The adventurer, in a word, treats the incalculable element in life in the way we ordinarily treat only what we think is by definition calculable. (For this reason, the philosopher is the adventurer of the spirit. He makes the hopeless, but not therefore meaningless, attempt to form into conceptual knowledge an attitude of the soul, its mood toward itself, the world, God. He treats this insoluble problem as if it were soluble.)
Georg Simmel
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“We go on living, we permit ourselves
to continue—but certainly
not for the university, what they publish
.
severally or as a group: clerks
got out of hand forgetting for the most part
to whom they are beholden.
.
spitted on fixed concepts like
roasting hogs, sputtering, their drip sizzling
in the fire
.
Something else, something else the same.”
William Carlos Williams
“Yet I still believe in another possible perspective on life: one that does not separate the whole and the parts, one for which the category of the whole and parts is not applicable to life at all but that takes life to be a unified process whose nature it is to exist only in moments that can be differentiated by their qualities or contents. Life … is an absolute continuity in which there is no assembly of fragments or parts. Life, moreover, is a unity, but one that at any moment expresses itself as a whole in distinct forms. This cannot be deduced further because life, which we attempt to formulate here in some way, is a basic fact that cannot be constructed. Each moment of life is the whole life whose steady stream — which is exactly its unique form — has its reality only at the crest of the wave in which it respectively rises. Each present moment is determined by the entire prior course of life, is the culmination of all preceding moments; and already, for this reason, every moment of life is the form in which the whole life of the subject is real.”
Georg Simmel, Rembrandt