Bitterness would be nothing without the conceit of its reasons. Unfortunately they exist. But not as reasons for bitterness.

“In the tank-churned black slime of Tunisia” --Dylan Thomas

“Dearer to the red jackals shall thou be.” --Sohrab and Rustum

It is necessary to imagine the existence of other aesthetics.

solax - to browse in a foreign dictionary

pyramidology - an obsession with certain masterworks (e.g. with me, Zanoni...)

I am very confucian in my veneration of the past. But my mysticism consists in this, that i feel its living presence, & cannot connect with any future, except by becoming in my mind a great ancestor. --How different this is from vanity, & yet how similar! To act as if there were hope. I prepare my great-ancestorness like a spider laying eggs.

Ruin is a story. (What happens is more complicated.) One first conceives of an Age as a structure... Epics of building, epics of ruin. Epics of building, epics of ruin. Epics of building have unity, epics of ruin have fragmentariness.

penrose - metaphor sobriety

nashwood - the tradition of setting stories on an already discovered extrasolar planet (Mission of Gravity: 61 Cygni C--van de Kamp's planet)

‘To think by different lights. The unreadable philosophers do not submit to any changes in their light.’ --Elias Canetti

If an ikon is the Name, then the name of an ikon is the name of the Name. Artcrit = games played with the name of a Name.

kenwood - the tradition of using impossible settings in scifi

The most precious sentiment is gratitude without the desire to possess.

TIME, the great commodity of the 21c. Is it not already worth paying more for so many things, if they be done quicker? Soon, this scarcity will rule every decision; & no aspect of our lives will escape its bullying consideration. But how puny a subject for art! (As, --Money seemed, yet Balzac made its epic. And since.) A tiny protest poem about being too busy: no one bothers to read to the end of it. --And more: the disorder of our days, & its very inhumanity, is also the product of not having the time to put things in order, or do them right. I don’t have time to pursue this meditation further; where could it lead, but to utopias of clocklessness?

“At some point in the next century the number of invented languages will probably overtake the number of surviving natural languages.” Cullen Murphy in "Atlantic Monthly", Oct ‘95

“It is needful to have night in one’s body.” --Robinson Jeffers

“’Ask me to do anything, ask me to rob a bank with you,’ I pleaded. ‘But don’t ask me to go to a movie theater and get arrested watching “Citizen Kane”.’” --Every Secret Thing

New Mythic Question: How did all the time get used up?

“Baroque art is largely camp about religion. The ballet is camp about love.” --Christopher Isherwood