To a certain degree we are really the person that others have seen in
us, friends as well as foes. And it works both ways: we ourselves are
the author of others; in some mysterious and inescapable way we are
responsible for the face they show us, responsible not for the
disposition itself, but for the development of that disposition. It is
we ourselves who stand in the way of a friend whose settled habits cause
us concern, for the reason that our opinion that he is settled in his
habits is a further link in the chain that binds and is slowly
strangling him. We would like him to change -- oh yes, we wish the same
for whole nations! But all the same we are by no means prepared to give
up our preconceived ideas about them. We ourselves are the last to
change those. We think of ourselves as mirrors, and only very seldom do
we realize to what extent the other person is himself the reflection of
our own set image, our creation, our victim --
Sketchbook 1946 - 1949, p18 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
translated by Geoffrey Skelton
Link to original text in German
Showing posts with label Sketchbook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sketchbook. Show all posts
time
Time does not change us.
It just unfolds us.
By not suppressing them, but writing them down, one acknowledges one's thoughts, which belong at best only to the moment and the place that produce them. One has no hope that two days hence, when one thinks the opposite, one will be wiser. One is what one is. One uses one's pen like the needle of a seismograph: we do not so much write as get a written. [...]
And time?
It would according to this be simply a magic device which separates out our nature and makes it visible by laying out life, an omnipresence of all possibilities, as a series. That alone is what makes it seem transitory, and that is why we always tend to suppose that time, the one-thing-after-another, is not actual, but apparent: it is an aid to visualization, a means of showing us one after another things that are in fact interlocked, forming a whole which we can no more grasp than we can see the separate colors that constitute light, until its rays are broken down and dissected.
Sketchbook 1946 - 1949, p12/13 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
translated by Geoffrey Skelton
Link to original text in German
It just unfolds us.
By not suppressing them, but writing them down, one acknowledges one's thoughts, which belong at best only to the moment and the place that produce them. One has no hope that two days hence, when one thinks the opposite, one will be wiser. One is what one is. One uses one's pen like the needle of a seismograph: we do not so much write as get a written. [...]
And time?
It would according to this be simply a magic device which separates out our nature and makes it visible by laying out life, an omnipresence of all possibilities, as a series. That alone is what makes it seem transitory, and that is why we always tend to suppose that time, the one-thing-after-another, is not actual, but apparent: it is an aid to visualization, a means of showing us one after another things that are in fact interlocked, forming a whole which we can no more grasp than we can see the separate colors that constitute light, until its rays are broken down and dissected.
Sketchbook 1946 - 1949, p12/13 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
translated by Geoffrey Skelton
Link to original text in German
on writing
What
is important is what cannot be said, the white space between the words.
The words themselves always express the incidentals, which is not what
we really mean. What we are really concerned with can only, at best, be
written about, and that means, quite literally, we write around
it. We encompass it. We make statements which never contain the whole
true experience: that cannot be described. All the statements can do is
to encircle it, as tightly and closely as possible: the true, the
inexpressible experience emerges at best as the tension between the
statements.
What we are presumably striving to do is to state everything that is capable of expression; language is like a chisel, which pares away all that is not a mystery, and everything said implies a taking away. We should not be deterred by the fact that everything, once it is put into words, has an element of blankness in it. What one says is not life itself; yet we say it in the interests of life. Like the sculptor plying his chisel, language works by bringing the area of blankness in the things that can be said as close as possible to the central mystery, the living element. There is always the danger that in doing so one might destroy the mystery, just as there is the danger that one might leave off too soon, might leave it as an unshaped block, might not locate the mystery, grasp it, and free it from all the things that could still be said; in other words, that one might not get through to its final surface.
This surface at which all that it is possible to express becomes one with the mystery itself has no substance, it exists only in the mind and not in Nature, where there is also no dividing line between mountain and sky. Is it perhaps what one means by form? A kind of sounding barrier -
Max Frisch, Sketchbook 1946 - 1949, p 25, (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
translated by Geoffrey Skelton
Original text in German
What we are presumably striving to do is to state everything that is capable of expression; language is like a chisel, which pares away all that is not a mystery, and everything said implies a taking away. We should not be deterred by the fact that everything, once it is put into words, has an element of blankness in it. What one says is not life itself; yet we say it in the interests of life. Like the sculptor plying his chisel, language works by bringing the area of blankness in the things that can be said as close as possible to the central mystery, the living element. There is always the danger that in doing so one might destroy the mystery, just as there is the danger that one might leave off too soon, might leave it as an unshaped block, might not locate the mystery, grasp it, and free it from all the things that could still be said; in other words, that one might not get through to its final surface.
This surface at which all that it is possible to express becomes one with the mystery itself has no substance, it exists only in the mind and not in Nature, where there is also no dividing line between mountain and sky. Is it perhaps what one means by form? A kind of sounding barrier -
Max Frisch, Sketchbook 1946 - 1949, p 25, (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
translated by Geoffrey Skelton
Original text in German
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)