reflections

Our consciousness being a kind of mirror, it follows that we appear to ourselves only symetrically altered, like the image in a mirror. Everything that passes through consciousness must therefore be corrected and inverted for the true effigy (the essential, paradisiac form) to appear.  This is part of the illusion of the world, whose trajectory can be corrected only by a suplementary artifice. We have to undo this mental turnabout, with the simulation of an inverted image — showing us we shall never actually appear to ourselves.

Hence, the betrothed at a Pakistani wedding together enter a room in which there is a mirror. They look at each other only in the mirror. In this way each sees the other as they are in paradise — this is to say, as they are really, in the transformed, essential image eternity provides for them, and not as they ordinarly appear.

pause…!

 

The strategy of idleness – that it to say, the unshakable desire to escape the violation of our time by all kinds of predatory, futile activities-consist in putting off the point where those activities have to be done, spacing them so that they can be picked off one by one, as in the story of Horatii and Curiatti. The other form of idleness is impatience; it is finishing before we have started- which is a way of coming out free on the other side. Expectare, diluere, suspendere humanum est…
…I have to write to people I do not know, and have no wish to…and I think, considering the motives and the immoderate, incidental impulses for undertaking such a vain and exhausting effort of dealing with the unconscious simulation of figurative pain, that man is an exaggerated being and he brings a pathetic exaggeration to the world. Just what objective suffering results from this ought to be assessed-the pain of those things which suffer, if not from existing, then certainly, at least from the fact that we exist. This is why Stoic teaching culminates not so much in the avoidance of human suffering as of the suffering inflicted on the world by our exaggerated and superfluous presence. Surely there it is much more emotional pollution of the world then any other we are made to know off. One wonders what will become of it if all this was to be exposed.

 

medley

The compulsion to repudiate those things which are close to you: family, children, country, nation. As though you have to disown what is given to  you – for fear of loosing them or having to give it back? To keep e prophylactic distance from one’s own – but first from oneself, one’s own name, one’s own body, one’s own face.

And speaking of faces: you gauge the flow of time only through others, whose faces are much fairer and crueler faces than our own image. This is doubtless because we recognize them through all their changing appearances, while one never recognizes oneself: one always rectifies one’s image by reference to an ideal face from which one’s present face is merely an exception, and never a definitive one.