From Poems by Emily Dickinson, Series Two (1891), by Emily Dickinson.
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us–don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
From A Chinese Garden of Serenity (1959), by Hung Tzu-ch’eng, translated by Chao Tze-chiang:
To appreciate one does not need to look afar; to be inspired one does not need to have much. In a little jagged stone or small basin, a man may visualize the grandeur of mountains or rivers ten thousand miles long; in a word or sentence of the ancient sages or worthies, he may read their minds. If so, he has the vision of the noble and the mind of the wise.
From Within a Budding Grove (1924), by Marcel Proust.
“Some one advised me once,” I began, thinking of the conversation we had had with Legrandin at Combray, as to which I was glad of an opportunity of learning Elstir’s views,–not to visit Brittany, because it would not be wholesome for a mind with a natural tendency to dream. “Not at all” he replied. “When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams. So long as you distract your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will always be being taken in by the appearance of things, because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one’s dreams if one is not to be troubled by them; there is a way of separating one’s dreams from one’s life which so often produces good results that I ask myself whether one ought not, at all costs, to try it, simply as a preventive, just as certain surgeons make out that we ought, to avoid the risk of appendicitis later on, to have all our appendices taken out when we are children.”
From A Chinese Garden of Serenity (1959), by Hung Tzu-ch’eng, translated by Chao Tze-chiang:
The radiant sun and the blue heaven may suddenly be blotted out by claps of thunder and strokes of lightning; a sweeping windstorm and a furious tempest may quickly end with a resplendent moon and a clear sky. How, then, can the Ether be in the least coagulated or the Great Void be in the least obstructed? The human mind should be of this nature.
From What Never Dies (1909), by Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly.
It was the middle of September, the most beautiful season of the year in Normandy. The rich green grass was gone, but the oak trees blushed beneath a blushing sky. The hawthorn no longer bloomed in the pathways where the wind detaches and scatters them from the hedge, filling with white, thick and odorous dust the ruts left by the carts in the days of winter; but the brambles disappeared beneath the weight of the blackberries that weighed them down. The clear gold of the wild cabbage was no longer seen waving in the distance on the plain, contrasting with the purple-violet tint of the flowering clover, like shorn velvet; everywhere was the hue of ploughed land. The straight or leaning apple trees of the orchards have lost their pink and white draperies, but the vermillion masses of fruit, which for us folk of the West are our oranges and grapes, gleamed brilliantly through the branches, and fell at the foot of their trunks as if tossed out from a horn of abundance. The buckwheat, the black bread of the poor, which blooms so white, had not yet been cut; but the work will be done in a few days, and with their sheaves, bound up and piled on the ground at equal distances, they will form a camp of small carmine tents.
When evening comes on (the orange-hued Norman evenings), clouds, superb in form and colour, form above this land of such exuberant aspect, and in the presence of their magic display, the calm purity of the most beautiful sky of spring-time is not regretted. The joyous chant of the harvest girls and mowers, returning to the farms to supper, is no longer heard, only the melancholy barking of a dog, teased by an echo, following the footsteps of some belated sportsman. Such an autumn makes up for the snows that are to follow; and viewing it, an Italian might perhaps understand, no doubt, that one could see Naples and not die.
Virgil in the Georgics, 2.485-486, tells us:
Rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes, flumina amem silvasque inglorius.
Which translates as:
Let my delight be the country, and the running streams amid the dells–may I love the waters and the woods, though fame be lost.
or
May the countryside and the gliding streams content me. Lost to fame, let me love river and woodland.
From A Chinese Garden of Serenity (1959), by Hung Tzu-ch’eng, translated by Chao Tze-chiang:
Whether in favor or in humiliation, be not dismayed. Let your eyes leisurely look at the flowers blooming and falling in your courtyard. Whether you leave or retain your position, take no care. Let your mind wander with the clouds folding and unfolding beyond the horizon.
From The Philosophy of Solitude (1933), by John Cowper Powys.
As you walk along–with your eyes on the ground–you think of the whole strange rondure of this terraqueous globe and the spirit within you voyages with it through immeasurable space. It is twilight perhaps; and all around you there is that indescribable blue light which, like the blue robe of the Mother of God, the city wears at this season and this hour. But you still keep your eyes upon the ground; for you can feel the presence of that blue light in a certain mystical taste.
There is an indescribable sadness in this air as you breathe it in, as of a lingering incense in a vast empty temple; for the Autumn is beginning, though it is still only August. But this sadness is far sweeter to you than all the gaieties of all the places of pleasure in the world! This air which you taste in your mouth is indeed the very atmosphere of the earth, and into it have passed all the subtle, gentle thoughts of the men and women of the old time who in their day slipped out, just as you have done, to get a breath of air after their day’s work!
Work, work, work! Thus do the days of the years of our life pass by. But it is this daily half-hour–our very own out of all the rest–that makes it worth it to us that we were born at all.
And as we walk on, avoiding the people and still staring at the ground, the mute expectancy of all this vast mass of mineral substance beneath us, all this “thick rotundity” of Inanimateness between us and our antipodes, steals over us like a spell. Can it be that this huge mineral body–covered with its green pastures, its grey seas, its yellow deserts, its white mountain-ridges, and now with this strange blue light–is absolutely devoid of anything corresponding to what in us is consciousness?
And as we think of this–as we have done every day for the last five, ten, fifteen years!–the rare ecstasy we are always seeking begins slowly to tremble through our being. Is it–can it be–the response of all this vast orbic volume of Not-Self to the cravings and longings and fumblings of the Self, this quivering ecstasy that trembles through us?
From The Consolation of Philosophy, by Boethius.
Once more, how many of high renown in their own times have been lost in oblivion for want of a record! Indeed, of what avail are written records even, which, with their authors, are overtaken by the dimness of age after a somewhat longer time? But ye, when ye think on future fame, fancy it an immortality that ye are begetting for yourselves. Why, if thou scannest the infinite spaces of eternity, what room hast thou left for rejoicing in the durability of thy name? Verily, if a single moment’s space be compared with ten thousand years, it has a certain relative duration, however little, since each period is definite. But this same number of years–ay, and a number many times as great–cannot even be compared with endless duration; for, indeed, finite periods may in a sort be compared one with another, but a finite and an infinite never. So it comes to pass that fame, though it extend to ever so wide a space of years, if it be compared to never-lessening eternity, seems not short-lived merely, but altogether nothing.
From The Philosophy of Solitude (1933), by John Cowper Powys.
It is a pitiful degeneracy in our modern life that we are not more often transported out of ourselves by the eternal things that surround us.
Consider the wind! One of the best tests you can apply to yourself as to whether you are lost to the primeval grandeur of the world, taking it all for granted, is to note your attitude to the arbitrary motions of the wind. Do you take the wind for granted? Do you only notice it at all if it is wildly furious, madly violent, bitterly freezing? Or, on the other hand, is the least breath of it upon your face like the touch of the remote Past? Do you never feel it without thinking what a miraculous phenomenon it is, this invisible and yet most living presence, as it moves over the city, over the land, over the sea? Nothing can excel the wind in awakening from the depths of our natures those far-away memories which seem to carry with them the very essence of life.
The potency of memory is that it winnows and purges reality of its grossness, of its dullness, of its poisonous hurtings. Memory seems to retain, in great hushed vases and urns, at the bottom of its being, essences that have the power of redeeming all. And the wind stirs up these essences until their fleeting perfumes mount to our heads and fill us with an indescribable transport.
From A Chinese Garden of Serenity (1959), by Hung Tzu-ch’eng, translated by Chao Tze-chiang:
A drop of water has the tastes of the water of the seven seas: there is no need to experience all the ways of worldly life. The reflections of the moon on one thousand rivers are from the same moon: the mind must be full of light.
From Astronomy for Amateurs, by Camille Flammarion (1910).
O Night, mysterious, sublime, and infinite! withdrawing from our eyes the veil spread above us by the light of day, giving back transparency to the Heavens, showing us the prodigious reality, the shining casket of the celestial diamonds, the innumerable stars that succeed each other interminably in immeasurable space! Without Night we should know nothing. Without it our eyes would never have divined the sidereal population, our intellects would never have pierced the harmony of the Heavens, and we should have remained the blind, deaf parasites of a world isolated from the rest of the universe. O Sacred Night! If on the one hand it rests upon the heights of Truth beyond the day’s illusions, on the other its invisible urns pour down a silent and tranquil peace, a penetrating calm, upon our souls that weary of Life’s fever. It makes us forget the struggles, perfidies, intrigues, the miseries of the hours of toil and noisy activity, all the conventionalities of civilization. Its domain is that of rest and dreams. We love it for its peace and calm tranquility. We love it because it is true. We love it because it places us in communication with the other worlds, because it gives us the presage of Life, Universal and Eternal, because it brings us Hope, because it proclaims us citizens of Heaven.