Five Rings

The verb ‘to leave oneself [se laisser]’: signature of the writer.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the workers to gather wood, don’t divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

“A rose is a rose is a rose, but not to the perfumer. Russian rose is softer, Indian thinner, Egyptian richer, Turkish sweeter, Bulgarian rounder, Moroccan brighter. Jasmine sambac is sharp, while grandiflorum jasmine is more full-bodied. Deepgreen Tasmanian boronia has a rich herbal scent, whereas the bright orange kind has a sweet-tart citrusy odor. Spanish, Tunisian, and French orange flower absolute all vary in sweetness and depth.”

The snake symbolizes something unconscious; it is the instinctive movement or tendency; it shows the way to the hidden treasure, or it guards the treasure. The snake has a fascinating appeal, a peculiar attraction through fear. Some people are fascinated by this fear. Things that are awe-inspiring and dangerous have an extraordinary attraction. The serpent shows the way to hidden things which leads man to go beyond the point of safety, and beyond the limits of consciousness.

For we are capable of doing only what we are inclined to do. And again, we truly incline only toward something that in turn inclines toward us, toward our essential being, by appealing to our essential being as the keeper who holds us in our essential being. What keeps us in our essential nature holds us only so long, however, as we for our part keep holding on to what holds us. And we keep holding on to it by not letting it out of our memory. Memory is the gathering of thought.

"This gorgeous green, / this searing lilac, / this heart that is nothing but mystery.”

Baudelaire was a lover of depth, understood in the strictly spatial sense. He waited, like some marvel always ready to flare into being, for certain moments in which space eluded its customary flatness and began to reveal itself in a potentially inexhaustible succession of stage wings. Then things – every single negligible object – suddenly took on an unexpected significance. In those moments, he wrote, ‘the exterior world offers itself with a powerful emphasis, a clearness of outline, a wealth of exquisite colors.’ As if to say that thought was possible only when the world presented itself in this way. These were also ‘the moments of existence in which time and extension are more profound, and the sentiment of existence has grown enormously.’ So, in Western terms, Baudelaire was getting close to describing what for Vedic seers, and later for Buddha, was bodhi, the ‘awakening.’ And in an equally literal Western spirit, he made this coincide with physiological awakening, with the moment in which ‘the eyelids have just been unburdened of the sleep that sealed them.’ This is what drugs are for: opium makes space deep (‘Space is deepened by opium’), while hashish ‘spreads over the whole of life like a magic varnish’ (perhaps similar to Vauvenargues’s comment ‘clarity is the vernis des maîtres’?). Yet Baudelaire also pointed out that drugs are only a surrogate for physiology, since ‘every man carries within himself the right dose of natural opium, which he unceasingly secretes and renews.’