(no subject)

[proximoception]

I wonder if Bloom's startling decision that Goethe ended an "aristocratic age" of literature, leaving Wordsworth to usher in a "democratic" one, was influenced on some level by his rearguard defense of the existence of Aristotle's view of white as the true Color of pure light, rather than one possible apparition of mixed rainbow hues. The notion that light could exist without matter, hence perhaps be ascended into via those things that diluted its purity least. Be something that we also are. "More light."

Which in Wordsworth becomes not what we are but were - the childish thing we cannot help but put away. "It fades into the light of common day." The colors of which are brain-tints: the only things we purely know are impurities, by the elder lights. And if our colors are wrong then perhaps we are bounded, our nature closed forever to the perfect. Perhaps we cannot even picture the best that might have been. Perhaps nothing we see here can ever let us, look how we will. The death not of God but a God who'd shake hands with a man. (Thus the dream of becoming a man who could shake hands with God.) "More life," now, on the assumption that that's all that's left. All prayer now directed to time, that it at least, if only it, not end for us. Our nutshell boundary blocking every godlike dream but that.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Nifty.

[agoraphiliac.livejournal.com]

That's so great: "more life."

(Not really related, exactly, but there's a Bernhard piece called "Goethe Schtirbt," with "stirbt" misspelled, where he calls out on his deathbed "Mehr nicht," no more.)
http://shirtysleeves.blogspot.com/2011/11/translation-of-goethe-schtirbt-by.html

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

(Thus the dream of becoming a man who could shake hands with God.)
Who is obviously another male? (Just jesting; loved the light bits...;)

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Just wriggling into the (hypothesized) mindset. It doesn't quite fit my notion of Goethe.