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| 47492 | STU_PALORD   | CHATTER              | 04/14/93 | 04/20/93 |     3    |
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| Description: Reply to 47490: Reply to 47488: If I could te                   |
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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