, in both requisite for superb greatness: symmetry and balance!
It is just amazing that John Milton in the sixteenth-seventeenth century was ahead of most Renaissance visual artists in the North of Europe, for the obdurate man, like Shakespeare, dealt with the broadest range and spectrum in the preview and registration of human nature on aesthetic sensibilities: from the worst conceivable hell, up to the loftiest ideas of beauty and divinity in the heaven of his stunning mind, John Milton's genius towards above artists and musicians!
We may be tempted to place Rembrandt or Caravaggio as superb Miltonic artists, but they scarcely touched on the dreadful, sublime and majestic as did the divine English bard in his poetic brush-strokes: the devils building Pandemonium in Hell (Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 755...).
Equally great was Milton's ideas of the ugly, beautiful and celestial (Book IV, starting in lines 135 to 355), which with due justice, Gustave Dore, and to a certain extent, William Adolf Bouguereau, and even American artist Maxfield Parrish, could have appropriated for a greater forcible juxtaposition of unlike elements within the framework of a composition, thus inciting a compelling sense of aesthetic delight in complementary nuances, nay, cohesiveness in subject matter: the roughest rocks, knotted, gnarled trees, beetling rocks and jagged cliffs against the most tranquil whirlpools and peaceful skies; or, vice versa, a plus warm next to a minor hue or shade, and many other "oxymoronic devices" in configuration.
Artists who are well read in the classics could paint well! This is the case with Salvador Dali and Peter Paul Ruben. The Nietzschean men dealt with the most grotesque ideas as well with the most sublime and beautiful conceptions of form, color and texture in the association with the profoundest human experiences.
For instance, in Dali's Christ, St. John of the Cross, we are, forthwith, on the precipitous verge of a dreadful fall, fearful perspective due to Christ's body, tensed, forced position, and yet, suspended in the sublime expanses of spatial realm, whereat heaven and earth may convene peacefully with fisher men (more effective with chiaroscuro); and finally, gloriously beautiful, the perfect anatomy of the Master, the idea of the crucifixion of the noblest human being, his place in the universe and our hope! Verily, a terrible composition that is kept together within the frame-work of balance, harmony and symmetry on a painful cross of ecstatic suffering!
The pre-fixes of Gustave Dore, His Stunning Imagery and Remote Viewing
Did the artist really see into the womb of time and nature?
Those who have seen the dramatic drawings of Gustave Dore may wonder at the artist's astonishing imagination.
Gustavo Dore's masterful illustration of the Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, the Bible along other superbly illustrated literary master-pieces, remain as one of the great marvels of pictorial imagination and the power of the human mind.
By judging the stunning accuracy of his dozens of faithful beautiful illustrations, we cannot but conclude that the prolific artist was either very well read to understand the recondite tomes of classic literature, whereof some trenchant passages may require very keen understanding of the author's personality and characters: the broadest scope of descriptive words, both subjective and objective, elucidating powers in representational forms, and likewise, akin to the author's prodigious mind, an obdurate follow-up for a farewell of mutual delight into the beautiful, awesome, dreadful and sublime. Or perhaps Dore, in all likelihood, and I may subscribe to this view, could have seen into the very womb of time like a soothsayer, seer, psychic or clairvoyant!
We are tempted to believe, that in all likelihood, some-one else read aloud and explained to him separate fragments or vignettes for his clear understanding of the said classic literature.
How was Gustave Dore able to depict, so accurately, John Milton's ideas on the sublime, dreadful and beautiful, a bulky work of endless analogies, tropes and entangled similes (take a look at Paradise Lost, Book II, lines 650-1055), that even for an English scholar may demand a thorough dominion of, at least, 20, 000 English words in aesthetic configuration, broad knowledge of mythology and subtlest slants with Christian dogmas; nay, all this terribly complicated jargon, subservient to poetic rapture into the very nadir of night and the acme of light inaccessible?
Was Gustave Dore acquainted with the writings of Edmund Burke?
Was he acquainted with Immanuel Kant's treatises on aesthetics?
One plausible explanation may be furnished with this amazing fact about creative geniuses, that although many vision-artists cannot keep pace with the writer's intellectual powers --far-fetched words and high-flown lexicon-- some artists do seem to perceive in the Womb of Nature the fancy of the poet's imagery and imagination.
