Burke discerned two radically distinct responses to beauty in general, and to natural beauty in particular: one originating in love, the other in fear. When we are attracted by the harmony, order and serenity of nature, so as to feel at home in it and confirmed by it, then we speak of its beauty; when, however, as on some wind-blown mountain crag, we experience the vastness, the power, the threatening majesty of the natural world, and feel our own littleness in the face of it, then we should speak of the sublime. Both these responses are elevating; both lift us out of the ordinary utilitarian thoughts that dominate our practical lives.
Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction
Front cover and illustration from Graham Connah’s Polished Stone Axes in Benin publication. The photograph (top right) is a detail of a brass altar group thought to depict Oba Ohen at the Agwe festival, holding a stone axe head in his left hand. The line drawing is of an axe head obtained from Chief Osuabor of Benin City. Both were/are in the collection of the National Museum, Benin. (https://re-entanglements.net/tag/ukhure/)
Something that I often try and do is make a sculpture that is just one sentence, or feels like that, or one word. I think that’s where poetry can become very interesting, in the way things are sort of honed in on to such a degree that it’s just the sound of two words touching.
Rachel Whiteread, A brush with… Rachel Whiteread, The Art Newspaper, 23 December 2020
It moves, yes. It moves through its contradictions. Thought is essentially movement. It is only a limiting — thought which holds still, apparently still, is only a limiting case which holds only a little while. Thought cannot hold still; it has to be in movement.
David Bohm, interviewed by Maurice Wilkins, Session VI, https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/32977-6
Gardens. In the creation of a garden, the architect invites the partnership of the Kingdom of Nature. In a beautiful garden, the majesty of Nature is ever present, but Nature reduced to human proportions and thus transformed into the most efficient haven against the aggressiveness of contemporary life.
Luis Barragán, 1980 Acceptance Speech, The Pritzker Architecture Prize
Here, however, lies the task of any philosophical thought: to go to the limit of hypotheses and processes, even if they are catastrophic. The only justification for thinking and writing is that it accelerates these terminal processes. Here, beyond the discourse of truth, resides the poetic and enigmatic value of thinking. For, facing a world that is unintelligible and problematic, our task is clear: we must make that world even more unintelligible, even more enigmatic.
Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion
It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question,—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
