Thread by @KS1729

For 2023, a new thread of sentences.

1. “I walked past the brothel as if past the house of a beloved.”

— The Diaries of Franz Kafka, translated by Ross Benjamin #KafkaDiaries

2. From 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater' by Thomas De Quincey

3. आशासु शीतलतरासु पयोदतोयै-
राशासिताप्तिविवशेषु च सज्जनेषु ।
नैशाकरोदयविधौ निशि मध्यमायां
क्लेशापहस्त्रिजगतां त्वमिहाविरासी: ॥२॥

4. a great descriptor that conveys बीभत्स : "the mephitic stench from the bilge"

5. Kafka’s efforts to seek impossible intimacies by means of careful observations…

6. Never ceases to amaze me how extensively ancient Indians kept thinking/arguing/disputing/reframing the question of: what does **meaning** mean? Where does meaning emerge from? Who lends meaningfulness to meaning?

7. a phoneme of the Gods is pregnant with recommendations

8. What distinguishes one sentence from another?

ākānkṣa, Divergence of Expectations

9. "As Karl Guthke pointed out in The Gender of Death (1999), while Death is feminine in other languages, its masculine gender in German allowed artists to imagine the ‘boneman’ as bridegroom, seducer, rapist."

10. "I owe a great deal to Hegel, Goethe, Ghalib, Bedil & Wordsworth. 1st 2 led me into “inside” of things; 3rd & 4th taught me how to remain oriental in spirit & expression aftr having assimilated foreign ideals of poetry, & last saved me frm atheism in my student days."
— Iqbal

11. “There are no masses, only ways of seeing people as a mass.” — Raymond Williams

12. “In 1766, Immanuel Kant confessed in a letter: “Indeed, I believe with the firmest conviction and the utmost satisfaction, many things that I will never have the courage to say, but I will never say anything I do not believe.””

13. But what is Time? — Girolamo Cardano

14. “How is it, cruelest of hearts, that you’re not ashamed to run after a person you’ve only seen for a moment, aban- doning this person—me!—you’ve grown up with from birth?”

— from ‘Ratnāvali’, a play by the Emperor Harshavardhana, 7thC.

15. "In Duryodhana’s way of thinking, contentment yields complacency and can never produce greatness. So he nurtures his resentment until it leads him to embrace a perfidious plan to lure his cousin Yudhishthira to lose every thing in a dicing match, which in turn leads… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

16. "The Four Fates of Man: Death; Soul in Hell; Soul in Purgatory; Soul in Heaven (c.1775), attributed to the Ecuadorian Manuel Chili, was probably intended for a devotional setting, but – as the only work of its kind – is difficult to contextualise. The vividly coloured… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

17. "THERE is a certain shade of red brick-a dark, almost melodious red, sombre and riddled with blue-that is my childhood in St. Louis. Not the real childhood, but the false one that extends from the dawning of consciousness until the day that one leaves home for college. That… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

18. anannatannassamitindriya

The “I-Will-Come-to-Know-What-Is-Unknown” Faculty (Pali)

“In a tradition that posits a deep primordial ignorance pervasive in the unregenerate human condition, this bridge from de- lusion to wisdom provides a necessary lifeline. Else how do we know… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

19. "Finding the real identity beneath the apparent contradiction and differentiation, and finding the substantial diversity beneath the apparent identity, is the most delicate, misunderstood and yet essential endowment of the critic of ideas and the historian of historical… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

20. “A good writer must be in training: if he is a stone too heavy then it must be because that fourteen pounds represents for him so much extra indulgence, so much clogging laziness; in fact a coarsening of his sensibility. There are but two ways to be a good writer (and no… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

21. “Fraternity is the State's bribe to the individual; it is the one virtue which can bring courage to members of a materialist society. All State propaganda exalts comradeship, for it is this gregarious herd-sense and herd-smell which keeps people from thinking and so… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

22. “The narrative thread is deceptively true. Father and son are on a motorcycle holiday, traveling from Minneapolis toward the Dakotas, then across the mountains, turning south to Santa Rosa and the Bay. Asphalt, motels, hairpins in the knife-cold of the Rockies, fog and… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

