- Num ---- Username ---- Category ------------- Posted -- Expires --- Pages --- | 47492 | STU_PALORD | CHATTER | 04/14/93 | 04/20/93 | 3 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Description: Reply to 47490: Reply to 47488: If I could te | ================================================================================ From _Studies in the History of the Renaissance_ by Walter Pater. "Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How can we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to form habits; for habit is relative to a stereotyped world; meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike.... Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliance of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendor of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about what we see and touch. What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or Hegel, or our own." -=-=-=- The "focused, concentrated type" sees with this ecstasy, as all of my examples proved. The unfocused, unconcentrated type would never have the mental precision to even NOTICE the details mentioned in _vision thing_. The unfocused, unconcentrated type is most likely to fall into a "facile orthodoxy," as there will be no moments of intuitive recognition outside of his gray, shapeless universe, no instants which could shock him into a Real Life. Here endeth the lesson. pfm