In his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” Schopenhauer points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition
“The herdsmen wandering by the lonely rills, marks where they lie on the scarred mountain flanks. Remembering that mild morning when the hills shook to the roar of guns, and those wild Franks surged upward from the sea.”[1] –The ANZAC Book As morning broke on Sunday April 25th 1915, Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), British, French, Indian, Irish, and Senegalese troops awoke before the sun to prepare for
Nature may reach the same result in many ways. Like a wave in the physical world, in the infinite ocean of the medium which pervades all, so in the world of organisms, in life, an impulse started proceeds onward, at times, may be, with the speed of light, at times, again, so slowly that for ages and ages it seems to stay, passing through processes of a complexity inconceivable to
Whatever concept an artist imagines Is a reflection of a latent form that lies within A block of marble; the hand alone, Guided by the intellect, can give it form. from Michelangelo’s Sonnet 15 The “reflection of a latent form” Michelangelo characterizes in his poem has inspired debate among artists, aesthetes, and philosophers for thousands of years, with little resolution. A procession of thinkers from Homer on have claimed that the
“The late humorist James Thurber wrote a fable set in a medieval court, and he has the Royal Astronomer report that all the stars are going out! It turns out that he is simply going blind. I am probably making the same mistake.” – Dan Wakefield, ed., Kurt Vonnegut Letters, Delacorte, 2012 I needed to be sure to get up at five this morning to drive a friend to a
People probably invented poetry to help them remember things they wanted to remember – what their gods and ancestors did, how to get from one place to another, what plants were good to eat and what plants were poisonous – all sorts of things that rhythmic patterns and regular rhyme schemes made easier to remember. So, for a long time, much poetry was written in regular rhythmic patterns called stanzas,
