The Note-Books of Samuel Butler
Then, after years of looking and searching and inquiring, I happen to find The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, because someone somewhere decided to put them upon the Internet.
Butler’s notes turn out to be a bit disappointing at first sight. Small wonder, because my expectations were high. Anyway, Butler maybe said so himself:
” The moment a thing is written, or even can be written, and reasoned about, it has changed its nature by becoming tangible, and hence finite, and hence it will have an end in disintegration. It has entered into death. And yet till it can be thought about and realised more or less definitely it has not entered into life. Both life and death are necessary factors of each other. But our profoundest and most important convictions are unspeakable.
So it is with unwritten and indefinable codes of honour, conventions, art-rules – things that can be felt but not explained – these are the most important, and the less we try to understand them, or even to think about them, the better. “
[x]#310 fan donderdag 16 januari 2003 @ 10:57:11
lieuwe op 19 januari 2003 @ 12:38:15
Hear! Hear!