BORGNY AARHUS

Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurp'd town, to another due, Labour to admit you, but O, to no end. Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captived, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain, But am betroth'd unto your enemy: Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Who in this mortal life would see The Light that is beyond all light, Beholds it best by faring forth Into the darkness of the Night.

Wherefore do you so ill translate yourself Out of the speech of peace, that bears such grace, Into the harsh and boisterous tongue of war?

The resident ornithologist, a severe young man, was studying the migration of the Jackass Penguin. We talked late into the night, arguing whether or not we, too, have journeys mapped out in our central nervous systems; it seemed the only way to account for our insane restlessness.

My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don't need any other.

And he played the mazurka that Chopin dictated on his deathbed. The wind whistled in the street and the music ghosted from the piano as leaves over a headstone.

"There is nothing glorious about making a film. It is an endless sequence of banalities."

The unspeakable is like the murmuring of a brook. If you go buried in your own thoughts, if you are busy, then you do not notice it at all in passing. You are not aware that this murmuring exists. But if you stand still, then you discover it. And if you have discovered it, then you must stand still. And when you stand still, then it persuades you. And when it has persuaded you, then you must stoop and listen attentively to it. And when you have listened to it, then it captures you. And when it has captured you, then you cannot break away from it, then you are overpowered. Infatuated, you sink down at its side. At each moment it is as if in the next moment it must offer an explanation. But the brook goes on murmuring, and the wanderer at its side grows older. The lonely wanderer is everywhere surrounded in nature by that which does not understand him, even though it always seems as if an understanding must be arrived at. It is otherwise with one who confesses. The stillness also impresses him, yet not in the melancholy mood of misunderstanding, but rather with the seriousness of eternity. He is not, like the wanderer, uncertain about how he came upon the stillness

The sea is sufficient unto itself. Whether in order to see what is going on it cunningly conceals itself as though it no longer existed, or whether it rages in its own passion: the sea has a deep ground, it knows well enough what is knows.

Ultimately what Kierkegaard winds up saying is that in the state of absence of despair the self rests transparently in the spirit which gave it rise. So the self, let’s say that’s you, that’s you, that’s you, that’s you, that’s each of you -you all rest transparently in the ground of being which created you. By which one means that despite your seeming separateness, each from the other, there radiates through you, with a perfect clarity, the soul of the universe which created you. This doubleness, this paradoxical doubleness, of seeming to be both separate from each other and yet to be able to experience, radiating through each other with no distortion, the universal spirit, is a state of grace. And I would also submit that it is the state of art. That the telling of a story is nothing more, or less, than the process of the viewer coming to experience what has seemed to be separate entities as informed by a single unity. And in that context all of the sort of abstract categories of plot, character, are subsumed into really what is a religious construct. Which is… e pluribus unum: out of many, one.

My walks are on the inaccessible shore of a sea which is perpetually stormy.

Nameless as a plain is nameless or a sea that has a name but on the map, in books, and to men, but which is, in reality, but distance, movement and depth.

Transience everywhere plunges into the depths of being. It is our task to print this temporal, perishable earth so painfully, passionately and deeply into ourselves, that its essence is resurrected again, invisibly, within us. The Elegies show this, the work of endlessly converting the visible, tangible world we love into the invisible vibrations and tremors of our own nature.

“If there was consciousness like ours in the sure creature, that moves towards us on a different track - it would drag us round in its wake. But its own being is boundless, unfathomable, and without a view of its condition, pure as its outward gaze And where we see future it sees everything, and itself in everything.”