Tag: virginia woolf notes

Simone Weil, Waiting for God, 179

We are made in the very image of God. It is by virtue of something in us which attaches to the fact of being a person but which is not the fact itself. It is the power of renouncing our own personality. It is obedience. Every time that a man rises to a degree of excellence, which by participation makes of him a divine being, we are aware of something impersonal and anonymous about him. His voice is enveloped in silence. This is evident in all the great works of arr or thoughts, in the great deeds of saints and in their words. It is then true in a sense that we must conceive of God as impersonal, in the sense that he is the divine model of a person who passes beyond the self by renunciation. To conceive of him as an all-powerful person, or under the name of Christ as a human person, is to exclude oneself from the true love of God. That is why we have to adore the perfection of the heavenly Father in his even diffusion of the light of the sun. The divine and absolute model of that renunciation which is obedience in us-such is the creative and ruling principle of the universe-such is the fullness of being. It is because the renunciation of the personality makes man a reflection of God that it is so frightful to reduce men to the condition of inert matter by plunging them into affliction. When the quality of human personality is taken from them, the possibility of renouncing it is also taken away.

‘One can only say that those who experience it [the aesthetic emotion] feel it to have a peculiar quality of “reality” which makes it a matter of infinite importance in their lives. Any attempt I might make to explain this would probably land me in the depths of mysticism. On the edge of that gulf I stop’.

Roger Fry, “Retrospect”, in Vision and Design, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1981 (1920), 211

From The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society by Susan Griffin

“Waking, my hand meets the cotton sheets on my bed, my mouth meets the water I drink as I arise, my eyes meet the morning light, shadows of clouds, the pine tree newly planted in our backyard, my ears meet the sounds of a car two blocks east. Everything I encounter permeates me, washes in and out, leaving a tracery, placing me in that beautiful paradox of being by which I am both a solitary creature and everyone, everything. 

Isn’t this what shapes our days? The paradox accounts for gravity, which is a kind of eros. The great mass of the earth curving space and time around it, the greater mass of the sun drawing the earth in an even circular motion, balanced between fusion and a solitary direction. 

There is an eros present at every meeting, and this is also sacred. One only has to listen inwardly to the histories and resonances of the word we use for religious experience. In Sanskrit the word satsang which translates into English as “meeting” means “godly gathering.” In the English language the word “common” is linked through the word “communicate” to “communion.” And earlier meanings of “common” point to levels of meaning that have been obscured in our idea of the sacred. Gary Snyder gives us the etymology for “common” as “ko, ‘together,’ with (Greek) moin, ‘held in common.’” And he also traces the word back to the Indo-European root mei, meaning “‘to move, to go, to change.’” This “… had an archaic special meaning of ‘exchange of goods and services within a society as regulated by custom or law,’” he writes, as in “the principle of gift economies: ‘the gift must always move.’…” And the gift does move.

 To exist in a state of communion is to be aware of the nature of existence. This is where ecology and social justice come together, with the knowledge that life is held in common. Whether we know it not, we exist because we exchange, because we move the gift. And the knowledge of this is as crucial to the condition of the soul as its practice is to the body.”

The beautiful is a carnal attraction which keeps us at a distance and implies a renunciation. This includes the renunciation of that which is most deep-seated, the imagination. We want to eat all the other objects of desire. The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it. We desire that it should be.

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

Emmanuel Levinas, The Proximity of the Other, 98

“All encounter begins with a benediction, contained in the word ‘hello’; that ‘hello’ that all cogito, all reflection on oneself already presupposes and that would be a first transcendence. This greeting addressed to the other man is an invocation. I therefore insist on the primacy of the well-intentioned relation toward the other. Even when there may be ill will on the other’s part, the attention, the receiving of the other, like his recognition, mark the priority of good in relation to evil.”