Saturday, November 25, 2006

Intimate Immensity: Part Three




René Magritte - The Listening Room (1958)


"Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it."

René Magritte

"The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That's where you are. You've got to keep both going. As Novalis said, 'The seat of the soul is where the inner and outer worlds meet.' "

Joseph Campbell


"Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we becomes motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of the motionless man. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet daydreaming.

And since we are learning philosophy from poets, here is a lesson in three lines, by Pierre Albert-Bireau:

And with a stroke of the pen I name myself
Master of the World
Unlimited man."
From The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard