Significant Moments: Part 8

The poem is an effort to express a knowledge imperfectly felt, to articulate relationships not quite seen, to make or discover some pattern in the world. It is a conflict with disorder, not a message from one person to another.
Richard Wilbur, The Genie in the Bottle.
Permit me to clarify the situation by a . . .
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
. . . poem drawn from . . .
The Home of the Eddic Lays.
. . . an old book, left to me by my ancestor . . .
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
Here!—here!
Richard Wagner, Parsifal.
I will show you something . . .
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land.
. . . not coerced into being by rational principle, but . . .
Richard Wilbur, The Genie in the Bottle.
. . . exhaled . . .
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land.
. . . from the imagination, a condition of spontaneous psychic unity.
Richard Wilbur, The Genie in the Bottle.

Worship

In the beginning was the rule of sacred kings
Who hallowed field, grain, plow, who handed down
The law of sacrifices, set the bounds
To mortal men forever hungering

For the Invisible Ones' just ordinance
That holds the sun and moon in perfect balance
And whose forms in their eternal radiance
Feel no suffering, nor know death's ambiance.

Long ago the sons of the gods, the sacred line,
Passed, and mankind remained alone,
Embroiled in pleasure and pain, cut off from being,
Condemned to change unhallowed, unconfined.

But intimations of the true life never died,
And it is for us, in this time of harm
To keep, in metaphor and symbol and in psalm,
Reminders of that former sacred reverence.

Perhaps some day the darkness will be banned,
Perhaps some day the times will turn about,
The sun will once more rule us as our god
And take the sacrifices from our hands.
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
The image we carry of a lost coherence, of a center that held, has authority greater than historical truth. Facts can refute but not remove it. It matches some profound psychological and moral need. It gives us poise, a dialectical counterweight with which to situate our own condition. This appears to be an almost organic, recursive process.
George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle.
Here we meet with a remarkable fact. It is that these traditions, instead of growing weaker as time went on, grew more and more powerful in the course of centuries, found their way into the later codifications of the official accounts, and at last proved themselves strong enough decisively to influence the thought and activity of the people.
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism.
To return now to the Glass Bead Game:
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
. . . until now it has been almost impossible to get an internal view of the workings of . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . the Glass Bead Game . . .
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
. . . with its initiation rites; expectations of membership loyalty over truth; pressures to accept concepts handed down by the leaders, no matter how irrational; xenophobic banding together against outsiders; and the punishment of anyone who poses questions or finally wants out.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Joseph Knecht, or Ludi Magister Josephus III, as he is called in the Archives of the Glass Bead Game . . .
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
—an individual . . .
Henry James, Washington Square.
. . . well known to me from letters and documents . . .
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
. . . was one of those fortunates who seem born for Castalia, for the Order, and for service in the Board of Educators. . . .

As Magister Ludi he became the leader and prototype of all those who strive toward and cultivate the things of the mind. He administered and increased the cultural heritage that had been handed down to him, for he was high priest of a temple that is sacred to each and every one of us.
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
Sadly, though, . . .
Sharon Begley, The Schizophrenic Mind.
As I look back on my training, I can see that much of it was an indoctrination process, a means of socializing me in a certain direction; it was partly intellectual, partly political and even to some extent had to do with class. . . . If this process was successful, it became almost impossible to question many of the major ideas within the parent organization.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Concerning his childhood before he entered the elite schools, we know only a single incident. It is, however, one of symbolic importance, for it signified the first great call of the realm of Mind to him, the voice of his vocation. . . .

Knecht must have been twelve or thirteen years old at the time.
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
At twelve it never occurred to me to be skeptical.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
At that time, . . .
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
I liked to think of advanced mystics holding special councils (as a result of reading Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, which in turn was influenced by Buddhism and Indian philosophy), at which my "spiritual education" was discussed in great detail by elder statesmen of the spiritual world.
J. Moussaieff Masson, My Father's Guru.
I dreamed of hidden Tibetan monasteries, where disciples of ancient “gurus” learned secret teachings.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
At the time, his greatest ambition had been to be a good pupil, to learn, receive, form himself. Now the pupil had become a teacher, and as such he had mastered the major task of his first period in office: the struggle to win authority and forge an identity of person and office. . . .

