Efflorescence

Love must be freed from its myths, from its images, from its spectacular categories; its authenticity must be strengthened and its spontaneity renewed. There is no other way of fighting its reification and its recuperation in the spectacle. Love can’t stand either isolation or fragmentation; it is bound to overflow into the will to transform the whole of human activity, into the necessity of building a world where lovers feel themselves to be free everywhere.

“… all great work is the fruit of patience and perseverance, combined with tenacious concentration on a subject over a period of months or even years. Many illustrious scholars have confirmed this when questioned about the secret of their creations. Newton stated that he arrived at the sovereign law of universal attraction only by constant thinking about the same problem. According to one of his sons, Darwin achieved such a high degree of concentration on the biological facts related to the principle of evolution that for many years he systematically deprived himself of all reading and contemplation unrelated to the goal of his thoughts. Buffon said unreservedly, “Genius is simply patience carried to the extreme.” To those who asked how he achieved fame he replied: “By spending forty years of my life bent over my writing desk.” As a final example, it is widely known that Mayer, the genius who discovered the principle of energy conservation and transformation, dedicated his entire life to this concept. Thus, it is clear beyond doubt that great scientific undertakings require intellectual vigor, as well as severe discipline of the will and continuous subordination of all one’s mental powers to an object of study. Harm is caused unconsciously by the biographers of illustrious scholars when they attribute great scientific conquests to genius rather than to hard work and patience. What more could the weak will of the student or professor ask than to rationalise its laziness with the modest, and thus even more lamentable, admission of intellectual mediocrity! … Careful thought should make them realise how discouraging this can be to they readers.”

how it feels knowing that loneliness is still time spent with the world

If you persevere, in time you will have an entirely different problem – not that life is meaningless, but rather that life has almost too much meaning. As the scales fall from your eyes the world rushes into focus, presenting itself with a kind of vibrational eloquence that can, at first, be almost overwhelming. Everything shimmers, everything clarifies, everything wrestles for your attention. Trees feel super-real, their roots plunged into the earth, their branches stretching to the sky, birds are flesh and blood souls, fragile with life, the sky unfolds and rolls, the ocean crashes, people fascinate, books are beautiful, children are whirling dynamos of chaos, dogs bark and cats meow, flowers shout, your neighbour glows, and God runs like a helix through all things. The world awaits you, humming with meaning. You are alive with potential. You are not dead.