I have been ill, my mind was tired, my soul disillusioned and my body suffering. I whom God has endowed at least with moral energy and a strong instinct of affection, I fell in the abyss of the most bitter discouragement and I felt with horror how a deadly poison penetrated my stifled heart. I spent three months on the moors, you know that beautiful region where the soul retires within itself and enjoys a delicious rest, where everything breathes calm and peace; where the soul in presence of God's immaculate creation throws off the yoke of conventions, forgets society, and loosens its bonds, with the strength of renewed youth; where each thought takes the form of prayer, where everything that is not in harmony with fresh and free nature quits the heart. Oh, there the tired souls find rest, there the exhausted man regains his youthful strength. So I passed my days of illness.... And then the evening! To be seated before the big fireplace with one's feet in the ashes, one's eyes fixed on a star that sends its ray through the opening in the chimney as if to call me, or absorbed in vague dreams too much to look at the fire, to see the flames rise, flicker, and supplant one another as if desirous to lick the kettle with their tongues of fire, and to think that such is human life: to be born, to work, to love, to grow and to disappear.
-- Conscience
- Re: 今天读的一些文字。posted on 05/09/2004
是谁写的? - Re: 今天读的一些文字。posted on 05/09/2004
maya wrote:
是谁写的?
是 Vincent van Gogh 写给弟弟 Theo 信中抄的,Flemish 作家 Conscience 的文字。刚在网上查了一下, 大概是 Hendrik Conscience (1812-1883):
http://www.famousbelgians.net/conscience.htm
- posted on 05/10/2004
I heard about Van Gogh's autobiography Dear Theo (letters to his brother Theo) almost 18 years ago when a freind in a southern city asked me to look for this book in Beijing for him - at that time we were mere freshmen in college and he was majoring in art & architecture, he thought in Beijing you should be able to get any books on Western arts that you can't get elsewhere in China. So I searched every bookstore in Beijing but came out empty handed. We both were very disappointed. Since then I don't think of this book often, but upon seeing 阿姗's post I decided to read it. Just ordered it from Amazon, but where is my friend in the youth time? Merciless flow of time, drag all our youthful moments down to oblivion. Sad, sad, sad ...
- Re: Vincent van Gogh 的书信文字令人感动落泪posted on 05/10/2004
Look for light and freedom and do not ponder too deeply over the evil in life.
---
Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.
---
我这本是 The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, selected and edited by Mark Roskill。一起读,一起讨论一下吧。
- Re: Dear Theoposted on 05/10/2004
I had one copy in Chinese, it's not very well printed.
It was my favorite reading three years ago, now I am reading more
of french poems.
Enjoy your reading... - Re: Dear Theoposted on 05/11/2004
your beautiful words made me cry
but where is my friend in the youth time? Merciless flow of time, drag all our youthful moments down to oblivion. Sad, sad, sad ...<< - posted on 06/01/2004
... signs and the signs of signs are used only when we are lacking things.
Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means.
The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the less I value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; and as the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently, without asking too many questions.
-- from The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
- posted on 06/01/2004
... this thoroughly restricted life of early boyhood seems like a limitless universe and this life which followed upon it, the life of the adult, a constantly diminishing realm. From the moment when one is put in school one is lost; one has the feeling of having a halter put around his neck. The taste goes out of the bread as it goes out of life. Getting the bread becomes more important than the eating of it. Everything is calculated and everything has a price upon it.
My whole aim in life is to get near to God, that is, to get nearer to myself. That's why it doesn't matter to me what road I take. But music is very important. Music is a tonic for the pineal gland. Music isn't Bach or Beethoven; music is the can opener of the soul. It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there's a roof to your being.
-- from Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
- posted on 06/06/2004
阿姗 wrote:
... this thoroughly restricted life of early boyhood seems like a limitless universe and this life which followed upon it, the life of the adult, a constantly diminishing realm. From the moment when one is put in school one is lost; one has the feeling of having a halter put around his neck. The taste goes out of the bread as it goes out of life. Getting the bread becomes more important than the eating of it. Everything is calculated and everything has a price upon it.
My whole aim in life is to get near to God, that is, to get nearer to myself. That's why it doesn't matter to me what road I take. But music is very important. Music is a tonic for the pineal gland. Music isn't Bach or Beethoven; music is the can opener of the soul. It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there's a roof to your being.
