The Discarded Image Quotes

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There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom.
Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations)
Answers to leading questions under torture naturally tell us nothing about the beliefs of the accused; but they are good evidence for the beliefs of the accusers.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
At his most characteristic, medieval man was not a dreamer nor a wanderer. He was an organiser, a codifier, a builder of systems.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
The fact of the matter is, if you haven’t been in an abusive relationship, you don’t really know what the experience is like. Furthermore, it’s quite hard to predict what you would do in the same situation. I find that the people most vocal about what they would’ve done in the same situation often have no clue what they are talking about – they have never been in the same situation themselves. By invalidating the survivor’s experience, these people are defending an image of themselves that they identify with strength, not realizing that abuse survivors are often the strongest individuals out there. They’ve been belittled, criticized, demeaned, devalued, and yet they’ve still survived. The judgmental ones often have little to no life experience regarding these situations, yet they feel quite comfortable silencing the voices of people who’ve actually been there.
Shahida Arabi (Becoming the Narcissist’s Nightmare: How to Devalue and Discard the Narcissist While Supplying Yourself)
It’s not black and white," he said. "If it were, I wouldn’t be here right now, and neither would you. We’re the gray area, angel. We’re the pieces of the puzzle they don’t know what to do with, the pieces that don’t quite fit into their perfect little picture, so they choose to discard us, to keep their image untainted,but we can only be ignored for so long.
J.M. Darhower (Extinguish (Extinguish, #1))
whatever flows immediately from God, senza mezzo distilla (67), will never end.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Of course there always will be darkness but I realize now something inhabits it. Historical or not. Sometimes it seems like a cat, the panther with its moon mad gait or a tiger with stripes of ash and eyes as wild as winter oceans. Sometimes it's the curve of a wrist or what's left of romance, still hiding in the drawer of some long lost nightstand or carefully drawn in the margins of an old discarded calendar. Sometimes it's even just a vapor trail speeding west, prophetic, over clouds aglow with dangerous light. Of course these are only images, my images, and in the end they're born out of something much more akin to a Voice, which though invisible to the eye and frequently unheard by even the ear still continues, day and night, year after year, to sweep through us all.
Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)
The really important difference is that the medieval universe, while unimaginably large, was also unambiguously finite. And one unexpected result of this is to make the smallness of Earth more vividly felt.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
It is said that people pointed out Dante in the street not as the man who made the Comedy but as the man who had been in Hell. Even today there are those (some of them critics) who believe every novel and even every lyric to be autobiographical. A man who lacks invention himself does not easily attribute it to others.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Covert narcissists blind you with their saccharine sweetness: they present the perfect public image, routinely go on their knees to pray, say their mantras on their yoga mats, preach ‘peace and compassion,’ all the while plotting on how to best stab you in the back. In some ways, covert narcissists are worse than overt ones. At least overt ones are open about how awful they really are.
Shahida Arabi (Becoming the Narcissist’s Nightmare: How to Devalue and Discard the Narcissist While Supplying Yourself)
Understand the difference between mystical art and mystical knowldge. Devotional music, life stories of mystics and gods, images, paintings etc. may temporarily transport you to mystical world but they can't give you mystical powers. Art is beautiful. Knowledge is boring. Ancient sages tried to mix art with knowledge. We discarded the knowledge but kept the art.
Shunya
Thus, while every falling body for us illustrates the ‘law’ of gravitation, for them it illustrated the ‘kindly enclyning’ of terrestrial bodies to their ‘kindly stede’ the Earth, the centre of the Mundus,
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
The insignificance (by cosmic standards) of the Earth became as much a commonplace to the medieval, as to the modern, thinker; it was part of the moralists’ stock-in-trade, used, as Cicero uses it (xix), to mortify human ambition.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Eternity is quite distinct from perpetuity, from mere endless continuance in time. Perpetuity is only the attainment of an endless series of moments, each lost as soon as it is attained. Eternity is the actual and timeless fruition of illimitable life.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
The term POTUS used to be viewed around the world with a degree of respect. Unfortunately the current US president has junked any last remnant of that image. Instead he seems only too happy to trash the environment; to scrap age old alliances promoting peace and prosperity; to discard internationally binding treaties; to toss aside like garbage hard won civil liberties. Maybe DETRITUS is a more fitting acronym for the current occupant of the White House - 'Deranged egotistical tyrant ruining & isolating the U.S.
Alex Morritt (Lines & Lenses)
To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The ‘space’ of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
We are now exposed to more images in a day than anyone in the 14th century would have known in a lifetime. [...] Most of it is garbage. Most of it needs excising. Even if we’re fearful that we might be missing something. We are probably not. We have to discard. We have to throw things away, cleanse the doors of our perception and work out what is worth looking at, what is worth remembering, what are the images that matter, what will we retain.
Robert Hughes
The reader will no doubt understand that this was no arbitrary fancy, but just such another ‘tool’ as the hypothesis of Copernicus; an intellectual construction devised to accommodate the phenomena observed. We have recently been reminded13 how much mathematics, and how good, went to the building of the Model.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
To be always looking at the map when there is a fine prospect before you shatters the ‘wise passiveness’ in which landscape ought to be enjoyed. But to consult a map before we set out has no such ill effect. Indeed it will lead us to many prospects; including some we might never have found by following our noses.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
The biggest mistake abuse survivors make after leaving their relationship is to shrink. They wallow in sadness and allow the abuser to go on social media sites and post pictures of how wonderful their life is now that you left them. They allow the abuser to win again by showing people they are so over you. This is not okay! I hope every abuse survivor has a marketing campaign of glory and triumph. Don't let the abuser paint the image of you as someone they discarded. Post your comeback story on social media. Invite the world back into your life. The victory is yours. Show the world that you overcame a monster. Show them you won!
Shannon L. Alder (The Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Bible)
A syndrome is small, portable, not weighed down by theory, episodic. You can explain something with it and then discard it. A disposable instrument of cognition. Mine is called Recurrent Detoxification Syndrome. Without the bells and whistles, its description boils down to the insistence of one’s consciousness on returning to certain images, or even the compulsive search for them. It is a variant of the Mean World Syndrome, which has been described fairly exhaustively in neuropsychological studies as a particular type of infection caused by the media. It’s quite a bourgeois ailment, I suppose. Patients spend long hours in front of the TV, thumbing at their remote controls through all the channels till they find the ones with the most horrendous news: wars, epidemics, and disasters. Then, fascinated by what they’re seeing, they can’t tear themselves away. The symptoms themselves
Olga Tokarczuk (Flights)
(Casual statements about pre-Copernican astronomy in modern scientists who are not historians are often unreliable.)
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Though literacy was of course far rarer then than now, reading was in one way a more important ingredient of the total culture.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
think, have been hard to find an educated man in any European country who did not love it. To acquire a taste for it is almost to become naturalised in the Middle Ages. Boethius,
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
scraps of Plato—often scraps which were very marginal and unimportant in Plato’s own work—trickled down to the Middle Ages.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Between the two habitable and temperate zones spreads the torrid zone, uninhabitable through heat.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
men were born under the law that they should garrison (tuerentur) the globe you see yonder in the middle of the temple, which is called Earth. . .
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
We're the gray area, angel. We're the pieces of the puzzle they don't know what to do with, the pieces that don't quite fit into their perfect little picture, so they choose to discard us, to keep their image untainted, but we can only be ignored for so long. Because eventually, whether they want to admit it or not, all of their black and white will bleed together anyway.
J.M. Darhower (Extinguish (Extinguish, #1))
In modern, that is, in evolutionary, thought Man stands at the top of a stair whose foot is lost in obscurity; in this, he stands at the bottom of a stair whose top is invisible with light.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Africanus Major carries Africanus Minor up to a height whence he looks down on Carthage ‘from an exalted place, bright and shining, filled with stars’ (xi). They are in fact in the highest celestial sphere, the stellatum. This is the prototype of many ascents to Heaven in later literature: those of Dante, of Chaucer (in the Hous of Fame), of Troilus’ ghost, of the Lover in the King’s Quair.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Hence what we might take to be the difference between a clearly Christian and a possibly Pagan work may really be the difference between a thesis offered, so to speak, to the Faculty of Philosophy and one offered to that of Divinity. This seems to me to be the best explanation of the gulf that separates Boethius’ De Consolatione from the doctrinal pieces which are (I presume, rightly) attributed to him.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Though Christians were logically bound to admit the goodness of matter that doctrine was not heartily relished; then, and for centuries, the language of some spiritual writers was hardly to be reconciled with it.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
There are, I know, those who prefer not to go beyond the impression, however accidental, which an old work makes on a mind that brings to it a purely modern sensibility and modern conceptions; just as there are travellers who carry their resolute Englishry with them all over the Continent, mix only with other English tourists, enjoy all they see for its ‘quaintness’, and have no wish to realise what those ways of life, those churches, those vineyards, mean to the natives. They have their reward. I have no quarrel with people who approach the past in that spirit. I hope they will pick none with me. But I was writing for the other sort. C.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Boethius slips in, as axiomatic, the remark that all perfect things are prior to all imperfect things.99 It was common ground to nearly all ancient and medieval thinkers except the Epicureans.100 I have already101 stressed the radical difference which this involves between their thought and the developmental or evolutionary concepts of our own period—a difference which perhaps leaves no area and no level of consciousness unaffected.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Eternity is quite distinct from perpetuity, from mere endless continuance in time. Perpetuity is only the attainment of an endless series of moments, each lost as soon as it is attained. Eternity is the actual and timeless fruition of illimitable life.112 Time, even endless time, is only an image, almost a parody, of that plenitude; a hopeless attempt to compensate for the transitoriness of its ‘presents’ by infinitely multiplying them. That
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
The Magpie Poet The magpie poet lined his poems, with a nest of shiny objects: engagement rings returned by ex-lovers, lipstick and keys found beneath his couch's cushions, even shards of his mom's silver hand mirror, too filled with images to discard. His nest of luminous memories held his yellow eye, his offspring. More importantly, it held him. Each poem he wrote was a pro tem refuge he could hide in, a safe house to rest his head after another sleepless night.
Beryl Dov
In our age I think it would be fair to say that the ease with which a scientific theory assumes the dignity and rigidity of fact varies inversely with the individual's scientific education. In discussion with wholly uneducated audiences I have sometimes found matter which real scientists would regard as highly speculative more firmly believed than many things within our real knowledge; the popular imago of the Cave Man ranked as hard fact, and the life of Caesar or Napoleon as doubtful rumor. ... The mass media which have in our time created a popular scientism, a caricature of the true sciences, did not then exist [in the middle ages]. The ignorant were more aware of their ignorance then than now.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image)
During these centuries much that was of Pagan origin was built irremovably into the Model. It is characteristic of the age that more than one of the works I shall mention has sometimes raised a doubt whether its author was Pagan or Christian.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
When Nietzsche said: 'God is dead,' he expressed a truth which is valid for the greater part of Europe". To Nietzsche's statement, Jung noted: "However it would be more correct to say: 'He has discarded our image, and where will we find him again?
Sonu Shamdasani (The Red Book: Liber Novus)
The last, and neo-Platonic, wave of Paganism which had gathered up into itself much from the preceding waves, Aristotelian, Platonic, Stoic, and what not, came far inland and made brackish lakes which have, perhaps, never been drained. Not all Christians at all times have detected them or admitted their existence: and among those who have done so there have always been two attitudes. There was then, and is still, a Christian ‘left’, eager to detect and anxious to banish every Pagan element; but also a Christian ‘right’ who, like St Augustine, could find the doctrine of the Trinity foreshadowed in the Platonici,2 or could claim triumphantly, like Justin Martyr, ‘Whatever things have been well said by all men belong to us Christians’.3
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
It would detain us too long here to trace the steps whereby a man’s genius, from being an invisible, personal, and external attendant, became his true self, and then his cast of mind, and finally (among the Romantics) his literary or artistic gifts. To understand this process fully would be to grasp that great movement of internalisation, and that consequent aggrandisement of man and desiccation of the outer universe, in which the psychological history of the West has so largely consisted.25
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Medieval art was deficient in perspective, and poetry followed suit. Nature, for Chaucer, is all foreground; we never get a landscape. And neither poets nor artists were much interested in the strict illusionism of later periods. The relative size of objects in the visible arts is determined more by the emphasis the artist wishes to lay upon them than by their sizes in the real world or by their distance. Whatever details we are meant to see will be shown whether they would really be visible or not.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
His writings are usually regarded as the main channel by which a certain kind of Theology entered the Western tradition. It is the ‘negative Theology’ of those who take in a more rigid sense, and emphasise more persistently than others, the incomprehensibility of God.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
The medieval conception of reality is an old idea, one that predates Christianity. In his final book The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis, who was a professional medievalist, explained that Plato believed that two things could relate to each other only through a third thing. In what Lewis called the medieval “Model,” everything that existed was related to every other thing that existed, through their shared relationship to God. Our relationship to the world is mediated through God, and our relationship to God is mediated through the world.
Rod Dreher (The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation)
Everywhere, on both sides, men were turning away from the civic virtues and the sensual pleasures to seek an inner purgation and a supernatural goal. The modern who dislikes the Christian Fathers would have disliked the Pagan philosophers equally, and for similar reasons.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
It looks as if the Romances and such Ballads were in the Middle Ages, as they have remained ever since, truancies, refreshments, things that can live only on the margin of the mind, things whose very charm depends on their not being ‘of the centre’ (a locality which Matthew Arnold possibly overvalued).
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Once you have piled your books, take them in your hand one by one and decide whether you want to keep or discard each one. The criterion is, of course, whether or not it gives you a thrill of pleasure when you touch it. Remember, I said when you touch it. Make sure you don’t start reading it. Reading clouds your judgment. Instead of asking yourself what you feel, you’ll start asking whether you need that book or not. Imagine what it would be like to have a bookshelf filled only with books that you really love. Isn’t that image spellbinding? For someone who loves books, what greater happiness could there be?
Marie Kondō (The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (Magic Cleaning #1))
If I am right, the man of genius then found himself in a situation very different from that of his modern successor. Such a man today often, perhaps usually, feels himself confronted with a reality whose significance he cannot know, or a reality that has no significance; or even a reality such that the very question whether it has a meaning is itself a meaningless question. It is for him, by his own sensibility, to discover a meaning, or, out of his own subjectivity, to give a meaning—or at least a shape—to what in itself had neither. But the Model universe of our ancestors had a built-in significance. And that in two senses; as having ‘significant form’ (it is an admirable design) and as a manifestation of the wisdom and goodness that created it. There was no question of waking it into beauty or life. Ours, most emphatically, was not the wedding garment, nor the shroud. The achieved perfection was already there. The only difficulty was to make an adequate response.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Everyone knows that the Arts are Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, and Astronomy. And almost everyone has met the mnemonic couplet Gram loquitur, Dia verba docet, Rhet verba colorat, Mus canit, Ar numerat, Geo ponderat, Ast colit astra. The first three constitute the Trivium or threefold way; the last four, the Quadrivium.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
cognitive filter in our brain that sticks to the first image we get. That’s a cognitive distortion often called the first impression bias. As soon as we have created our first impression we set it in stone and start filtering out everything that proves our impression was right. All of the evidence against our first impression is automatically discarded.   Our brains do this to save energy. Since our brains use up a ton of energy, they have a lot of shortcuts to avoid using processing power whenever it’s not necessary. When you see a car, your brain doesn’t look back at that car to second-guess whether you were right or not. If it looks like a car, it is a car. We can make misjudgments because of this.   Did
Brian Keephimattracted (F*CK Him! - Nice Girls Always Finish Single)
There was then, and is still, a Christian ‘left’, eager to detect and anxious to banish every Pagan element; but also a Christian ‘right’ who, like St Augustine, could find the doctrine of the Trinity foreshadowed in the Platonici,2 or could claim triumphantly, like Justin Martyr, ‘Whatever things have been well said by all men belong to us Christians’.3 A. CHALCIDIUS
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Sempre, ao longo dos séculos, item a item é transferido do lado do objeto para o lado do sujeito. E, agora, em algumas formas extremas do behaviorismo, o próprio sujeito é descartado como sendo meramente subjetivo; só o que fazemos é pensar que pensamos. Depois de ter tragado tudo, ele devora a si mesmo. E "para onde nós vamos" surge como uma questão mergulhada nas trevas.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Whatever else a modern feels when he looks at the night sky, he certainly feels that he is looking out--like one looking out from the saloon entrance on to the dark Atlantic or from the lighted porch upon dark and lonely moors. But if you accepted the Medieval Model you would feel like one looking in. The Earth is 'outside the city wall'. When the sun is up he dazzles us and we cannot see inside. Darkness, our own darkness, draws the veil and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps within the vast, lighted concavity filled with music and life. And, looking in, we do not see, like Meredith's Lucifer, 'the army of unalterable law', but rather the revelry of insatiable love. We are watching the activity of creatures whose experience we can only lamely compare to that of one in the act of drinking, his thirst delighted yet not quenched. For in them the highest of faculties is always exercised without impediment on the noblest object; without satiety, since they can never completely make His perfection their own, yet never frustrated, since at every moment they approximate to Him in the fullest measure of which their nature is capable.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
I thought that in an age when books were few and the intellectual appetite sharp-set, any knowledge might be welcome in any context. But this does not explain why the authors so gladly present knowledge which most of their audience must have possessed. One gets the impression that medieval people, like Professor Tolkien’s Hobbits, enjoyed books which told them what they already knew.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
My account of what I call the Medieval Model ignores all this: ignores even the great change from a predominantly Platonic to a predominantly Aristotelian1 outlook and the direct conflict between Nominalists and Realists. It does so because these things, however important for the historian of thought, have hardly any effect on the literary level. The Model, as regards those elements in it which poets and artists could utilise, remained stable.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
they were the age not only of her authority, but of authorities. If their culture is regarded as a response to environment, then the elements in that environment to which it responded most vigorously were manuscripts. Every writer, if he possibly can, bases himself on an earlier writer, follows an auctour: preferably a Latin one. This is one of the things that differentiate the period almost equally from savagery and from our modern civilisation.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
In popular usage Grammatica or Grammaria slid into the vague sense of learning in general; and since learning is usually an object both of respect and suspicion to the masses, grammar, in the form grammary comes to mean magic. Thus in the ballad of King Estmere, ‘My mother was a western woman learned in grammarye’. And from grammary, by a familiar sound-change, comes glamour—a word whose associations with grammar and even with magic have now been annihilated by the beauty-specialists.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Quintilian suggests literatura as the proper translation of Greek grammatike (II, i), and literatura, though it does not mean ‘literature’, included a good deal more than literacy. It included all that is required for ‘making up’ a ‘set book’: syntax, etymology, prosody, and the explanation of allusions. Isidore makes even history a department of Grammar (I, xli–xliv). He would have described the book I am now writing as a book of Grammar. Scholarship is perhaps our nearest equivalent.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
The legacy of our culture’s image-smashing (a powerful part of the Puritan world) is secularization—though now replete with its own images. If we fail to give a proper account of the role that images play in Christianity, the result will not be a Christianity with no images, but simply the dominance of cultural images and a subtle conformity to the world. The only image that needs to be discarded is the one we have of ourselves as God. We are not He. Worship God. Give honor to whom honor is due. It
Stephen Freeman (Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe)
Hence we may, with proper precautions, regard a certain humility as the overall characteristic of medieval art. Of the art; not always of the artists. Self-esteem may arise within any occupation at any period. A chef, a surgeon, or a scholar, may be proud, even to arrogance, of his skill; but his skill is confessedly the means to an end beyond itself, and the status of the skill depends wholly on the dignity or necessity of that end. I think it was then like that with all the arts. Literature exists to teach what is useful, to honour what deserves honour, to appreciate what is delightful. The useful, honourable, and delightful things are superior to it: it exists for their sake; its own use, honour, or delightfulness is derivative from theirs. In that sense the art is humble even when the artists are proud; proud of their proficiency in the art, but not making for the art itself the high Renaissance or Romantic claims. Perhaps they might not all have fully agreed with the statement that poetry is infima inter omnes doctrinas.17 But it awoke no such hurricane of protest as it would awake today. In this great change something has been won and something lost. I take it to be part and parcel of the same great process of Internalisation18 which has turned genius from an attendant daemon into a quality of the mind. Always, century by century, item after item is transferred from the object’s side of the account to the subject’s. And now, in some extreme forms of Behaviourism, the subject himself is discounted as merely subjective; we only think that we think. Having eaten up everything else, he eats himself up too. And where we ‘go from that’ is a dark question.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
float before I could swim. Ellis never believed it was called Dead-Man’s Float, thought I’d made it up. I told him it was a survival position after a long exhausting journey. How apt. All I see below is blue light. Peaceful and eternal. I’m holding my breath until my body throbs as one pulse. I roll over and suck in a deep lungful of warm air. I look up at the starry starry night. The sound of water in and out of my ears, and beyond this human shell, the sound of cicadas fills the night. I dreamt of my mother. It was an image, that’s all, and a fleeting one, at that. She was faded with age, like a discarded offcut on the studio floor. In this dream, she didn’t speak, just stepped out of the shadows, a reminder that we are the same, her and me, cut from the same bruised cloth. I understand how she got up one day and left, how instinctively she trusted the compulsion to flee. The rightness of that action. We are the same, her and me. She walked out when I was eight. Never came back. I remember being collected from school by our neighbour Mrs Deakin, who bought me sweets on the way home and let me play with a dog for as long as I wanted. Inside the house, my father was sitting at the table, drinking. He was holding a sheet of blue writing paper covered in black words, and he said, Your mother’s gone. She said she’s sorry. A sheet of writing paper covered in words and just two for me. How was that possible? Her remnant life was put in bags and stored in the spare room at the earliest opportunity. Stuffed in, not folded – clothes brushes, cosmetics all thrown in together, awaiting collection from the Church. My mother had taken only what she could carry. One rainy afternoon, when my father had gone next door to fix a pipe, I emptied the bags on to the floor and saw my mother in every jumper and blouse and skirt I held up. I used to watch her dress and she let me. Sometimes, she asked my opinion about colours or what suited her more, this blouse or that blouse? And she’d follow my advice and tell me how right I was. I took off my clothes and put on a skirt first, then a blouse, a cardigan, and slowly I became her in miniature. She’d taken her good shoes, so I slipped on a pair of mid-height heels many sizes too big, of course, and placed a handbag on my arm. I stood in front of the mirror, and saw the infinite possibilities of play. I strutted, I
