“There is no such thing as the isolated mythical event … Myth, like language, gives all of itself in each of its fragments. When a myth brings into play repetition and variants, the skeleton of the system emerges for a while, the latent order.” Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
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“Self-creation does not occur in a vacuum but is delimited by various constraints. The self is never alone but is embedded in the world around it, in what Sartre calls a situation. The situation influences the self and, in a sense, threatens to determine the self. The most important component of the situation is the [...]
“But Mouse, you are not alone, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes of mice and men Go often askew, And leave us nothing but grief and pain, For promised joy.” Robert Burns, To A Mouse
“I think that American is actually closer to Elizabethan English than our current English speech. That’s ironic, because American actors are often worried about not speaking what they call Standard English, yet they’re actually doing it closer to Shakespeare’s way than we are.” John Barton, Playing Shakespeare
“With Hamlet, Shakespeare found that if he refused to provide himself or his audience with a familiar, comforting rationale that seems to make it all make sense, he could get to something immeasurably deeper … Shakespeare came increasingly to rely on the inward logic, the poetic coherence that his genius and his immensely hard work [...]
“I will do what I have dreamed or I will do nothing.” Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double
“In Hamlet the shock that is brought to a young man is because he actually sees his father’s ghost. One of the questions that runs through the play is, ‘Is this an illusion?’ Somebody who is tormented by that question is forced to enquire into every aspect of life.” Peter Brook, Evoking Shakespeare
“Len says one steady pull more ought to do it. He says the best way out is always through. And I agree to that, or in so far As that I can see no way out but through.” Robert Frost, A Servant to Servants
Bookshelf
Posted in Bookshelf, Kafka Parables on Nov 2nd, 2009
“No one was so burningly conscious of the distance from God as he was … As a writer, he expressed himself solely, allegorically or symbolically, in parables. Why did the writer not say straight out the universal that he wanted to say? Because it cannot be said to the end, because it stretches into infinity.” [...]
“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden