Lux lucet in tenebris

‘Dizzy spells and falls’: this is how Baudelaire described to Sainte-Beuve the premonitory symptoms of the disease that would fell him a few weeks later in Namur. In the same letter (referring to pompous authors such as Thiers and Villemain), he posed the first question that should be asked about anyone who reads a book or looks at a picture: ‘Do these gentlemen really feel the dazzlement and the enchantment of an art object?’

The beautiful is not a simple arrangement; it needs power, energy, conquest. Statues themselves have muscles. The formal cause is of an energizing order. So it is at its peak in life, in human life, the life of the will. A form cannot be properly understood through idle contemplation. The contemplating being must play out his own destiny before the universe he contemplates, and so all types of poetry are types of destiny. A history of poetry is a history of human feelings.

On analogy, we find the decisive word – calm, mordant, decisive – in Goethe: ‘Every existent is an analogon of the entire existent; and so that which exists always appears to us isolated and interwoven at one and the same time. If one follows analogy too closely, everything coincides in the identical: if one avoids it, all is dispersed in the infinite. In both cases contemplation stagnates, in the one case because it is too lively, in the other because it has been killed.’ As often happens in Goethe, the surprise comes from a single flash, at the end. In his carefully thought-out sentence, the shock is conveyed by the last word: getötet, ‘killed.’ How do you kill contemplation? And for Goethe this is tantamount to saying: How do you kill life itself? By avoiding analogy. Those who avoid analogy can mock the excessive liveliness – febrile, almost delirious – of those who instead abandon themselves totally to it. Everyone knows that analogy is not obligatory. You can simply ignore it. And this act of omission has a boundless power, like a blow delivered by a murderer.

Love consists not in feeling great things but in having great detachment and in suffering for the Beloved.

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves.”