“The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know
that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?
That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength,
its shudders face to face with great ruin. its inventiveness and
courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting and exploiting
suffering and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret,
mask, spirit, cunning, greatness – was it not granted to it through
suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In man creature
and creator are united: in man there is material, fragment, excess,
clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, form
giver, hammer, hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day…”
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Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, #325
Monday, November 5th, 2007Glaucus to Diomedes, Book 6 of the Iliad (Hector Returns to Troy)
Monday, October 22nd, 2007“…Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men.
Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth,
now the living timber bursts with the new buds
and spring comes round again. And so with men:
as one generation comes to life, another dies away.”
Vonnegut
Thursday, April 19th, 2007from the 4.17.07 NY Times:
“Mr. Vonnegut said in the prologue to “Timequake” that it would be his last novel. And so it was.
His last book, in 2005, was a collection of biographical essays, “A Man Without a Country.” It, too, was a best seller.
It concludes with a poem written by Mr. Vonnegut called “Requiem,” which has these closing lines:
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.””