Sarah Winman (Tin Man)
Na Idade Média, e, na realidade, até bem mais tarde, temos de acrescentar outra fonte de credulidade. Se, como ensinava o platonismo - e nem o próprio Browne iria discordar - o mundo visível é feito de acordo com um padrão invisível, se as coisas debaixo da Lua forem derivadas de outras acima dela, a expectativa de que um senso analógico ou moral está embutido na natureza e no comportamento das criaturas não seria razoável a priori. Para nós, o registro sobre o comportamento animal que sugerisse uma moral muito óbvia é que pareceria improvável. Não para eles. Suas premissas eram diferentes.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is antihistorical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today. Yet if we look at our three religions, it becomes clear that there is no objective view of “God”: each generation has to create the image of God that works for it. The same is true of atheism. The statement “I do not believe in God” has meant something slightly different at each period of history. The
Karen Armstrong (A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam)
The emphasis usually falls on the past splendour rather than on the subsequent decline. Medieval and nineteenth-century man agreed that their present was no very admirable age; not to be compared (said one) with the glory that was, not to be compared (said the other) with the glory that is still to come. The odd thing is that the first view seems to have bred on the whole a more cheerful temper. Historically as well as cosmically, medieval man stood at the foot of a stairway; looking up, he felt delight. The backward, like the upward, glance exhilarated him with a majestic spectacle, and humility was rewarded with the pleasures of admiration. And, thanks to his deficiency in the sense of period, that packed and gorgeous past was far more immediate to him than the dark and bestial past could ever be to a Lecky or a Wells. It differed from the present only by being better. Hector was like any other knight, only braver. The saints looked down on one’s spiritual life, the kings, sages, and warriors on one’s secular life, the great lovers of old on one’s own amours, to foster, encourage, and instruct. There were friends, ancestors, patrons in every age. One had one’s place, however modest, in a great succession; one need be neither proud nor lonely. I
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
The biggest mistake abuse survivors make after leaving their relationship is to shrink. They wallow in sadness and ignore the continued abused when the abuser goes on social media sites to post pictures of how wonderful their life is now that you left them. They allow the abuser to win again by showing people they are so over you. This is not okay! I hope every abuse survivor has a marketing campaign of glory and triumph. Don't let the abuser paint the image of you as someone they discarded. Post your comeback story on social media. Invite the world back into your life. The victory is yours. Show the world that you overcame a monster. Show them you won!
Shannon L. Alder
O homem é um animal racional e, por isso, é um ser composto, em parte, à semelhança das feras, que são animais, mas não são racionais; e parcialmente à semelhança dos anjos, que são racionais, mas - na visão medieval tardia - ele não é animal. Eis aí um dos sentidos pelo qual o homem é um "pequeno mundo" ou microcosmo. Toda modalidade de ser, em todo o Universo, contribui para ele; ele é uma secção transversal da existência. Como disse Gregório, o Grande (540-604),35 "porque o ser humano tem uma existência (esse) em comum com as pedras; a vida, com as árvores; e o discernimento (discernere), com os anjos, ele é corretamente chamado segundo o nome do mundo".
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Common phrases narcissists use and what they actually mean: 1. I love you. Translation: I love owning you. I love controlling you. I love using you. It feels so good to love-bomb you, to sweet-talk you, to pull you in and to discard you whenever I please. When I flatter you, I can have anything I want. You trust me. You open up so easily, even after you’ve already been mistreated. Once you’re hooked and invested, I’ll pull the rug beneath your feet just to watch you fall. 2. I am sorry you feel that way. Translation: Sorry, not sorry. Let’s get this argument over with already so I can continue my abusive behavior in peace. I am not sorry that I did what I did, I am sorry I got caught. I am sorry you’re calling me out. I am sorry that I am being held accountable. I am sorry you have the emotions that you do. To me, they’re not valid because I am entitled to have everything I want – regardless of how you feel about it. 3. You’re oversensitive/overreacting. Translation: You’re having a perfectly normal reaction to an immense amount of bullshit, but all I see is that you’re catching on. Let me gaslight you some more so you second-guess yourself. Emotionally invalidating you is the key to keeping you compliant. So long as you don’t trust yourself, you’ll work that much harder to rationalize, minimize and deny my abuse. 4. You’re crazy. Translation: I am a master of creating chaos to provoke you. I love it when you react. That way, I can point the finger and say you’re the crazy one. After all, no one would listen to what you say about me if they thought you were just bitter or unstable. 5. No one would believe you. Translation: I’ve isolated you to the point where you feel you have no support. I’ve smeared your name to others ahead of time so people already suspect the lies I’ve told about you. There are still others who might believe you, though, and I can’t risk being caught. Making you feel alienated and alone is the best way for me to protect my image. It’s the best way to convince you to remain silent and never speak the truth about who I really am.
Shahida Arabi
Actors always want to know how I come up with interesting and creative takes on characters, characters that aren’t like me as I appear in daily life and that aren’t like each other. It’s simple: I let the lines and images connect with my imagination. I don’t worry about consistency; I let myself respond moment by moment, piecemeal, to the character’s dialogue and actions. Then I let my responses take me wherever they go, making mistakes and discarding them until choices start repeating themselves on their own no matter how arbitrary they seem at first. Then I know I’m on to something. But I don’t try to put the character together. I leave it in pieces. The script and story put the character together so my moment by moment performance seems like a creative take on the whole character.
Harold Guskin (How to Stop Acting: A Renown Acting Coach Shares His Revolutionary Approach to Landing Roles, Developing Them and Keeping them Alive)
To be formed and shaped by the Incarnate: That is what it means to be truly human. All efforts to be more than human, to be superhuman, all efforts to grow beyond one's humanity, all heroism, all attempts at being demigods are discarded here, for all of it is untrue. The real human being is neither an object of contempt nor of apotheosis, but rather God's love. The multiplicity of God's creative wealth is not violated here by false uniformity, by coercion of human beings under an ideal, under a type, a particular image. Real human beings are allowed in freedom to be the creatures of their creator. Being formed in the image of the Incarnate means being permitted to be the human being one really is. There is no more pretense, hypocrisy, cramped coercion to be something other than what one is, something better, something more ideal. God loves real human beings. God became a real human being.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Meditations on the Cross)
Only a fool says in his heart There is no Creator, no King of kings, Only mules would dare to bray These lethal mutterings. Over darkened minds as these The Darkness bears full sway, Fruitless, yet, bearing fruit, In their fell, destructive way. Sterile, though proliferate, A filthy progeny sees the day, When Evil, Thought and Action mate: Breeding sin, rebels and decay. The blackest deeds and foul ideals, Multiply throughout the earth, Through deadened, lifeless, braying souls, The Darkness labours and gives birth. Taking the Lord’s abundant gifts And rotting them to the core, They dress their dish and serve it out Foul seeds to infect thousands more. ‘The Tree of Life is dead!’ they cry, ‘And that of Knowledge not enough, Let us glut on the ashen apples Of Sodom and Gomorrah.’ Have pity on Thy children, Lord, Left sorrowing on this earth, While fools and all their kindred Cast shadows with their murk, And to the dwindling wise, They toss their heads and wryly smirk. The world daily grinds to dust Virtue’s fair unicorns, Rather, it would now beget Vice’s mutant manticores. Wisdom crushed, our joy is gone, Buried under anxious fears For lost rights and freedoms, We shed many bitter tears. Death is life, Life is no more, Humanity buried in a tomb, In a fatal prenatal world Where tiny flowers Are ripped from the womb, Discarded, thrown away, Inconvenient lives That barely bloomed. Our elders fare no better, Their wisdom unwanted by and by, Boarded out to end their days, And forsaken are left to die. Only the youthful and the useful, In this capital age prosper and fly. Yet, they too are quickly strangled, Before their future plans are met, Professions legally pre-enslaved Held bound by mounting student debt. Our leaders all harangue for peace Yet perpetrate the horror, Of economic greed shored up Through manufactured war. Our armies now welter In foreign civilian gore. How many of our kin are slain For hollow martial honour? As if we could forget, ignore, The scourge of nuclear power, Alas, victors are rarely tried For their woeful crimes of war. Hope and pray we never see A repeat of Hiroshima. No more! Crimes are legion, The deeds of devil-spawn! What has happened to the souls Your Divine Image was minted on? They are now recast: Crooked coins of Caesar and The Whore of Babylon. How often mankind shuts its ears To Your music celestial, Mankind would rather march To the anthems of Hell. If humanity cannot be reclaimed By Your Mercy and great Love Deservedly we should be struck By Vengeance from above. Many dread the Final Day, And the Crack of Doom For others the Apocalypse Will never come too soon. ‘Lift up your heads, be glad’, Fools shall bray no more For at last the Master comes To thresh His threshing floor.