The artist in question had probably developed certain internal-perceptions, the "dream organ or intuitive perception" of Schopenhauer's philosophy (Parerga and Parolipomena, Vol 1, On Spirit Seeing and Spirit Apparitions) thus seeing far beyond into this phenomenal reality to the "noumenal" of Kant's "thing-in-itself," --and perhaps even seeing far-off into the farthermost corners of the universe (take a look at the Fall of Satan, sublime illustration of Paradise Lost by the aforementioned French artist, Gustave Dore).
Incidentally, those serious artist-readers who are eager to having a firmer hold on their imaginative incursions into the unknown, should peruse David Ray Griffin's master-piece, Unsnarling the World Knot, which is a lucid continuation of Schopenhauer's philosophy.
Therefore, there are blessed people among us, whom, even unaware of such Pre-fixed gifts and Pre-sentiments, could see and perceive things in ways quite contrary to the immediate testimony of our physical reality.
A sceptic neurologist would argue against this assertion, on the ground that even such subtle sensations as dreams, imagery, premonitions and visions --some barely discernible on the wakeful- state, could be the mere outcomes of flashbacks surging from the far-reaching recesses of our unconscious mind, i.e., ebbing stimuli eddying from our cerebral cortex: the mysterious network of nerves, cells, hormones, gray substances and so on, which make up the massive infrastructure of our brain. In other words, the said artist's imagination in question, is the mere plaything of myriad of direct and indirect compounding impressions and sensations as perceived through the filter of our five senses (Hume).
Nonetheless, there is a kernel of truth in this undeniable assertion, but with due respect to the integrity of our sciences, our coarse brain's countless meandering arteries, with its hitherto unknown areas of content and massive fabric (in all their fine substance, chromatic ranges of sundry sensitive stimuli and subtile perceptions therein) could not always account for some striking coincidences affecting the unfolding events of our personal life's sequels: this "intuitive perception" of having felt this "pre-fix of many pre-sentiments" (deja vu) prior to our daily experiences and the pre-sent moment of "I already knew this somehow..."
Moreover, we know and feel that many tingling emotions and sensations, whose tugs and pulse are felt strikingly felt with astonishing reality and vehemence, seem to have their origination in the very pouch of our hearts, or are sometimes conceived in the pit of the stomach of in other parts of our physical bodies!
How to explain all these riddles?
Some fine minds believe that our seemingly scattered petty trifles of our daily experiences and squabbles, even those embarrassing rubbish of our efforts, may have a cohesiveness in the "thing in itself," and that we are all part of a unifying X, like the Internet or network of your computer: a phenomenon that is not circumscribed by causes and effects, nor it is confined by the ticking clock of linear time.
Consequently, as we are all part of this all-unifying X, we, human beings along with many other sentient entities --beyond the matrix of Euclid, could very well regard ourselves, but as tiny, self-deceived, self enclosed capsules or droplets of individualities rambling and ranging (no-where wayfarers without fixed point or goals) the boundless ocean of self-awareness: the all-compassing "will-network" of this mysterious cosmos!
But more mind-boggling than this scary revelation is this jaw-dropping possibility: the farthest galactic point to the nearest quantum point in our consciousness has no relevance for this X beyond time and space.
Therefore, and in all probability, if this X is boundless and yet one in itself undivided, we may not be too far in the near future —with a clearer understanding of Kant and Einstein's transcendent voyage along the work of serious neurologists— to traverse the sidereal distance with little effort; this could be possible but in the very fundamentals of our mysterious mind, as we attune ourselves with the rest of the cosmos' many paralleled lines in a given X= present reality!
Remote viewing, in all probability, is a vague hint to a greater contact, interconnectedness with boundlessness, a "pre-fixed harbinger" to a greater dawn into the fantastic history of intelligent life and awareness: that the riddles of space and time could be overcome with a complete re-arrangement of object-subject's co-dependency, a relationship we could scarcely hint at on the inside of our mind with Kant and the mathematics of Einstein, not on the outside —as it is an impossibility to reach the nearest star with a flying machine, or a spacecraft propelled with steaming power; but if accessible, it is only through a riveting voyage into the unplumbed cobwebs of our "will-consciousness.”
You are either with Hume (the pavement's slabs of our senses in the matrix of Euclid) or with Kant's transcendentalism, you are apace with the Phoenix Bird's Flight —above the squirrel of rationality, precluded by the impervious escarpments and high walls of our materialistic sciences!
On the Bucolic People of Yesteryears and Their Pre-Sentiments:
Where is the Portal-X to Another Reality?
The bucolic people of the old days were perhaps too superstitious, but many paranormal experiences added to a greater theater (vital pre) in the screen of their humble pastoral existence.
How real were these stories of ghosts and fairy tales?
Of course, the subjective mind is far more apt to strike rapport with such hazy reality. For the peasants in the wood, Nature was a theater of grandest scope, comparable to our latest movies, the special effects of the show-reality in the wonder of tele-vision.
But let our faculties be enveloped by all the attendant circumstances in the wood of yore, and how we seem to be transformed by a higher-uplifting elation of being in touch with a greater whole!
Henry D. Thoreau almost unfathomed this uncanny network, divine nexus and interconnectedness with Mother Nature, but it was Arthur Schopenhauer who found the brandishing key to unlocking the secrets of the Mother Earth (Faust Part 2, Goethe).
Nay, sometimes our mind seems to feel the pre-fixes of pre-sence and pre-science in ways we could scarcely grasp with our intuitive perception, nor can we always bring the "chilly pre" to our cognitive powers (or intellectual apprehension) with clearer understanding as when we chance ourselves into the uncharted bosky domains of Mother Nature; and herein, the mind is struck with the Sense of Awe, Sublime and Dread!
We cannot deny this fact, that many human beings, however averse with any interaction with the dread-sense of the unknown, have a penchant for such chilly experiences (ghosts), a contradiction that must be sought in our inner-sense of brotherhood with a greater thoroughfare with other sentient beings.
Therefore, though our awful experiences with ghostly specters from beyond are often associated with fear and premonition, we cannot deny a gloomy delight when talking about ghosts, for it is, on closer investigation, a connatural urge to dispel such doubts in the reality of spirit apparitions: the pre-stroke of our consciousness, "Will-to-Exist," as not being confined to the fixed ticks in the clock of linear time.
This general curiosity is deeply seated in our human nature; for, our five senses could not, in all their subtleties or perceptive powers, confine or encase our consciousness to this mere immediate reality: virtual reality. Indeed, there are times when we are more attuned with this "Pre" of our intuitive perceptions and inquiries, a keen sense that is highly developed among certain clairvoyant women, specially if the said persons have been reared in pastoral settings, where Mother Nature could hone the mind and heartbeats to the subtlest hunches and pre- sentiments.
I regret to say, that in urban society, city-people, like New York with their amusing vaudevilles, many indispensable sense-perceptions (pre-fixes) have become numbed and finally lost due to rampant materialism, silly tangibility, because it is a well known fact, that long-lasting, constant contiguity with solid matters could make our mind dull, insipid, lackadaisical, vapid, toad-like reactive, feeble and insensitive in the other misty veils of Mother Nature. At any rate, let us re-appraise the humble peasants in the wood of yore, perhaps their ghost-stories have a kernel of truth...
Those who have seen the dramatic drawings of Gustave Dore may wonder at the artist's astonishing imagination.
Gustavo Dore's masterful illustration of the Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, the Bible along other superbly illustrated literary master-pieces, remain as one of the great marvels of pictorial imagination and the power of the human mind.
By judging the stunning accuracy of his dozens of faithful beautiful illustrations, we cannot but conclude that the prolific artist was either very well read to understand the recondite tomes of classic literature, whereof some trenchant passages may require very keen understanding of the author's personality and characters: the broadest scope of descriptive words, both subjective and objective, elucidating powers in representational forms, and likewise, akin to the author's prodigious mind, an obdurate follow-up for a farewell of mutual delight into the beautiful, awesome, dreadful and sublime. Or perhaps Dore, in all likelihood, and I may subscribe to this view, could have seen into the very womb of time like a soothsayer, seer, psychic or clairvoyant!
