Chaff

"The stars are threshed, and the souls are threshed from their husks."

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

You have not said too much

"We say 'far away'; the Zulu has a sentence word instead that means: 'where one cries mother I am lost.' And the Fuegian surpasses our analytical wisdom with a sentence word of seven syllables that literally means: 'they look at each other, each waiting for the other to offer to do that which both desire but neither wishes to do.'"

and

"The world that appears to you in this way is unreliable, for it appears always new to you, and you cannot take it by its word. It lacks density, for all in it permeates all else. It lacks duration, for it comes even when not called and vanishes when you cling to it. It cannot be surveyed: if you try to make it surveyable, you lose it. It comes--comes to fetch you--and if it does not reach you or encounter you it vanishes, but comes again, transformed. It does not stand outside you, it touches your ground; and if you say 'soul of my soul' you have not said too much. But beware trying to transpose it into your soul--that way you destroy it. It is your present; you have only a present only insofar as you have it; and you can make it into an object for you and experience and use it--you must do that again and again--and then you have no present any more. Between you and it there is a reciprocity of giving: you say You to it and give yourself to it; it says You to you and gives itself to you. You cannot come to an understanding about it with others; you are lonely with it; but it teaches you to encounter others and stand your ground in such encounters; and through the grace of its advents and the melancholy of its departures it leads you to that You in which the lines of relation, though parallel, intersect. It does not help you to survive. It only helps you to have intimations of eternity."

--Martin Buber

1 Comments:

At 8:34 AM, Blogger Galen said...

Reading all these literate quotes from you and anna makes me really depressed that I cannot read anything but my school books.

 

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