[Image: “Twinned meerkats,” by user amndw2 (Amanda L. Watson, whom I do not know) on Flickr. She received these small toys (only about an inch high) as gifts, independently, within months of each other. She does not know what, if anything, the coincidence might mean. I believe they’ve just twigged to the same idea, at the same time.]
From whiskey river:
Dangerous Considerations
(excerpt)In our day, we confine ourselves at the best of times to discussing the imagination. The word “imagination” is beautiful and vast, but it doesn’t hold everything.
But what is the spirit, the spiritual life? If only I were up to defining such things! Robert Musil says that the spirit synthesizes intellect and emotion. It’s a good working definition, for all its concision.
In the case of poetry, literature, it’s simpler to say — theologians know a thing or two about this — what the spirit isn’t. It’s not psychoanalytic any more than it is behavioral, sociological, or political. It is holistic, and in it are reflected, as in an astronaut’s helmet, the earth, the stars, and a human face.
These are difficult and dangerous considerations.
(Adam Zagajewski [source])
…and:
The thought is not something that observes an inner event, but, rather it is this inner event itself. We do not reflect on something, but, rather, something thinks itself in us.
(Robert Musil [source])