We are tempted to believe, that in all likelihood, some-one else read aloud and explained to him separate fragments or vignettes for his clear understanding of the said classic literature.
How was Gustave Dore able to depict, so accurately, John Milton's ideas on the sublime, dreadful and beautiful, a bulky work of endless analogies, tropes and entangled similes (take a look at Paradise Lost, Book II, lines 650-1055), that even for an English scholar may demand a thorough dominion of, at least, 20, 000 English words in aesthetic configuration, broad knowledge of mythology and subtlest slants with Christian dogmas; nay, all this terribly complicated jargon, subservient to poetic rapture into the very nadir of night and the acme of light inaccessible?
Was Gustave Dore acquainted with the writings of Edmund Burke?
Was he acquainted with Immanuel Kant's treatises on aesthetics?
One plausible explanation may be furnished with this amazing fact about creative geniuses, that although many vision-artists cannot keep pace with the writer's intellectual powers --far-fetched words and high-flown lexicon-- some artists do seem to perceive in the Womb of Nature the fancy of the poet's imagery and imagination.
The artist in question had probably developed certain internal-perceptions, the "dream organ or intuitive perception" of Schopenhauer's philosophy (Parerga and Parolipomena, Vol 1, On Spirit Seeing and Spirit Apparitions) thus seeing far beyond into this phenomenal reality to the "noumenal" of Kant's "thing-in-itself," --and perhaps even seeing far-off into the farthermost corners of the universe (take a look at the Fall of Satan, sublime illustration of Paradise Lost by the aforementioned French artist, Gustave Dore).
Incidentally, those serious artist-readers who are eager to having a firmer hold on their imaginative incursions into the unknown, should peruse David Ray Griffin's master-piece, Unsnarling the World Knot, which is a lucid continuation of Schopenhauer's philosophy.
Therefore, there are blessed people among us, whom, even unaware of such Pre-fixed gifts and Pre-sentiments, could see and perceive things in ways quite contrary to the immediate testimony of our physical reality.
A sceptic neurologist would argue against this assertion, on the ground that even such subtle sensations as dreams, imagery, premonitions and visions --some barely discernible on the wakeful- state, could be the mere outcomes of flashbacks surging from the far-reaching recesses of our unconscious mind, i.e., ebbing stimuli eddying from our cerebral cortex: the mysterious network of nerves, cells, hormones, gray substances and so on, which make up the massive infrastructure of our brain. In other words, the said artist's imagination in question, is the mere plaything of myriad of direct and indirect compounding impressions and sensations as perceived through the filter of our five senses (Hume).
Nonetheless, there is a kernel of truth in this undeniable assertion, but with due respect to the integrity of our sciences, our coarse brain's countless meandering arteries, with its hitherto unknown areas of content and massive fabric (in all their fine substance, chromatic ranges of sundry sensitive stimuli and subtile perceptions therein) could not always account for some striking coincidences affecting the unfolding events of our personal life's sequels: this "intuitive perception" of having felt this "pre-fix of many pre-sentiments" (deja vu) prior to our daily experiences and the pre-sent moment of "I already knew this somehow..."
Moreover, we know and feel that many tingling emotions and sensations, whose tugs and pulse are felt strikingly felt with astonishing reality and vehemence, seem to have their origination in the very pouch of our hearts, or are sometimes conceived in the pit of the stomach of in other parts of our physical bodies!
How to explain all these riddles?
Some fine minds believe that our seemingly scattered petty trifles of our daily experiences and squabbles, even those embarrassing rubbish of our efforts, may have a cohesiveness in the "thing in itself," and that we are all part of a unifying X, like the Internet or network of your computer: a phenomenon that is not circumscribed by causes and effects, nor it is confined by the ticking clock of linear time.
Consequently, as we are all part of this all-unifying X, we, human beings along with many other sentient entities --beyond the matrix of Euclid, could very well regard ourselves, but as tiny, self-deceived, self enclosed capsules or droplets of individualities rambling and ranging (no-where wayfarers without fixed point or goals) the boundless ocean of self-awareness: the all-compassing "will-network" of this mysterious cosmos!
But more mind-boggling than this scary revelation is this jaw-dropping possibility: the farthest galactic point to the nearest quantum point in our consciousness has no relevance for this X beyond time and space.