-- from Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Music is just one way to catch a glimpse of it, the soul. It is a pitiful fact that people lose touch of their soul for the most part of their life. "the life of the adult, a constantly diminishing realm". It is so true for most people. Only a few people can break free, most people don't even try it. Is it really so difficult ? 60s in US is an interesting era when most people are willing to give it a try. - posted on 06/08/2004
现在我相信,如果每天早上我能读两段 Henry Miller ,那一整天我和我周围的人就会有足够的热情与阳光。可是,我不敢读多。他简直是疯狂。
----
Hydra is almost a bare rock of an island and its population, made up almost exclusively of seamen, is rapidly dwindling. The town, which clusters about the habour in the form of an amphitheatre, is immaculate. There are only two colours, blue and white, and the white is whitewashed every day, down to the cobblestones in the street. The houses are even more cubistically arranged than at Poros. Aesthetically it is perfect, the very epitome of that flawless anarchy which supersedes, because it includes and goes beyond, all the formal arrangements of the imagination. This purity, this wild and naked perfection of Hydra, is in great part due to the spirit of the men who once dominated the island. For centuries the men of Hydra were bold, buccaneering spirits: the island produced nothing but heroes and emancipators. The least of them was an admiral at heart, if not in fact. To recount the exploits of the men of Hydra would be to write a book about a race of madmen; it would mean writing the word DARING across the firmament in letters of fire.
Hydra is a rock which rises out of the sea like a huge loaf of petrified bread. It is bread turned to stone which the artist receives as reward for his labours when he first catches sight of the promised land. After the uterine illumination comes to the ordeal of rock out of which must be born the spark which is to fire the world. I speak in broad, swift images because to move from place to place in Greece is to become aware of the stirring, fateful drama of the race as it circles from paradise to paradise. Each halt is a stepping-stone along a path marked out by the gods. They are stations of rest, of prayer, of meditation, of deed, of sacrifice, of transfiguration. At no point along the way is it marked FINIS. The very rocks, and nowhere on earth has God been so lavish with them as in Greece, are symbols of life eternal. In Greece the rocks are eloquent: men may go dead, but the rocks never. At a place like Hydra, for example, one knows that when a man dies he becomes part of his native rock. But this rock is a living rock, a divine wave of energy suspended in time and space, creating a pause of long or short duration in the endless melody. Hydra was entered as a pause in the musical score of creation by an expert calligrapher. It is one of those divine pauses which permit the musician, when he resumes the melody, to go forth again in a totally new direction. At this point one may as well throw the compass away. To move towards creation does one need a compass? Having touched this rock I lost all sense of earthly direction. What happened to me from this point on is in the nature of progression, not direction. There was no longer any goal beyond--I became one with the Path. Each station thenceforth marked a progression into a new spiritual latitude and longitude. Mycenae was not greater than Tiryns nor Epidaurus more beautiful than Mycenae: each was different in a degree for which I had lost the circle of comparison. There is only one analogy I can make to explain the nature of this illuminating voyage which began at Poros and ended at Tripolis perhaps two months later. I must refer the reader to the ascension of Seraphita, as it was glimpsed by her devout followers. It was a voyage into light. The earth became illuminated by her own inner light. At Mycenae I walked over the incandescent dead; at Epidaurus I felt a stillness so intense that for a fraction of a second I heard the great heart of the world beat and I understood the meaning of pain and sorrow; at Tiryns I stood in the shadow of the Cyclopean man and felt the blaze of that inner eye which has now become a sickly gland; at Argos the whole plain was a fiery mist in which I saw the ghosts of our own American Indians and greeted them in silence. I moved about in a detached way, my feet flooded with the earthly glow. I am at Corinth in a rose light, the sun battling the moon, the earth turning slowly with its fat ruins, wheeling in light like a waterwheel reflected in a still pond. I am at Arachova when the eagle soars from its nest and hangs poised above the boiling cauldron of earth, stunned by the brilliant pattern of colours which dress the heaving abyss. I am at Leonidion at sundown and behind the heavy pall of marsh vapour looms the dark portal of the Inferno where the shades of bats and snakes and lizards come to rest, and perhaps to pray. In each place I open a new vein of experience, a miner digging deeper into the earth, approaching the heart of the star which is not yet extinguished. The light is no longer solar or lunar; it is the starry light of the planet to which man has given life. The earth is alive to its innermost depths; at the centre it is a sun in the form of a man crucified. The sun bleeds on its cross in the hidden depths. The sun is man struggling to emerge towards another light. Form light to light, from calvary to calvary. The earth song ....
-- from The Colossus of Maroussi
- posted on 06/09/2004
阿姗, here is two from Henry Miller
**Living apart and at peace with myself, I came to realize more vividly the meaning of the doctrine of acceptance. To refrain from giving advice, to refrain from meddling in the affairs of others, to refrain, even though the motives be the highest, from tampering with another's way of life - so simple, yet so difficult for an active spirit. Hands off! **
**One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things. **
- posted on 06/26/2004
知道店主玛雅不喜欢 Henry Miller, 我还是一个劲儿把他的文字一个个敲出来。他描写的这个希腊的地方,没有任何实际的内容,只有他的热情的印象。今天下午我坐在阳光下,昏昏沉沉地读了这段文字,做梦一样。我怀疑是最近读了他的文字,受影响,才写得出“天才印象”那样的动不动就是“世界”啊“梦境”啊的东西来的。
----
Finally it was decided that we would go to Delphi, the ancient navel of the world. ... By some unaccountable logic Thebes looked exactly as I had pictured it to look; the inhabitants too corresponded to the loutish image which I had retained since school days. ... Yet I liked Thebes; it was quite unlike the other Greek towns I had visited. It was about ten in the morning and the air was winey; we seemed to be isolated in the midst of a great space which was dancing with a violet light; we were oriented towards another world.
As we rolled out of the town, snaking over the low hills cropped close and kinky like a Negro's poll, Ghika who was sitting beside the driver turned round to tell me of a strange dream which he had had during the night. It was an extraordinary dream of death and transfiguration in which he had risen up out of his own body and gone out of the world. As he was describing the wondrous wraiths whom he had encountered in the other world I looked beyond his eye to the undulating vistas which were unrolling before us. Again that impression of a vast, all-englobing space encircling us, which I had noted in Thebes, came over me. There was a terrific synchronization of dream and reality, the two worlds merging in a bowl of pure light, and we the voyagers suspended, as it were, over the earthly life. All thought of destination was annihilated; we were purring smoothly over the undulating ground, advancing towards the void of pure sensation, and the dream, which was hallucinating, had suddenly become vivid and unbearably real. It was just as he was describing the strange sensation he had experienced of suddenly discovering his own body lying prone on the bed, of balancing himself gingerly above it so as to slowly descend and fit himself into it again without the loss of an arm or a toe, that out of the corner of my eye I caught the full devastating beauty of the great plain of Thebes which we were approaching and, unable to control myself, I burst into tears. Why had no one prepared me for this? I cried out. I begged the driver to stop a moment in order to devour the scene with one full sweeping glance. We were not yet in the bed of the plain; we were amidst the low mounds and hummocks which had been stunned motionless by the swift messengers of light. We were in the dead centre of that soft silence which absorbs even the breathing of the gods. Man had nothing to do with this, nor even nature. In this realm nothing moves nor stirs nor breathes save the finger of mystery; this is the hush that descends upon the world before the coming of a miraculous event. The event itself is not recorded here, only the passing of it, only the violet glow of its wake. This is an invisible corridor of time, a vast, breathless parenthesis which swells like the uterus and having bowelled forth its anguish relapses like a run-down clock. We glide through the long level plain, the first real oasis I have ever glimpsed. How am I to distinguish it from those other irrigated Paradises known to man? Was it more lush, more fertile, did it groan with a heavier weight of produce? Was it a thriving honeycomb of activity? I cannot say that I was made aware of any of these factors. The plain of Thebes was empty, empty of man, empty of visible produce. In the belly of this emptiness there throbbed a rich pulse of blood which was drained off in black furrowed veins. Through the thick pores of the earth the dreams of men long dead still bubbled and burst, their diaphanous filament carried skyward by flocks of startled birds.
-- from The Colossus of Maroussi
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