23. “IT MAY WELL be that scholarship of the very first order is as rare as great art or poetry. Some of the gifts and qualities it exacts are obvious: exceeding concentration, a capacious but minutely precise memory, finesse and a sort of pious skepticism in the handling of… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

24. On the complicated friendship between Gershom Scholem & Walter Benjamin ~~ Kabbalah vs Communism

“Scholem bridled at what he intuited, uneasily, to be Benjamin’s imaging of Marxism as a natural variant of Judaic messianic eschatology—of the central Judaic investment in… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

25. Walter Benjamin’s letter on June 12, 1938:

“Kafka eavesdropped on tradition, and he who listens hard does not see.
The main reason why this eavesdropping demands such effort is that only the most indistinct sounds reach the listener. There is no doctrine that one… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

26. “There is not the least doubt that Pietro Catte in the abstract has no reality, any more than any other man on the face of the earth. But the fact remains that he was born and that he died, as those irrefutable certificates prove. And this endows him with reality in actual… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

27. “Solzhenitsyn, a theocratic anarchist, has little esteem for reason, particularly when it stems from the “intellectual,” from the man who makes his more or less mundane living by dispassion. In the presence of the inhuman, reason is often a small—indeed, a laughable—agent.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

28. "How many villains and knaves interfered in Prague's affairs and set up camp here over the decades and centuries: rodomonts, all gilt armour and puffed-up chests jingling with trinkets; plump friars of every order; prelates from the gates of hell; Obergauner in sidecars… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

29. What matters more: social order sustained by lies OR chaos nourished by truth?

30. Kausari, a Safavid poet at the court of Shah Tahmasp, declared in despair:

darin kishvar kharidar-i sukhan nist
kasi sargarm-i bazar-i sukhan nist
sukhan ra qadr u miqdari namanda
ma‘ani ra kharidar namanda
ki dar Iran kasi nayad padidar
ki bashad jins-i ma‘ni ra kharidar… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

31. "...we can form an adequate picture of the world only if we begin to think the long-forgotten nexus of space, time, and action. We have repressed this elementary insight for so long that it is worth our while to bring it back into play."

32. on the Flâneur

"Every form of movement corresponds to a specific mode of cognition. The flâneur drifts. He is interested not in the whither but in the where. He paces out. He has his own rhythm, now ambling, now pacing briskly. He walks around; he follows up. He does not… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

33.

34.

35. “According to the philosopher Mazviita Chirimuuta, ‘colours are not properties of minds, objects or lights, but of perceptual processes – interactions that involve all three terms’. In what she calls ‘colour adverbialism’, colours are not properties of things but ways that… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

36. "Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

37. The description of a calendar.

“Three hundred and sixty milking cows (7) give birth to a single calf,(8) the creator and destroyer of time. The calves are in different sheds, but they suckle the same truth. The Ashvins milk them of true knowledge. There are 720 spokes on… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

38. "T. H. Green's Idealistic defense of the retributive function of punishment was vitiated by his disregard for psychological observation. That "the state cannot be supposed capable of vindictive passion" may be true as far as ordinary language goes; but Green's peremptory… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

39.

40. "one year of anarchy is worse than a hundred years of tyranny"

41. “Kalidasa’s treatment of Kanva’s ashram is relevant even beyond his borrowing of particular points from Asvaghosa in composing his play, the ‘Abhijnana Shakuntala’. The very existence of the play itself may have sprung from a remark by Ashwaghosha, who mentioned that the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

42. "The womb is itself a paradoxical thing. In preparing for pregnancy, an entirely new organ, the placenta, is created. It infiltrates the uterine blood vessels and grows over 150 miles of capillaries to provide nutrients and oxygen to the developing fetus before it is… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

43. “Friedrich Nietzsche, a young philologist who had worked up to that point on Greek texts and had two years earlier achieved an unexpected celebrity with The Birth of Tragedy, published the Un zeitgemässe Betrachtungen, the Untimely Meditations, a work in which he tries to… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

44. Where is ‘past’ and ‘future’ born from?

“[Ludwig] Boltzmann has shown that entropy exists because we describe the world in a blurred fashion. He has demonstrated that entropy is precisely the quantity that counts how many are the different configurations that our blurred… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

45.