E.A. Bucchianeri (Vocation of a Gadfly (Gadfly Saga, #2))
Perhaps a crux of success or failure as a society is to know which core values to hold on to, and which ones to discard and replace with new values, when times change. In the last 60 years the world’s most powerful countries have given up long-held cherished values previously central to their national image, while holding on to other values. Britain and France abandoned their centuries-old role as independently acting world powers; Japan abandoned its military tradition and armed forces; and Russia abandoned its long experiment with communism. The United States has retreated substantially (but hardly completely) from its former values of legalized racial discrimination, legalized homophobia, a subordinate role of women, and sexual repression. Australia is now reevaluating its status as a rural farming society with British identity. Societies and individuals that succeed may be those that have the courage to take those difficult decisions, and that have the luck to win their gambles.
Jared Diamond (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed)
Duvido de que eles teriam entendido nossa demanda por originalidade ou valorizado mais aquelas obras de sua própria época que fossem originais, só por conta disso. Se você tivesse perguntado a La3amon ou Chaucer: "Por que é que vocês mesmos não inventaram uma história inédita?" Penso que eles poderiam ter respondido: "Com certeza ainda não estamos reduzidos a isso, estamos?" Que sentido teria tecer uma nova trama da própria cabeça, quando o mundo está repleto de tantas obras excelentes: exemplos proveitosos; tragédias deploráveis; aventuras estranhas e chistes divertidos que ainda nunca foram levados a efeito como mereciam? A originalidade que nós temos como sinal de prosperidade poderia parecer a eles uma confissão de pobreza. Por que fazer coisas sozinho, feito o solitário Robinson Crusoé, se há riquezas por toda a parte, para você se apropriar? O artista moderno muitas vezes não se dá conta dessas riquezas. Ele é o alquimista, que deve transformar metal básico em ouro. Isso faz uma diferença radical.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
I have made several comparisons... between modern and primitive man. Such comparisons... are essential to an understanding of the symbol-making propensities of man, and of the part that dreams play in expressing them. For one finds that many dreams present images and associations that are analogous to primitive ideas, myths, and rites. These dream images were called "archaic remnants" by Freud; the phrase suggests that they were psychic elements surviving in the human mind from ages long ago. This point of view is characteristic of those who regard the unconscious as a mere appendix of consciousness (or, more picturesquely, as a trash can that collects all the refuse of the conscious mind)... Further investigation suggested to me that this attitude is untenable and should be discarded. I found that associations and images of this kind are an integral part of the unconscious, and can be observed everywhere whether the dreamer is educated or illiterate, intelligent or stupid. They are not in any sense lifeless or meaningless "remnants." They still function, and they are especially valuable.
C.G. Jung (Man and His Symbols)
The daemons are ‘between’ us and the gods not only locally and materially but qualitatively as well. Like the impassible gods, they are immortal: like mortal men, they are passible (xiii). Some of them, before they became daemons, lived in terrestrial bodies; were in fact men. That is why Pompey saw semidei Manes, demigod-ghosts, in the airy region. But this is not true of all daemons. Some, such as Sleep and Love, were never human. From this class an individual daemon (or genius, the standard Latin translation of daemon) is allotted to each human being as his ‘witness and guardian’ through life (xvi). It would detain us too long here to trace the steps whereby a man’s genius, from being an invisible, personal, and external attendant, became his true self, and then his cast of mind, and finally (among the Romantics) his literary or artistic gifts. To understand this process fully would be to grasp that great movement of internalisation, and that consequent aggrandisement of man and desiccation of the outer universe, in which the psychological history of the West has so largely consisted.25
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Se eu estiver certo, o homem de gênio de então se encontrava em uma situação muito diferente daquela do seu sucessor moderno. Hoje, um homem assim, muitas vezes, ou até usualmente, sente-se confrontado com uma realidade, cuja significância ele não pode conhecer; ou com uma realidade que não tenha significância alguma; ou até com uma realidade tal que a própria questão, se tiver um sentido, é, em si, uma questão sem sentido. O objetivo para ele é, por sua própria sensibilidade, descobrir o sentido; ou com base em sua própria subjetividade, atribuir sentido ou ao menos uma forma para aquilo que, por si mesmo, não possui alguma dessas características. Mas o Modelo de universo de nossos ancestrais tinha uma significância embutida. E isso em dois sentidos: como tendo uma "forma significativa" (trata-se de um projeto admirável) e como manifestação da sabedoria e bondade de quem o criou. Não havia necessidade de despertá-lo para a beleza ou a vida. Para sermos mais enfáticos, o nosso problema não era o vestido de noiva, nem a mortalha. A perfeição alcançada já estava lá. A única dificuldade era de lhe dar uma resposta adequada.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
A eternidade é bem distinta da perpetuidade, da mera continuidade infinita no tempo. A perpetuidade é nada mais do que a realização de uma série infinita de momentos, cada um dos quais se perde assim que se realizam. A eternidade é a fruição real e perene de vida ilimitada. O tempo, mesmo o tempo infinito, não passa de uma imagem, quase uma paródia, daquela plenitude; uma tentativa desesperada de compensar a transitoriedade de seus "presentes", multiplicando-os infinitamente. Esse é o motivo por que a Lucrécia de Shakespeare o chama de "seu criado incessante por toda a eternidade" (Rapto, 967). E Deus é eterno, não perpétuo. Estritamente falando, Ele nunca prevê; Ele simplesmente vê. Seu "futuro" é apenas uma área, e apenas para nós uma área especial, do Seu Agora infinito. Ele vê ( em vez de lembrar) seus atos de ontem porque o ontem ainda "está aí" para Ele; Ele vê (em vez de prever) os seus atos futuros porque Ele já está no amanhã. Como um espectador humano, ao assistir aos meus atos presentes, não infringe sua liberdade, assim tampouco sou menos livre para agir como bem entendo no futuro, porque Deus, no futuro (o Seu presente) me vê agir.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
As sete artes liberais Atribuir a um currículo educacional um lugar no modelo do Universo pode parecer um absurdo à primeira vista; e seria um absurdo se os medievais tivessem tido o mesmo sentimento, a esse respeito, que temos quanto às matérias dos programas de ensino de hoje. Acontece que esse programa era tido como imutável; o número sete é numinoso; as Artes Liberais, por uma prescrição longa, haviam alcançado um status semelhante ao da própria natureza. As Artes, e também as Virtudes e os Vícios, eram personificados. A Gramática, com sua palmatória, está assentada com olhar altivo nos claustros de Magdalen. Dante no Convivia faz um entalhe cuidadoso das artes na estrutura do cosmo. A Retórica, por exemplo, corresponde a Vênus, pelo único motivo de que ela é "a mais amável de todas as disciplinas", soavissima di tutte le altre scienze. A Aritmética é como o Sol, pois, na medida em que este fornece luz para todas as demais estrelas, ela também fornece luz a todas as outras ciências, e como nossa visão fica turvada pela ação de sua luz intensa, da mesma forma nossa inteligência fica perplexa com a infinidade de números. E assim ocorre com as outras [matérias] (li, xiii),
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
O espírito desse esquema, ainda que não em todos os detalhes, está bem presente no Modelo Medieval. E se o leitor suspender sua descrença e exercitar sua imaginação neste assunto, mesmo que só por alguns minutos, acho que tomará consciência do amplo reajuste envolvido na leitura atenta dos poetas antigos. Encontrará toda a sua atitude perante o Universo invertida. No pensamento moderno, isto é, no pensamento evolucionário, o homem está no topo de uma escada cuja base se perde na escuridão; nesse Modelo, ele está na base de uma escada cujo topo é invisível por causa da luz ofuscante. Também compreenderá que algo, além do gênio individual, ajudou a dar aos anjos de Dante aquela majestade inigualável. Milton, ao perseguir esse objetivo, errou o alvo. O classicismo entrou no meio. Seus anjos têm anatomia demais, armaduras demais, e são por demais parecidos com os deuses de Homero e Virgílio, e (por essa mesma razão) são muito pouco parecidos com os deuses do paganismo em seus desenvolvimentos religiosos mais elevados. Depois de Milton, instaurou-se a degradação completa e, por fim, chegamos aos anjos puramente consoladores - portanto, femininos e aguados - da arte do século XIX.