Therefore, and in all probability, if this X is boundless and yet one in itself undivided, we may not be too far in the near future —with a clearer understanding of Kant and Einstein's transcendent voyage along the work of serious neurologists— to traverse the sidereal distance with little effort; this could be possible but in the very fundamentals of our mysterious mind, as we attune ourselves with the rest of the cosmos' many paralleled lines in a given X= present reality!
Remote viewing, in all probability, is a vague hint to a greater contact, interconnectedness with boundlessness, a "pre-fixed harbinger" to a greater dawn into the fantastic history of intelligent life and awareness: that the riddles of space and time could be overcome with a complete re-arrangement of object-subject's co-dependency, a relationship we could scarcely hint at on the inside of our mind with Kant and the mathematics of Einstein, not on the outside —as it is an impossibility to reach the nearest star with a flying machine, or a spacecraft propelled with steaming power; but if accessible, it is only through a riveting voyage into the unplumbed cobwebs of our "will-consciousness.”
You are either with Hume (the pavement's slabs of our senses in the matrix of Euclid) or with Kant's transcendentalism, you are apace with the Phoenix Bird's Flight —above the squirrel of rationality, precluded by the impervious escarpments and high walls of our materialistic sciences!
On the Bucolic People of Yesteryears and Their Pre-Sentiments:
Where is the Portal-X to Another Reality?
The bucolic people of the old days were perhaps too superstitious, but many paranormal experiences added to a greater theater (vital pre) in the screen of their humble pastoral existence.
How real were these stories of ghosts and fairy tales?
Of course, the subjective mind is far more apt to strike rapport with such hazy reality. For the peasants in the wood, Nature was a theater of grandest scope, comparable to our latest movies, the special effects of the show-reality in the wonder of tele-vision.
But let our faculties be enveloped by all the attendant circumstances in the wood of yore, and how we seem to be transformed by a higher-uplifting elation of being in touch with a greater whole!
Henry D. Thoreau almost unfathomed this uncanny network, divine nexus and interconnectedness with Mother Nature, but it was Arthur Schopenhauer who found the brandishing key to unlocking the secrets of the Mother Earth (Faust Part 2, Goethe).
Nay, sometimes our mind seems to feel the pre-fixes of pre-sence and pre-science in ways we could scarcely grasp with our intuitive perception, nor can we always bring the "chilly pre" to our cognitive powers (or intellectual apprehension) with clearer understanding as when we chance ourselves into the uncharted bosky domains of Mother Nature; and herein, the mind is struck with the Sense of Awe, Sublime and Dread!
We cannot deny this fact, that many human beings, however averse with any interaction with the dread-sense of the unknown, have a penchant for such chilly experiences (ghosts), a contradiction that must be sought in our inner-sense of brotherhood with a greater thoroughfare with other sentient beings.
Therefore, though our awful experiences with ghostly specters from beyond are often associated with fear and premonition, we cannot deny a gloomy delight when talking about ghosts, for it is, on closer investigation, a connatural urge to dispel such doubts in the reality of spirit apparitions: the pre-stroke of our consciousness, "Will-to-Exist," as not being confined to the fixed ticks in the clock of linear time.
This general curiosity is deeply seated in our human nature; for, our five senses could not, in all their subtleties or perceptive powers, confine or encase our consciousness to this mere immediate reality: virtual reality. Indeed, there are times when we are more attuned with this "Pre" of our intuitive perceptions and inquiries, a keen sense that is highly developed among certain clairvoyant women, specially if the said persons have been reared in pastoral settings, where Mother Nature could hone the mind and heartbeats to the subtlest hunches and pre- sentiments.
I regret to say, that in urban society, city-people, like New York with their amusing vaudevilles, many indispensable sense-perceptions (pre-fixes) have become numbed and finally lost due to rampant materialism, silly tangibility, because it is a well known fact, that long-lasting, constant contiguity with solid matters could make our mind dull, insipid, lackadaisical, vapid, toad-like reactive, feeble and insensitive in the other misty veils of Mother Nature. At any rate, let us re-appraise the humble peasants in the wood of yore, perhaps their ghost-stories have a kernel of truth...