"My father grew up in an era when to be an American—a white American, at least—was to be yourself. In some respects his generation was more ignorant, complacent, self-centered and parochial than mine. For better and for worse, it actually believed in progress, which is to… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

46. “In the year 387, Plato returned to Athens from his trip to southern Italy, where he had sought contact with the Pythagoreans. It is the trip that is also known as the first Sicilian one and that brought the philosopher, who was at that time forty years old, into the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

47. "At the end of the Second World War, Arthur Koestler wrote a lucid essay, ‘The Yogi and the Commissar’, in which he typologically contrasted the two fundamental responses of the twentieth century to the misery of the world, the response of the yogi, who chooses the path… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

48. “In 1935, Jung said: “A point exists at about the thirty-fifth year when things begin to change, it is the first moment of the shadow side of life, of the going down to death. It is clear that Dante found this point and those who have read Zarathustra will know that… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

49. “Still, returning to the life of Gustave Flaubert, Sartre would have us regard with sympathy this poor idiot of the Flaubert family: “Worst of all, he condemns himself in advance—he judges himself according to the norms the Flauberts have adopted”. Gustave Flaubert can never… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

50. On poets & politics:

"On the local level, late-thirteenth-century northern Italy (Milano, to the north, and Rome, to the south, are barely on Dante’s personal political map; rather we hear, in addition to Florence, of such cities as Genoa, Pisa, Pistoia, Siena, etc.) was… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

51. nā́sad āsīn nó sád āsīt tadā́nīṃ
nā́sīd rájo nó víomā paró yát
kím ā́varīvaḥ kúha kásya śármann
ámbhaḥ kím āsīd gáhanaṃ gabhīrám…

“The hymn does not describe cosmogony, but it in some sense is cosmogony. The unfolding of the hymn itself is an act of creation; the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

52. "Everyone during the communist time promised us a bright future. Now, thirty years later, the populists are trying to sell me the pay cheque of the past. Don't believe anyone who tries to sell you the past or future, the cheques are empty.” -- Georgi Gospodinov

53. "A wider and equally shaky rear-view mirror opinion is that the [1848] revolutions were a failure. It certainly felt like one to their participants, as counter-revolution prevailed. Social and political reaction submerged their Europe under a flood of executions,… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

54. "Lucien Febvre in an entertaining article, imagined how astonished Herodotus would be if he were to repeat his itinerary today, at the flora which we think of as typically Mediterranean: orange, lemon and mandarin trees imported from the Far East by the Arabs; cactus from… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

55. "PALAVRAS NUM SILÊNCIO DE OURO. WORDS IN GOLDEN SILENCE. When I read a newspaper, listen to the radio or overhear what people are saying in the café, I often feel aversion, even disgust at the same words written and spoken over and over-at the same expressions, phrases, and… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

56. "I feel the same way about solitude as some people feel about the blessing of the church. It's the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without the awareness that I am carrying out an act of mercy toward myself. Cantor illustrated the concept of infinity for… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

57. “Iraqis and palm trees. Who resembles whom? There are millions of Iraqis and as many, or perhaps somewhat fewer, palm trees. Some have had their fronds burned. Some have been beheaded. Some have had their backs broken by time, but are still trying to stand. Some have dried… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

58. "The winter that Boyd turned fourteen the trees inhabiting the dry river bed were bare from early on and the sky was gray day after day and the trees were pale against it. A cold wind had come down from the north with the earth running under bare poles toward a reckoning… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

59. "What Alzheimer discovered under the microscope would make history. Inside Auguste [Deter]’s brain, Alzheimer saw neurons in various degrees of disintegration, seemingly destroyed by fibrils, or tiny fibers, growing inside them. In some neurons, one or several fibrils could… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…