Advancing ~ or ~ Receding?
Painting by Leonard Orr
An literary exploration of the intriguing concept
of a perpetual redistribution of human emotion:
"We seem to have learned of the horizon
the art of perpetual retreating and reference."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~
from "Experience" ~ 1844
"It was the tragic part of happiness;
one's right was always made of
the wrong of some one else."
~ Henry James ~
Portrait of a Lady (Chapter 35, 357) ~ 1888
"The tears of the world are a constant quantity.
For each one who begins to weep
somewhere else another stops.
The same is true of the laugh."
~ Samuel Beckett ~
from Waiting for Godot ~ 1953
"Every moment of one's existence
one is growing into more or retreating into less.
One is always living a little more or dying a little bit."
~ Norman Mailer ~
from Advertisements for Myself ~ 1959
"As in the fusion with Mercer, everyone ascended together or, when the cycle had come to an end, fell together into the trough of the tomb world. Oddly, it resembled a sort of biological insurance, but double-edged. As long as some creature experienced joy, then the condition for all other creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any living being suffered, then for all the rest the shadow could not be entirely cast off. A herd animal such as man would acquire a higher survival factor through this..."
from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ~ 1968
"So how do we seize the past? As it recedes, does it come into focus? Some think so. We know more, we discover extra documents, we use infra - red light to pierce erasures in the correspondence, and we are free of contemporary prejudice; so we understand better. Is that it? I wonder. . . .
“The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use; it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion; and as the boat sets off again, we return to our normal activity: scurrying from one telescope to another, seeing the sharpness fade in one, waiting for the blur to clear in another. And when the blur does clear, we imagine that we have made it do so all by ourselves.
"Does the world progress? Or does it merely shuttle back and forth like a ferry?" (100, 101, 105)
Flaubert's Parrot ~ 1984
"Their happiness is not her unhappiness. Unless it is.
What if there is only an equal ratio of happiness to
unhappiness in the world at any given time?"
~ Gabrielle Zevin ~
The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry ~ 2014
"But life is not a zero - sum game.
There isn't a limited quantity of success or happiness,
meaning that if one person achieves something,
the rest of us take an automatic step backward."
~ Natalie Hanes ~ "Introduction" ~ 2015
to Extracts from The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir ~ 1949
“It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.
"You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.” (48 - 49)
from The Five People You Meet in Heaven ~ 2003
"It's the universe showing us that we're all connected
and feel the love, happiness, and pain oif one another
-- we just have to be ready to listen."
~ Peggy Carriker Rosenbluth ~ 2014
"One fire burns out another's burning.
One pain is lessened by another's anguish.
Tut man, one fire burns out another’s burning.
One pain is lessened by another’s anguish.
Turn giddy, and be helped by backward turning.
One desperate grief cures with another’s languish.
Take thou some new infection to thy eye,
And the rank poison of the old will die."
~ Shakespeare ~
Romeo & Juliet ~ 1597
Quoted by Peter Abernathy in Westworld ~ 2016
Sky ~ and / or ~ Sea?
Painting by Leonard Orr
*******************
Thanks Len for multiple appearances on my blogs!
Previously Posted Paintings & Poetry:
Fortnightly
Capturing the Ginkgo Light
Like An Ant
I Will Show You Modernism In A Handful of Dust
The Ides of Whatever
Advancing & Receding
2020 ~ The Essential Sincerity of Falsehood
Quotidian
End of Summer Sounds
Golden Paintings by Leonard Orr
Excellent Images
Happy Birthday Dylan Thomas
The same war continues . . .
The Magpie Waiting for his Beautiful Partner
An Ant and a Grain of Sand
Bursting Into Light
Sun ~ Flower ~ Moon
Days of Optimism
Life Without Poetry
What To Do
Star - Spanlged But Unsingable
That Lost Time & Place
Book List
Lovely As A Tree
Evening ~ Timing ~ Floating: Poetry by Leonard Orr
Poems: "Past Tense, Future Tense" ~ "Yiddish for Travellers"
"The Loop" ~ "Desperate Times" ~ "Optimist" ~
"Sun and Wheatfields" & "Russian Olives" ~ "Monet's The Magpie"
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, August 14th
Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ Pie Safe
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com
Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com
People fly planes into the land or sea because they don't know where the horizon is. I occasionally do a background that I can turn upside down and it still works horizonwise. See Nolde's watercolors and some of his paintings.
ReplyDeleteOld Furniture
ReplyDeleteI know not how it may be with others
Who sit amid relics of householdry
That date from the days of their mothers’ mothers.
But well I know how it is with me
Continually.
I see the hands of the generations
That owned each shiny familiar thing
In play on its knobs and indentations,
And with its ancient fashioning
Still dallying:
Hands behind hands, growing paler and paler,
As in a mirror a candle-flame
Shows images of itself, each frailer
As it recedes, though the eye may frame
Its shape the same.
On the clock’s dull dial a foggy finger,
Moving to set the minutes right
With tentative touches that lift and linger
In the wont of a moth on a moth on a summer night,
Creeps to my sight.
On this old viol, too, fingers are dancing –
As whilom – just over the strings by the nut,
The tip of a bow receding, advancing
In airy quivers, as if it would cut
The plaintive gut.
And I see a face by that box for tinder,
Glowing forth in fits from the dark,
And fading again, as the linten cinder
Kindles to red at the flinty spark,
Or goes out stark.
Well, well. It is best to be up and doing,
The world has no use for one today
Who eyes things thus – no aim pursuing!
He should not continue in this stay,
But sink away.
Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928)