Clive Staples Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
But even if I do look like someone who is nearly dead, there’s not much I can do about it, he told himself, as he stared at the mirror. Because I really am on the brink of death. I’ve survived, but barely—I’ve been clinging to this world like the discarded shell of an insect stuck to a branch, about to be blown off forever by a gust of wind. But that fact—that he looked like someone about to die—struck him again, forcefully. He stared fixedly at the image of his naked body for the longest time, like someone unable to stop watching a TV news report of a huge earthquake or terrible flood in a faraway land. A sudden thought struck him—maybe I really did die. When the four of them rejected me, perhaps the young man named Tsukuru Tazaki really did pass away. Only his exterior remained, but just barely, and then over the course of the next half year, even that shell was replaced, as his body and face underwent a drastic change. The feeling of the wind, the sound of rushing water, the sense of sunlight breaking through the clouds, the colors of flowers as the seasons changed—everything around him felt changed, as if they had all been recast. The person here now, the one he saw in the mirror, might at first glance resemble Tsukuru Tazaki, but it wasn’t actually him. It was merely a container that, for the sake of convenience, was labeled with the same name—but its contents had been replaced. He was called by that name simply because there was, for the time being, no other name to call him.
Haruki Murakami (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage)
The Japanese sense the presence of a divinity in every industrial object. For us, that sacred presence has been reduced to a tiny ironic glimmer, a nuance of play and distantiation. Though this is, none the less, a spiritual form, behind which lurks the evil genius of technology which sees to it itself that the mystery of the world is well-guarded. The Evil Spirit keeps watch beneath artefacts and, of all our artificial productions, one might say what Canetti says of animals: that behind each of them there is a hidden someone thumbing his nose at us. Irony is the only spiritual form in the modern world, which has annihilated all others. It alone is the guardian of the mystery, but it is no longer ours to exercise. For it is no longer a function of the subject; it is an objective function, that of the artificial, object world which surrounds us, in which the absence and transparency of the subject is reflected. The critical function of the subject has given way to the ironic function of the object. Once they have passed through the medium or through the image, through the spectrum of the sign and the commodity, objects, by their very existence, perform an artificial and ironic function. No longer any need for a critical consciousness to hold up the mirror of its double to the world: our modern world swallowed its double when it lost its shadow, and the irony of that incorporated double shines out at every moment in every fragment of our signs, of our objects, of our models. No longer any need to confront objects with the absurdity of their functions, in a poetic unreality, as the Surrealists did: things move to shed an ironic light on themselves all on their own; they discard their meanings effortlessly. This is all part of their visible, all too visible sequencing, which of itself creates a parody effect.
Jean Baudrillard (The Perfect Crime)
As dimensões do universo medieval não são tão facilmente percebidas, ainda hoje, quanto a sua estrutura; em meu próprio tempo de vida, um cientista distinto ajudou a disseminar um erro. 14 O leitor deste livro já deve estar sabendo que a Terra era, a julgar por padrões cósmicos, um pontinho - de nenhuma magnitude significativa. E como o Somnium Scipionis nos ensinou, as estrelas eram maiores do que ela. Isidoro já sabia no século VI que o Sol é maior, e a Lua, menor do que a Terra. (Etymologies, III, xlvii-xl- viii); Maimônides,15 no século XII, sustenta que cada estrela é noventa vezes maior; Roger Bacon, no século XIII, declara que a menor estrela é "maior" do que ela. 16 Quanto às estimativas da distância, contamos com a sorte de ter o testemunho de uma obra completamente popular, Lendas do Sul da Inglaterra, uma prova melhor do que qualquer produção pesquisada, em favor do Modelo, como ele existia no imaginário de pessoas comuns. Diz-se ali que se um homem fosse capaz de viajar para o alto, numa velocidade de quarenta milhas17 e um pouco mais por dia, ele ainda assim não conseguiria alcançar o Stellatum ("o mais alto céu que jamais se viu") em oito mil anos. 18 Esses fatos são em si curiosidades de interesse medíocre. Eles se tornam acessíveis, apenas à medida que nos permitem penetrar mais fundo na consciência dos nossos ancestrais, dando-nos conta de como um universo assim deve ter afetado aqueles que acreditavam nele. A receita para tal compreensão não é o estudo de livros. Você terá de sair numa noite estrelada e caminhar por aproximadamente meia hora, tentando examinar o céu em termos da velha cosmologia. Lembre-se de que agora você tem um "para cima" e um "para baixo" absolutos. A Terra é, de fato, o centro, o lugar mais baixo; o movimento para chegar a ela, de qualquer direção que seja, é um movimento para baixo. Como homem moderno, você localizava as estrelas a uma grande distância. Agora terá de substituir essa distância por um tipo de distância muito especial e muito menos abstrata chamada altura; Os Céus 1 103 que fala imediatamente aos nossos músculos e nervos. O Modelo Medieval é vertiginoso. E o fato de que a altura das estrelas na astronomia medieval é muito pequena comparada às distâncias modernas acabará se manifestando como não tendo o tipo de importância que você supunha. Para o pensamento e a imaginação, dez milhões de milhas e um bilhão são a mesma coisa. Ambas podem ser concebidas (isto é, podemos fazer contas com ambas) e nenhuma delas pode ser imaginada; e quanto mais imaginação tivermos, melhor deveríamos saber disso. A diferença realmente importante é que o universo medieval, ao mesmo tempo que era inimaginavelmente grande, também era indubitavelmente finito. E um resultado inesperado disso foi o de fazer com que a pequenez da Terra fosse sentida com mais vivacidade. Em nosso Universo ela é pequena, sem dúvida; mas as galáxias e tudo o mais também são - e daí? Mas para eles havia um padrão finito de comparação. A esfera celeste mais alta, o maggior corpo de Dante, era tão simples e finalmente o maior objeto existente. A palavra "pequeno" aplicada à Terra assume, então, uma significância bem mais absoluta. Repito, pelo fato de o universo medieval ser finito, ele adquire uma forma, a forma perfeitamente esférica, que contém em si uma diversidade ordenada. Consequentemente, olhar para fora numa noite escura com olhos modernos é como olhar para o mar, que vai minguando num dia de nevoeiro; ou olhar para uma floresta virgem - infindáveis árvores sem nenhum horizonte. Vislumbrar o universo medieval altaneiro é mais como visualizar um prédio bem alto. O "espaço" da astronomia moderna pode infligir terror, espanto ou um vago devaneio; as esferas celestes dos medievais nos apresentam um objeto no qual a mente pode repousar, impressionando por sua grandeza, mas satisfazendo por sua harmonia. Esse é o sentido pelo qual o nosso universo é romântico, e o deles era clássico.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
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Don’t Rylee me! Do you want some sick fuck somewhere jacking off to images of you and me having sex? I mean, seriously? Doesn’t that make your stomach turn, Colton? I’m your wife. Not some whore you slept with and discarded for God’s sake.” I push myself out of the chair needing to get away from him and get some perspective. He’s talking crazy, and right now, I have enough crazy in my life.