In the last two years of his magistracy he twice referred to himself in letters as "Schoolmaster," reminding his correspondent that the expression Magister Ludi—which for generations had meant only "Master of the Game" in Castalia—had originally been simply the name for the schoolmaster. . . .

But we have run far ahead of our story, and now return to the period of Knecht's first years in office. After gaining the desired relationship with the elite, he had next to turn his attention to the bureaucracy of the Archives and show it that he intended to be a friendly but alert master. Then came the problem of studying the structure and procedures of the chancery, and learning how to run it. A constant flow of correspondence, and repeated meetings or circular letters of the Boards, summoned him to duties and tasks which were not altogether easy for a newcomer to grasp and classify properly.
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
Letters were a means of access to the soul without the sometimes irritating presence of the other person, and the possibility of the other person's interrupting one's train of thought.
Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud's Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis.
Quite often questions arose in which the various Faculties of the Province were mutually interested and inclined toward jealousy—questions of jurisdiction, for instance. Slowly, but with growing admiration, he became aware of the powerful secret functions of the Order, the living soul of the Castalian state, and the watchful guardian of its . . .
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
. . . Constitution and Byelaws.
Constitution and Byelaws of the International Psychoanalytical Association.
The rewards were abundant. There was even a degree of warmth and security in accepting the "wisdom" handed down over the last hundred years.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
The game allowed me to shed the overcoat of loneliness and confusion.
Robert C. Gallo, Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer, and The Human Retrovirus—A Story of Scientific Discovery.
Outside, to be sure, it was a far colder world. I am not even certain that had I not been forced out, I would ever have had the courage to step outside entirely on my own.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
_______________________________________________________________

The secret archives of the Board of Educators are not at our disposal. What we know about . . .
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
. . . Freud's self-revelations and self-estimates . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . must therefore be deduced from his occasional remarks to friends.
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
Freud was a highly complex man, modified and changed by the disappointments, failures, and successes of his life. In trying to understand this man, who has been such an important influence on our culture, one ponders the question: Why, at a crucial point in the history of psychoanalysis, did the Committee mean so much to him? In fact, what did friendship—as played out with such great drama and intensity by the members of the Committee—mean to Freud?

One might assume that someone who wrote as many letters as Freud did was capable of great friendship. But such an assumption is questionable.
Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud's Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis.
In our Province explicit friendships among the holders of high office are most rare. We need therefore not be surprised that . . . intimacies beyond the joint work on an official level are scarcely possible.
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
A striking feature of Freud's correspondence is the fact that the bulk of it was limited almost exclusively to his professional colleagues. A touching exception is his letters to his friend Eduard Silberstein, a young Romanian from the town of Braila whom he met in his early teens when both were students at the gymnasium in Vienna.
Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud's Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis.
The friendship between the two was an unusual one.
Hermann Hesse, Beneath the Wheel.
They had spent almost every hour together, taking "secret walks." They learned Spanish, which they made into a secret code, taking names from Cervantes with which to address each other, Silberstein becoming Berganza, Freud Cipion.
Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud's Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis.
One cannot resist imagining his astonishment had someone suddenly addressed him as Cipion half a century later!
Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud.
The character, Cipion, appears in "The Colloquy of the Dogs" (1613), a picaresque tale in which a vagabond mongrel tells his story to a compassionate canine listener. . . . The two, guard dogs at a hospital, had the gift of speech for only a day, and Cipion instructed Berganza to tell his life story first. Cervantes' two characters—the sage commentator and the charming, sometimes maudlin hysteric—interact within strict time limits. Cipion never gets his turn to confess or regale; as in the "talking cure," there is no reciprocity. Cervantes' tale unfolds a charming parody of the human colloquy called psychoanalysis.
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
Silberstein and Freud comprised the entire faculty of the imaginary "Academia Castellana" (also called "Academia Espanola")—"the two sole luminaries of the A.E."—and they addressed each other formally as "Your Honor." Girls were known as "principles," and European cities were given the names of their Spanish counterparts. (Madrid stood for Berlin, Seville for Vienna.)
Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud's Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis.
Unbeknownst to his friend, he had led a second, very different life of his own, in which his friend played no part.
Hermann Hesse, Tales of Student Life.
In the dark, he sat for a long time in his room.
Hermann Hesse, Beneath the Wheel.
. . . he always had a room of his own, no matter how straightened his parents' circumstances.
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
Here he was his own master, undisturbed. Here—obstinately, ambitiously—he had battled weariness, sleep and headaches, brooding many hours over Caesar, Xenophon, grammars, dictionaries and mathematics. But he had also experienced those few hours more valuable than all lost boyhood joys, those few rare, dreamlike hours filled with the pride, intoxication and certainty of victory; hours during which he had dreamed himself beyond school and examinations into the elect circle of higher beings. He had been seized by a bold and marvelous premonition that he was really something special, superior to his fat-cheeked, good-natured companions on whom he would one day look down from distant heights.
Hermann Hesse, Beneath the Wheel.
Even as a boy of seventeen, he was looking for a companion 'to whom I could pour out my inmost being to my heart's content, without my caring what the effect might be on him.'
Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay—Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus.
Could it be in reality he had had no friend at all, possessed no share in someone else's life? He had had a companion, a listener, a yes-man, a henchman, and no more!
Hermann Hesse, Tales of Student Life.
The intensity with which . . .
Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud's Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis.
. . . later in life . . .
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species.
. . . he entered into his largely epistolary friendship with Wilhelm Fliess must have been a reflection of his disappointment with reality and his need to seek an idealized friend who existed only as a projection of his own needs. For Freud the ideal friend had to be an extension of himself.
Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud's Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis.
______________________________________________________________

