| The World is Still out of Clothes, ibid. [planeetai, saakums] |
[Aug. 3rd, 2011|08:30 pm] |
un raksta Tomass Kārlails VIII nodaļā ar nosaukumu
The World out of Clothes:
”With men of speculative turn,” writes Teufelsdröckh, ”there come seasons, meditative, sweet, yet awful hours, when in wonder and fear you ask yourself that unanswerable question: Who am I; the thing that can say ‘I’ (das Wesen das sich ICH nennt)? The world, with its loud trafficking, retires into distance; and, through the paper-hangings, and stone-walls, and thick-plied tissues of Commerce and Polity, and all the living and lifeless integuments (of Society and a Body), wherewith your Existence sits surrounded,—the sight reaches forth into the void Deep, and you are alone with the Universe, and silently commune with it, as one mysterious Presence with another.
”Who am I; what is this ME? A Voice, a Motion, an Appearance:—some embodied, visualised Idea in the Eternal Mind? Cogito, ergo sum. Alas, poor Cogitator, this takes us but a little way. Sure enough, I am; and lately, was not : but Whence? How? Whereto? The answer lies around, written in all colours and motions, uttered in all tones of jubilee and wail, in thousand-figured, thousand-voiced harmonious Nature : but where is the cunning eye and ear to whom the God-written Apocalypse will yield articulate meaning? We sit as in boundless Phantasmagoria and Dreamgrotto; boundless, for the faintest star, the remotest century, lies not even nearer the verge thereof : sounds and many-coloured visions flit round our sense; but Him, the Unslumbering, whose work both Dream and Dreamer are, we see not; except in rare, half-waking moments, suspect not. Creation, says one, lies before us, like a glorious Rainbow; but the Sun that made it lies behind us, hidden from us. Then, in that strange Dream, how we clutch at shadows as if they were substances; and sleep deepest while fancying ourselves most awake! Which of your Philosophical Systems is other that a dream theorem; a net quotient, confidently given out, where divisor and dividend are both unknown? What are all your national Wars, with their Moscow Retreats and sanguinary hate-filled Revolutions, but the Somnambulism of uneasy Sleepers? The Dreaming, this Somnambulism is what we on Earth call Life; wherein the most indeed undoubtingly wander, as if they knew right hand from left; yet they only are wise who know that they know nothing. |
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