K. Bromberg (Aced (Driven, #4))
Old age and memory weave themselves into time and come increasingly to resemble braids; time is in fact a whirlpool in which past and present events circle, prehistory and posthistory, in an eternal embrace. And as the future collapses, as there is in fact no future, the time that is coming is wrapped in the past like a scroll becoming the underground world of the future, a world obsessed with everything old. And so empires collapse, the leaders of ages parade like statesmen, and under their equipment people become invisible. Therefore, no stories emerge from a disintegrated past, only lifeless images. There is no construction without stitches, everywhere there are fragments, because it is out of ruins, out of wrecks, out of discarded parts that new comes into being.
Daša Drndić (Belladonna)
Amid the mass amnesia sustained by the culture of global capitalism, images have become one of many depleted and disposable elements that, in their intrinsic archiveability, end up never being discarded, contributing to an ever more congealed and futureless present.
Jonathon Crary
Unlike television or the computer, language appears to be not an extension of our powers but simply a natural expression of who and what we are. This is the great secret of language: Because it comes from inside us, we believe it to be a direct, unedited, unbiased, apolitical expression of how the world really is. A machine, on the other hand, is outside of us, clearly created by us, modifiable by us, even discardable by us; it is easier to see how a machine re-creates the world in its own image. But in many respects, a sentence functions very much like a machine, and this is nowhere more obvious than in the sentences we call questions.
Neil Postman (Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology)
I believe in you my friend, so much so, that if any of my ideas make you feel belittled in any manner, I want you to rise against me and throw my work into the fire. Any notion, any book, any institution that weakens the self instead of strengthening it, must be discarded at ones.
Abhijit Naskar (The Bengal Tigress: A Treatise on Gender Equality (Humanism Series))
When we fail to appreciate the profound unity of body and soul, we no longer see the human body in light of our creation in the image and likeness of God. Rather, we reduce it to a thing to be used, exploited, manipulated, and even discarded at will, forgetting that that body is not just a body but some-body. Within this milieu, as John Paul II observed, the human being “ceases to live as a person and a subject. Regardless of all intentions and declarations to the contrary, he becomes merely an object.
Christopher West (Our Bodies Tell God's Story: Discovering the Divine Plan for Love, Sex, and Gender)
We are living in dark times indeed, but let us never forget that “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). We are people of hope, and the Bridegroom is preparing a great springtime for his bride (see Song 2:11–13). How do we pass over from this winter to the promised springtime? If we can recognize in the above the diagnosis of what ails the modern world, we can also recognize the cure. Here it is: We must recover a sense of primordial wonder at the divinely inspired beauty of the human body. We must come to recognize in the human body the revelation of the human person whose dignity demands that he or she never be used, exploited, manipulated, or discarded. We must rediscover the treasure of human sexuality and gender as a stupendous sign of the divine image in our humanity and as an invitation to use our freedom to live this divine image through the sincere gift of one’s life in marriage or in celibacy for the kingdom. And we can do all of the above precisely by pondering the profound understanding of masculinity and femininity found in the Bible, found in God’s Word made flesh in Jesus, the Christ.
Christopher West (Our Bodies Tell God's Story: Discovering the Divine Plan for Love, Sex, and Gender)
Lorel once told me that fate is a poet, organizing beauty out of chaos. I believed that for a long time—that life happens to a person, buoying them along on its tide whichever way it pleases, instead of bending and shaping itself around my will. And even now I’m not sure that I can entirely discard the idea, because God knows my life has spiraled into gothic prose, and even in the depths of my insanity I could not have thought up the repeating rhythms of horrible motif. Blood as oil, oil as sacred chrism, the suffocating paradox of its sacred and sensual nature, and can oil really run in a person’s blood? Because when I think of one, I think of the other—they are inseparable in my mind. When I think of the times I dipped my fingers in green-gold oil, memory calls forth the image of blood on a warehouse floor, and blood mixed with oil in the creases of my hands.
Abigail C. Edwards (And We All Bled Oil)
The real waste is not discarding clothes you don’t like but wearing them even though you are striving to create the ideal space for your ideal lifestyle. Precisely because no one is there to see you, it makes far more sense to reinforce a positive self-image by wearing clothes you love. The same goes for pajamas. If you are a woman, try wearing something elegant as nightwear. The worst thing you can do is to wear a sloppy sweat suit.
Marie Kondō (The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (Magic Cleaning #1))
The Primary Act. As they entered the cinema, Dr Nathan confided to Captain Webster, ‘Talbert has accepted in absolute terms the logic of the sexual union. For him all junctions, whether of our own soft biologies or the hard geometries of these walls and ceilings, are equivalent to one another. What Talbert is searching for is the primary act of intercourse, the first apposition of the dimensions of time and space. In the multiplied body of the film actress - one of the few valid landscapes of our age - he finds what seems to be a neutral ground. For the most part the phenomenology of the world is a nightmarish excrescence. Our bodies, for example, are for him monstrous extensions of puffy tissue he can barely tolerate. The inventory of the young woman is in reality a death kit.’ Webster watched the images of the young woman on the screen, sections of her body intercut with pieces of modern architecture. All these buildings. What did Talbert want to do - sodomize the Festival Hall? Pressure Points. Koester ran towards the road as the helicopter roared overhead, its fans churning up a storm of pine needles and cigarette cartons. He shouted at Catherine Austin, who was squatting on the nylon blanket, steering her body stocking around her waist. Two hundred yards beyond the pines was the perimeter fence. She followed Koester along the verge, the pressure of his hands and loins still marking her body. These zones formed an inventory as sterile as the items in Talbert’s kit. With a smile she watched Koester trip clumsily over a discarded tyre. This unattractive and obsessed young man - why had she made love to him? Perhaps, like Koester, she was merely a vector in Talbert’s dreams. Central Casting. Dr Nathan edged unsteadily along the catwalk, waiting until Webster had reached the next section. He looked down at the huge geometric structure that occupied the central lot of the studio, now serving as the labyrinth in an elegant film version of The Minotaur . In a sequel to Faustus and The Shrew , the film actress and her husband would play Ariadne and Theseus. In a remarkable way the structure resembled her body, an exact formalization of each curve and cleavage. Indeed, the technicians had already christened it ‘Elizabeth’. He steadied himself on the wooden rail as the helicopter appeared above the pines and sped towards them. So the Daedalus in this neural drama had at last arrived. An Unpleasant Orifice. Shielding his eyes, Webster pushed through the camera crew. He stared up at the young woman standing on the roof of the maze, helplessly trying to hide her naked body behind her slim hands. Eyeing her pleasantly, Webster debated whether to climb on to the structure, but the chances of breaking a leg and falling into some unpleasant orifice seemed too great. He stood back as a bearded young man with a tight mouth and eyes ran forwards. Meanwhile Talbert strolled in the centre of the maze, oblivious of the crowd below, calmly waiting to see if the young woman could break the code of this immense body. All too clearly there had been a serious piece of miscasting. ‘Alternate’ Death. The helicopter was burning briskly. As the fuel tank exploded, Dr Nathan stumbled across the cables. The aircraft had fallen on to the edge of the maze, crushing one of the cameras. A cascade of foam poured over the heads of the retreating technicians, boiling on the hot concrete around the helicopter. The body of the young woman lay beside the controls like a figure in a tableau sculpture, the foam forming a white fleece around her naked shoulders.
