So Much Longing in So Little Space
A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face.
— Jorge Luis Borges
Here we have an account of sublime experience that oscillates between feeling reduced to nothing in comparison with the great spatial and temporal expanse of nature, and then feeling elevated by two thoughts ‘that only philosophy makes clear’. First is the thought that as cognising, thinking subjects we in a sense create (support, construct) our ow
... See moreSandra Shapshay • At once tiny and huge: what is this feeling we call ‘sublime’? | Aeon Ideas
A story exists in language, but lives in the imagination, in the memory. When does a story live? It lives only when it is read or heard. A story is part telling, part hearing. Part writing, part reading. It dwells in the ambiguous place between the teller and the hearer, between the writer and the reader. The greatest storytellers understand this m
... See moreBen Okri • The Mystery Feast: Thoughts on Storytelling
Philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote that the self is made through story. Not a fixed thing, but an unfolding—stitched together by time, memory, retelling. When you stop telling the story, the self begins to fade.
You Can’t Live Everywhere: What Comes After the Plot Collapses
To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole; but ever since the painting had vanished from under me I’d felt drowned and extinguished by vastness—not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances betwe
... See moreDonna Tartt • The Goldfinch: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
