miniZibaldone

[T]oday I would like to reflect with you on the enemies of hope, because hope has its enemies, as every good in this world has its enemies. See why it’s important to guard one’s heart, opposing temptations to unhappiness, which certainly don’t come from God. We can repeat that simple prayer, of which we also find traces in the Gospels and which has become the foundation of so many Christian spiritual traditions: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner!” – a beautiful prayer. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner!” It’s not true that “so long as there is life there is hope,” as is usually said. If anything, it’s the contrary: it’s hope that keeps life upright, that protects it, guards it and makes it grow. If men had not cultivated hope, if they were not supported by this virtue, they would never have comes out of the caves, and would have left no trace in the history of the world. It’s the most divine that can ex...

From Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh   Dear Theo, ...Do you know an American magazine called 'Harper's Monthly'? There are wonderful sketches in it, which strike me dumb with admiration, among others 'Glass Works' and 'Steel Works,' all scenes from factories; and also sketches from a Quaker town in the olden days, by Howard Pyle. I am full of new pleasure in those things, because I have a new hope of making things myself that have soul in them. I should love to make, sooner or later, after some more study, drawings for illustration. Perhaps one thing will follow from another. The point is to continue to work.... Evacuation by Pyle Letter of Introduction by Pyle Men of Iron by Pyle Perfect Christmas by Pyle Quakers by Pyle Surprised by the Hero of Seventy Fights - The Good Lord James of Douglas (Howard Pyle)

Dear Theo: the Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh by Irving Stone Paris , late October 1887 |  To Willemien van Gogh My dear little sister, Is the Bible enough for us? Nowadays I believe Jesus himself would again say to those who just sit melancholy,  it is not here, it is risen. Why seek ye the living among the dead? If the spoken or written word is to remain the light of the world, it’s our right and our duty to acknowledge that we live in an age in which it’s written in such a way, spoken in such a way that in order to find something as great and as good and as original, and just as capable of overturning the whole old society as in the past, we can safely compare it with the old upheaval by the Christians. For my part, I’m always glad that I’ve read the Bible better than many people nowadays, just because it gives me a certain peace that there have been such lofty ideas in the past. But precisely  because I think the old is good, I find the new a...

Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendour around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, leaving it to its avarice and sadness. No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man. We no longer dare to believe in beauty, and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.  The witness borne by Being becomes untrustworthy for the person who can no longer read the language of beauty. Works of ar...

The Letters of James and Alix Strachey 1924-1925 ed Perry Meisel and Walter Kendrick Dear Theo: the Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh by Irving Stone The Journals of Sylvia Plath Words in Air: Correspondence by Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell Letters from Freedom by Adam Michnik Parting the Curtains by Dannye Powell Cosima Wagner's Diaries 

An idle man resembles an idle bird like that [in a cage]. And it’s often impossible for men to do anything, prisoners in I don’t know what kind of horrible, horrible, very horrible cage. There is also, I know, release, belated release. A reputation ruined rightly or wrongly, poverty, inevitability of circumstances, misfortune; that creates prisoners. You may not always be able to say what it is that confines, that immures, that seems to bury, and yet you feel I know not what bars, I know not what gates — walls. Is all that imaginary, a fantasy? I don’t think so; and then you ask yourself, Dear God, is this for long, is this for ever, is this for eternity? You know, what makes the prison disappear is every deep, serious attachment. To be friends, to be brothers, to love; that opens the prison through sovereign power, through a most powerful spell. But he who doesn’t have that remains in death. But where sympathy springs up again, life springs up again.

Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B. F. Skinner   The Gulag Archipelago II by Alexander Solzhenitsyn   The Gulag Archipelago I by Alexander Solzhenitsyn   Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer   Dear Theo: the Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh by Irving Stone   Bhagavad-Gita