He confessed to being bored by his contemporaries . . .
Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud's Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis.
One exception was Fritz Tegularius, whom we may well call, . . .
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
. . . past all parallel—
Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time quoting Lord Byron, Don Juan.
. . . Joseph Knecht's closest friend throughout his life. Tegularius, destined by his gifts for the highest achievements but severely hampered by certain deficiencies of health, balance, and self-confidence, was the same age as Knecht at the time of Knecht's admission to the Order—that is, about thirty-four—and had first met him some ten years earlier in a Glass Bead Game course. . . . For a characterization of Tegularius we may use a page from Knecht's confidential memoranda which, years later, he regularly drew up for the exclusive use of the highest authorities. It reads:
"Tegularius. Personal friend of the writer. Recipient of several honors at school in Keuperheim. Good classical philologist, strong interest in philosophy, work on Leibniz, Bolzano, subsequently Plato.
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
His sensitive temperament . . .
Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage.
. . . made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.
He was as solitary and self-preoccupied as his father was garrulous; as serious and introspective as his father was effervescent and glib.
G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges.
His father . . .
Franz Kafka, The Judgment.
. . . the old doctor . . .
Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Guardian Angel.
. . . thought his son given to “looking at life as a solemn show where he is only a spectator”; William James . . .
G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
. . . Henry’s brother . . .
H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines.
. . . found in him a “cold-blooded, conscious egotism and conceit.”
G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges.
A timid adolescent, as sensitive as he was withdrawn, . . .
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
. . . a person who had never learned to relate to another person, not even as a child . . .
Ayke Agus, Heifetz As I Knew Him.
. . . he no doubt felt the need of a rigorous context, an orderly and protective society.
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
The most brilliant and gifted Glass Bead Game player I know. He would be predestined for Magister Ludi were it not that his character, together with his frail health, make him completely unsuited for that position. T. should never be appointed to an outstanding, representative, or organizational position; that would be a misfortune for him and the office. His deficiency takes physical form in states of low vitality, periods of insomnia and nervous aches, psychologically in spells of melancholy, a hunger for solitude, fear of duties and responsibilities, and probably also in thoughts of suicide. Dangerous though his situation is, by the aid of meditation and great self-discipline he keeps himself going so courageously that most of his acquaintances have no idea of how severely he suffers and are aware only of his great shyness and taciturnity. . . ."
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
In the person of Fritz Tegularius, Hesse has given us his interpretation of the brilliant but unbalanced character of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Theodore Ziolkowski, Foreword to Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
The young Nietzsche . . .
H. James Birx, Nietzsche 2000: An Introduction.
. . . was shy and quiet and kept to himself. He was not the sort one befriended easily. Some found him very solemn.
Tom Wells, Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg.
I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy; and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend, . . .
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
. . . he wrote to his sister in Basel:
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
. . . when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate in my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathise with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans. How would such a friend repair the faults of your poor brother!
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
Nietzsche's loneliness was caused by his inner plight, for only the very few were receptive to what he said, and perhaps he wasn't aware of even these few. Thus, he would rather be alone than together with people who did not understand him.
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
He remained alone, because he found no second self.
Barry Cooper, Beethoven (quoting Grillparzer’s Funeral Oration).
In his solitude, he had new ideas and made new discoveries; since they were based on his most personal experiences, but at the same time concealed them, they were difficult to share with others, and they only deepened his loneliness and the gulf between him and those around him.
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
To live alone one must be an animal or a god — says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both — a philosopher.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.
Nietzsche's favorite philosophers—Socrates, Pascal, Spinoza, and Schopenhauer—were all "primarily concerned with the cure of sick souls," and for Nietzsche "a genuine philosopher was essentially a physician of the interior self." Nietzsche believed that the well won't care for the sick; true healers also had to be sick.
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
I myself am convinced that . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . had he been healthy, it is doubtful he could have created as much, or as well.
Frederick Karl, Franz Kafka: Representative Man.
Nietzsche was too self-analytical not to be aware of the parallels between himself and the Jewish philosopher . . .
Colin Wilson, Spinoza—The Outsider.
. . . Benedict de Spinoza
Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics: Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Affects.
Both were 'sickly recluses'; both were 'outsiders', rejected by their own community, living in rented rooms on a low income, devoting themselves to the life of the mind.
Colin Wilson, Spinoza—The Outsider.
At the age of twelve he kept a diary, the kind an adult might have kept, written in a well-adjusted, reasonable, well-behaved way.
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
I live in the suburbs with my mother and my sister and my grandmother, . . .
Rich Cohen, Lake Effect.
. . . he wrote . . .
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
. . . almost a prisoner but full of road dreams and the constant anticipation of adventures in strange cities. At night, I pore over maps and imagine every highway and hill and out of the way town. I approach big cities in my mind. I explore every back street and alley. From the tops of tall buildings I enjoy crystal views of streets spilling into the country. Sometimes the streets are filled with traffic and sometimes they are deserted and I am alone.
Rich Cohen, Lake Effect.
His writing kept alive the illusion of liberation because on a symbolic level he actually did take steps in the direction of truth and freedom.
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
In fact two . . .
Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography.
. . . separate individuals . . .
Truddi Chase, When Rabbit Howls.
. . . two different Nietzsches talked about loneliness. The one was his mother’s son . . .
Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography.
. . . a “laughed-at ‘mama’s boy’” . . .
Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study.
. . . the only male in a household of women—
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
The other was a fearless explorer and a military strategist on his philosophical quest, . . .
Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography.
. . . who spoke of . . .
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
. . . life in military metaphor—as a war with battles, retreats, campaigns . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . one for whom solitude was powerfully symbolic.
Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography.
He was alone with his past, his present and his future. Alone! He needed to be. The strongest must pause when the precipice yawns before him. The gulf can be spanned; he feels himself forceful enough for that; but his eyes must take their measurement of it first; he must know its depths and possible dangers.
Anna Katharine Green, Initials Only.
When he became an expert in the use and manipulation of his . . .
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
. . . own egotism, . . .
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.
. . . he conceived a notion of space that allowed him to navigate . . .
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
. . . unknown currents . . .
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.
. . . across unknown seas, to visit uninhabited territories, and to establish relations with splendid beings without having to leave his study.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Friedrich Nietzsche . . .
Desmond Stewart, Theodor Herzl: Artist and Politician. A Biography of the Father of Modern Israel.
. . . was truly a hero of the nineteenth century, that era when the tale of lonely outsiders—reviewing life and society in the obscurity of a study and plotting new policies in the reading room of a public library—was often more fascinating and significant than the story of crowned heads, prime ministers, illustrious generals, and captains of industry.
Amos Elon, Herzl.
His room . . .
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
. . . a quiet room for a . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
. . . closet metaphysician, . . .
Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography.
. . . was more than a place for work, . . .
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
. . . this wonderful place . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
. . . Nietzsche’s place . . .
Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography.
. . . was to him a . . .
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
. . . retreat . . .
Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August.
. . . a banqueting room of the spirit, a cupboard of mad dreams, a storeroom of revelations.
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
Nietzsche . . .
Edward R. Tannenbaum, 1900: The Generation Before the Great War.
. . . as we have seen, . . .
Daniel J. Boorstin, Cleopatra’s Nose: Essays on the Unexpected.
. . . had a good mind and was an excellent writer.
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
He looked at the world with the eyes of a Henry James, noting the subtlest of feelings in himself and those around him.
Charles B. Strozier, Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst.
Ever since his schooldays he had dreamed of composing a book about life which would contain, like buried explosives, the most striking things he had so far seen and thought about.
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
The books he wrote are now among the classics of philosophy, but are highly untypical of works that answer to that description. Primarily concerned to convey insights rather than expound arguments or analyse other people’s positions, they are usually written not in long chapters of extended prose but in short, concentrated bursts, sometimes no more than aphorisms, separately numbered.
Bryan Magee, The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy.
The internal tensions in . . .
G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges.
. . . Nietzsche . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
. . . ultimately led to a fatalistic dependence on paradox and impotence, and this formed the basis of his . . .
G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges.
. . . philosophy.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet.
Consciously or unconsciously, he perceived the opposing impulses in himself, . . .
G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges.
. . . what he called the constitutional incapacity . . .
Siegfried Hessing, Freud’s Relation with Spinoza.
. . . and gave up attempting to reconcile them. Whether man was inherently evil or perfectible, whether change ever constituted progress, even whether he himself existed—a question he took seriously—were unanswerable riddles. The easy solution was to acknowledge “ultimate Facts”—power, force, and change—
G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges.
The idea that came to him was that all religions and philosophies have so far been mistaken about the highest good. It does not lie in moral virtue, or in self-restraint, or even in self-knowledge, but in the idea of great health and strength. This, says Nietzsche, is the fundamental constituent of freedom. Once man has these the others will follow. For most of his evils—and his intellectual confusions—spring from weakness.
Colin Wilson, Spinoza—The Outsider.
Momentous for Nietzsche in 1865 . . .
Robert Wicks, Friedrich Nietzsche.
. . . as he claims in his “Autobiographical Sketch,” . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . was his accidental discovery of Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818) in a local bookstore. He was then 21.
Robert Wicks, Friedrich Nietzsche.
These notes . . .
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
. . . “fragments of a grand confession”—
Geoffrey Skelton, Wieland Wagner: The Positive Sceptic quoting Goethe.
. . . were found later among his papers:
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
I must be profoundly related to Byron’s Manfred:
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
From my youth upwards my spirit . . .
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Manfred.
. . . sought for the hidden metaphysical truth behind and beyond the phenomena of this world, for the ideal.
Theodor Reik, The Haunting Melody.
I lived then in . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Retrospect of my Two Years at Leipzig.
. . . my small albergo, . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
. . . in a state of helpless indecision, alone with certain painful experiences and disappointments.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Retrospect of my Two Years at Leipzig.
“Nothing more terrible could be imagined,” he wrote.
Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August.
What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to the way I thought it ought to!
Carl Gustav Jung, Commentary on “The Secret of the Golden Flower.”
This was an error.
Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August.
One day . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Retrospect of my Two Years at Leipzig.
—strangely enough,
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . I found . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Retrospect of my Two Years at Leipzig
. . . Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818) in a . . .
Robert Wicks, Friedrich Nietzsche.
. . . secondhand bookshop, picked it up as something quite unknown to me, and turned the pages. I do not know what demon whispered to me, 'Take this book home with you.' It was contrary to my usual practice of hesitating over the purchase of books. Once at home, I threw myself onto the sofa with the newly-won treasure and began to let that energetic and gloomy genius operate upon me . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Retrospect of my Two Years at Leipzig.
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
Here I saw a mirror in which I beheld the world, life and my own nature in a terrifying grandeur . . . here I saw sickness and health, exile and refuge, Hell and Heaven.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Retrospect of my Two Years at Leipzig.
He never tired in his search after that transcendental and supernatural secret of the Absolute and he did not recognize that the great secret of the transcendental, the miracle of the metaphysical is that it does not exist.
Theodor Reik, The Haunting Melody.
The very notion that . . .
Robert Osserman, Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of the Cosmos.
. . . one might imagine . . .
Henry James, The Ambassadors.
. . . the strange sublunary poetry which lies in . . .
John Russell Taylor, The Angry Theatre.
. . . a particle of an inch . . .
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.
. . . at the other end of a microscope . . .
John Russell Taylor, The Angry Theatre.
. . . was so . . .
Robert Osserman, Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of the Cosmos.
. . . wantonly extravagant . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
. . . that even a century later . . .
Robert Osserman, Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of the Cosmos.
. . . the philosopher . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
. . . would be mocked for spending his . . .
Robert Osserman, Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of the Cosmos.
. . . whole life . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
. . . both interest and principal, . . .
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan.
. . . in a vain search for it.
Robert Osserman, Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of the Cosmos.
It had been the dream of his life to write with an originality so discreet, so well concealed, as to be unnoticeable in its disguise of current and customary forms; all his life he had struggled for a style so restrained, so unpretentious that the reader or the hearer would fully understand the meaning without realizing how he assimilated it. He had striven constantly for an unostentatious style, and he was dismayed to find how far he still remained from his ideal.
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
While he was lost in his work, life . . .
Harold C. Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers.
. . . that miserable patch of event, that melange of nothing, . . .
Clifford Odets, Personal Notes quoted in Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright.
. . . passed him by.
Harold C. Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers.
______________________________________________________________

A clock tower strikes eight times in the distance.
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
I stood . . .
Miguel Serrano, Jung & Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships.
. . . in the shadow of an arcade . . .
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
. . . quietly contemplating the clock tower, the low balcony and the tiny square. No one else was there, and it seemed as though time had stopped. Then a cat appeared and walked slowly and deliberately towards the balcony; it then stopped and lay down beneath it. A few moments later, I heard the sound of footsteps and a man . . .
Miguel Serrano, Jung & Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships.
. . . already advanced in years . . .
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha.
. . . emerged from one of the narrow streets and came into the square; his presence there seemed to increase the stasis of the scene, and he stood out alone against his surroundings, seemingly isolated from them.
Miguel Serrano, Jung & Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships.
A person in old age knows no one. He talks to people, but he does not know them. His life is scattered in fragments of conversation, forgotten by fragments of people. His life is divided into hasty episodes, witnessed by few.
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
The man, with his hands in his overcoat pockets, was disconnected from everything, standing apart from his own landscape. He was the very image of the forlorn; he represented the persona and its fear of death. He was like a scrap from the morning newspaper which by noon was already out of date.
Miguel Serrano, Jung & Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships.
What a cruel practical joke old Nature played when she flung so many . . .
Somerset Maugham, Moon and Sixpence.
. . . scattered fragments . . .
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ethan Brand.
. . . so many contradictory elements together, and left the man face to face with the perplexing callousness of the universe.
Somerset Maugham, Moon and Sixpence.
Life is . . .
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
. . . full of hope, of brutality, misery, sickness and death; nevertheless, it has completeness, a satisfaction and an emotional beauty which is unfathomable.
Miguel Serrano, Jung & Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships.
Life is a vessel of sadness, but it is noble to live life, and without time there is no life.
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
But if these contradictions are improbable to us, they are not to the Indians.
Miguel Serrano, Jung & Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships.
The ironic philosopher reflects with a smile . . .
Somerset Maugham, Moon and Sixpence.
. . . the wisdom of the East, . . .
Kate Douglas Wiggin, Marm Lisa.
. . . of India, . . .
Miguel Serrano, Jung & Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships.
. . . as revealed in . . .
Mark Twain, Christian Science.
. . . the Sacred Texts.
K.R. Eissler, Discourse on Hamlet and HAMLET.
It is written:
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha.
Our original teacher Shakyamuni Buddha spoke the Diamond Sutra in Sravasti. As Subhuti raised questions, the Buddha very compassionately explained for him. Subhuti attained enlightenment on hearing the teaching, and asked Buddha to give the teaching a name according to which later people could absorb and hold it. Therefore the sutra says, "The Buddha told Subhuti, 'This sutra is named Diamond Prajnaparamita, and you should uphold it by this name.'"
The "diamond prajnaparamita" spoken of by the Realized One takes its name from a metaphor for the truth. What does it mean? Diamond is extremely sharp by nature and can break through all sorts of things. But though diamond is extremely hard, horn can break it. Diamond stands for buddha-nature, horn stands for afflictions. Hard as diamond is, horn can break it; stable though the buddha-nature is, afflictions can derange it.

Even though afflictions may be intractable, prajna knowledge can destroy them; even though horn may be hard, fine steel can break it. Those who realize this principle clearly see essential nature.
Commentary on the Diamond Sutra.
__________________________________________________________________

All those who try to go it sole alone,
Too proud to be beholden for relief,
Are absolutely sure to come to grief.
Robert Frost, Excerpt from Haec Fabula Docet.
(or are they?)
Andrea Gerlin, Look who’s talking (or are they?): Shy Finns go cell-phone crazy.
A patient in analysis was in the habit of wandering about in a foreign city on a cold, windy night—observing the warm lighted houses on the top of the hill, longing to be inside them, yet enjoying in some curious way his own solitude. This masochistic enjoyment has a spurious quality to it. If the Indian ascetic wanders off into the forest by himself, he nonetheless soon begins to people his asrama with all the denizens of his imagination. What Indian ascetic is not on the closest terms with a large number of gods and demons; is he not steeped in mythology? The tradition provides the lost ascetic with his hearth, and hence, I believe, the universal tendency for mythology to begin to concern itself with the family life of the gods.
J. Moussaieff Masson, The Psychology of the Ascetic.
It is dozens of years since I . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . attended college.
Charles W. Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars.
But I remember . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
My condition at that time was a kind of madness. Amid the ordered peace of . . .
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
. . . the University . . .
Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study.
. . . I lived shyly, in agony, like a ghost; I took no part in the life of the others, rarely forgot myself for an hour at a time.
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
The last term in my last year of college sputtered out in a week-long fusillade of examinations and sentimental alcoholic conferences with professors whom I knew I would not really miss, even as I shook their hands and bought them beers.
Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh: A Novel.
I had been lonely at Harvard. My relationships with others didn't seem to go deep enough to give me the sense that I was making permanent friends and becoming part of a larger community. I was unable to fall in love. I could easily imagine disappearing without leaving any trace in the world. This thought had a curious effect on me: it depressed me and yet the depression itself was so interesting a state for me to be able to feel, that I was nearly elated at experiencing it. But perhaps I am romanticizing my loneliness in retrospect. I know at the time that I just wanted it to end.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
My salvation came from a totally unexpected source, which, at the same time, brought a new element into my life that has affected it to this very day.
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
One autumn evening in 1962 I was walking in a quiet residential neighborhood of Cambridge, looking for the home of a friend. I stopped to ask directions at a house that looked cheerful and bright. The man who opened the door to me asked me in. He called his wife, and the three of us began a lively conversation, lively because both of them seemed to be unaccountably curious about me, where I had come from, what languages I grew up speaking, how I liked studying Sanskrit, . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . my sad and cynical major . . .
Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh: A Novel.
. . . where I was going that night, and whom I was going to meet and why. Both the man and his wife, it turned out, were psychoanalysts, the first I had ever met. I immediately assumed that their intense human curiosity must be a by-product of psychoanalysis, and I was fascinated. "What a wonderful profession," I thought, "that encourages such kindly intimacy." When I told them what I was thinking, and how badly I longed for just such conversations, they suggested I might be interested in therapy.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Suddenly we found ourselves in the midst of a strange conversation touching on many ominous topics.
Hermann Hesse, Demian.