J.G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition)
As far as expressing the creative turmoil within my head was concerned, I took to the English language as a duck takes to water. I was therefore a keen accomplice and student in my own mental colonisation . . . For a black writer the language is very racist; you have to have harrowing fights and hair-raising panga duels with the language before you can make it do all that you want it to do . . . This may mean discarding grammar, throwing syntax out, subverting images from within, beating the drum and cymbals of rhythm, developing torture chambers of irony and sarcasm, gas ovens of limitless black resonance.
Dambudzo Marechera (The House of Hunger)
We go away from him, but he does not go away from us. He waits for our return, he longs for our return; he cries over our misery and our betrayal of him and of ourselves, and the moment we appear in the distance, he is there waiting for us, rushing towards us to greet us, so that, when we come, we do not come as mendicants, we do not come as beggars, we do not have to come kneeling down before him who would stand there as a judge condemning us by his own righteousness. He rushes towards us, so that we can know that we are longed for, we are loved in our misery and in our sinfulness, not approved in our sinfulness, but loved with a love that never falters, never diminishes, that burns bright, that is perhaps more tragically deep than the quiet and peaceful love which a father can have for his son when there is nothing wrong in his life. This is, I believe, the best image of confession as an encounter with God, and there is nothing else in confession that matters. We, like the Prodigal Son, come in order to meet God from whom we have parted, whom we have rejected, whom we have discarded, and are met by a Father with open arms. This we must remember, because he is not meeting us as Judge but as Saviour.
Anthony Bloom (Coming Closer to Christ)
Their moral philosophy is but a description of their own passions. Leviathan, Chapter 46 The origins of what has come to be called the woke movement are in the decay of liberalism. The movement is most powerful in English-speaking countries – tellingly, the countries where classical liberalism was strongest. Beyond the Anglosphere, in China, the Middle East, India, Africa and most of continental Europe, it is regarded with indifference, bemusement or contempt. While its apostles regard it as a universal movement of human emancipation, it is recognized in much of the world as a symptom of Western decline – a hyperbolic version of the liberalism the West professed during its brief period of seeming hegemony after the Cold War. Hyper-liberal ideology plays a number of roles. It operates as a rationale for a failing variety of capitalism, and a vehicle through which surplus elites struggle to secure a position of power in society. Insofar as it expresses a coherent system of ideas, it is the anti-Western creed of an antinomian intelligentsia that is ineffably Western. Psychologically, it provides an ersatz faith for those who cannot live without the hope of universal salvation inculcated by Christianity. Contrary to its right-wing critics, woke thinking is not a variant of Marxism. No woke ideologue comes anywhere close to Karl Marx in rigour, breadth and depth of thought. One function of woke movements is to deflect attention from the destructive impact on society of market capitalism. Once questions of identity become central in politics, conflicts of economic interests can be disregarded. Idle chatter of micro-aggression screens out class hierarchy and the abandonment of large sections of society to idleness and destitution. Flattering those who protest against slights to their well-cultivated self-image, identity politics consigns to obloquy and oblivion those whose lives are blighted by an economic system that discards them as useless. Neither is woke thinking a version of ‘post-modernism’. There is nothing in it of Jacques Derrida’s playful subtlety or Michel Foucault’s mordant wit. Derrida never suggested every idea should be deconstructed, nor did Foucault suppose society could do without power structures. Just as fascism debased Nietzsche’s thinking, hyper-liberalism vulgarizes post-modern philosophy. In their economic
John Gray (The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism)
For the writer the conscious mind may be the great inhibitor, the great censor. This conscious mind is created by social mores, education, environment, family pressures, and conventions. For creativity it is necessary to work with the unconscious which accumulates pure experience, reactions, impressions, intuitions, images, memories—an unconscious freed from the negative effect of societal evaluations. The conscious mind can only act later as critic, selector, discarder.
Anaïs Nin (The Novel of the Future)
There is a real Bharatvarsha—a complete India. Unless we establish ourselves there, we can’t absorb its true living essence into our minds and hearts. Therefore I say, forgetting all else, discarding book-learning, the lure of prestige, and the temptation of odd profits, we must set sail for that very port, whether we drown or perish. No wonder I can never forget the true, complete image of Bharatvarsha.
Rabindranath Tagore (Gora)
In the end, Lewis enjoyed a long and productive period at Cambridge, until ill health finally forced him to resign his chair with effect from October 1963. By my reckoning, Lewis wrote thirteen books and forty-four articles during his Cambridge years, not to mention numerous book reviews and several poems, and he edited three collections of essays. There were controversies, of course, perhaps most significantly the 1960 debate with F. R. Leavis and his supporters over the merits of literary criticism. Nevertheless, Lewis’s Cambridge period—while not being anything like Bunyan’s “Plain called Ease”—was certainly an oasis of creativity, resulting in some of his most significant works, including Till We Have Faces (1956), Reflections on the Psalms (1958), The Four Loves (1960), An Experiment in Criticism (1961), and The Discarded Image (published posthumously in 1964). Yet Lewis’s Cambridge period was dominated by an event in his personal life, which had a significant impact on his writings during this time. Lewis found a new—but rather demanding—literary stimulus: Helen Joy Davidman.
Alister E. McGrath (C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet)
Most readers of this section of the book will smile at this point, realising that a seemingly sophisticated philosophical argument is clearly invalidated by the context within which Lewis sets it. Yet Lewis has borrowed this from Plato—while using Anselm of Canterbury and René Descartes as intermediaries—thus allowing classical wisdom to make an essentially Christian point. Lewis is clearly aware that Plato has been viewed through a series of interpretative lenses—those of Plotinus, Augustine, and the Renaissance being particularly familiar to him. Readers of Lewis’s Allegory of Love, The Discarded Image, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, and Spenser’s Images of Life will be aware that Lewis frequently highlights how extensively Plato and later Neoplatonists influenced Christian literary writers of both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Lewis’s achievement is to work Platonic themes and images into children’s literature in such a natural way that few, if any, of its young readers are aware of Narnia’s implicit philosophical tutorials, or its grounding in an earlier world of thought. It is all part of Lewis’s tactic of expanding minds by exposing them to such ideas in a highly accessible and imaginative form.
Alister E. McGrath (C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet)