The Compleat Heretic's Epigraphs 2013
This page was last modified on 28 June 2014.
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4 December 2013
I did not exist to write poems, to preach or to paint, neither I nor anyone else. All of that was incidental. Each man had only one genuine vocation—to find the way to himself. He might end up as a poet or madman, as prophet or criminal—that was not his affair, ultimately it was of no concern. His task was to discover his own destiny—not an arbitrary one—and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness.
— Hermann Hesse, Demian (Michael Roloff and Michael Lebeck, trans.)
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16 December 2013
One thing is needful.— To "give style" to one's character— a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. . . . In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 290 (Walter Kaufmann, trans.)
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21 December 2013
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
— Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning," lines 110-113
Happy Winter Solstice! And woe unto you who is not of the Sun, for we live in an old chaos of the sun!
(It's the real reason for the season, you know . . .)
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28 December 2013
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
— T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," lines 214-216
Happy Old Year! Happy New Year!
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