Sublime

Do not be distracted by surfaces; it is in the depths that all laws obtain.

“On a building, I don’t know where I’m going when I start,” he said. “If I knew where I was going, I wouldn’t go there, that’s for sure.”

river beneath the river.

Perhaps the “flow” of water leads to the flow of ideas.

All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience. —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, POET, DRAMATIST, AND POLYMATH

“That’s right. A reciprocal metaphor. Things outside you are projections of what’s inside you, and what’s inside you is a projection of what’s outside. So when you step into the labyrinth outside you, at the same time you’re stepping into the labyrinth inside. Most definitely a risky business.”

Comme le narrateur de La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste, Valéry pense à cette époque que « les têtes les plus fortes, les inventeurs les plus sagaces, les connaisseurs le plus exactement de la pensée devaient être des inconnus, des avares, des hommes qui meurent sans avouer ». Comme lui, il imagine peut-être que rien ne lui résisterait s’il tournait

sculpture in the memory

“Surely you believe, don’t you,” the painter said to him one day when they had touched on this subject, “that a fantastic image you’ve put into your poem is the result of rational thought. Not so: it came to you out of nowhere; suddenly; unexpectedly; the author of that image is not you but rather someone inside you, someone who wrote your poem