Sublime

“If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all

aesthete

The health of the ego is often determined by how well one measures boundaries in the outer world, how strongly one’s identity is formed, how well one differentiates past, present, and future, and how closely one’s perceptions coincide with consensual reality.

like escaped worlds.

If, in our modern societies, the hands of the ego must be sundered in order to regain our wild office, our feminine senses, then go they must in order to take us away from all seductions of meaningless things within our reach, whatever it is that we can hold on to in order not to grow.

A woman’s life may die away in the fire of self-hatred for complexes can bite hard and, at least for a time, successfully frighten her away from coming too near the work or life that matters to her.

Somehow, Hildegard managed to balance equal dignity with meaningful difference, in a way I’d not yet encountered. I wish I’d followed that thread; perhaps it would have pulled me into the Christian cosmos earlier. Instead, I let it go and lost myself in the labyrinth of postmodern feminism for the next ten years.

The woman’s discoveries were about her own nearness to things. If you have empathy with someone, you join them; for a moment, you have the same heart. If you have the same heart as someone, you know their name. If you assume that there really is a light in your own kitchen, then you probably notice that sometimes you can see it. Sometimes nothing i

But, unless she practices her inner and outer freedoms regularly, submission, passivity, and time spent in captivity dull her innate gifts of vision, perception, confidence, and so forth, the ones she needs for standing on her own.