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| Susan Howe [Modern American Poetry] |
When
such Sundays loomed into view Fanny and I sat at the front of
Memorial Chapel beside the great person of great-aunt Muriel. She
tried every covert trick in her book to make us laugh out loud while
great-uncle Willy wrapped in his great black robe was going on about
something holy oh she was serious in regard to us and all the people
listening. Later we might sit in the dining room of Longfellow House
eating lunch on one side of a roped-off area while the resident
poet-caretaker guided sightseers single-file along the other side of
the barrier pointing out ornaments, furnishings, portraits,
structural details; as if we were ghosts. If private space is the
space of private writing, objects must be arranged in position
(witnesses and vanishing points) not looking both ways at once.
Something about nature “nice” children good manners in
architecture. Space
is a frame we map ourselves in. . . .
[quoting
from Pierre Bayle's Historical and Critical Dictionary:
A perfect history is “unacceptable to all sects or nations; for it
is a sign that the writer neither flatters nor spares any of them.”
. . .
What is it about "documents" that seems to require their relegation to the bedroom (a private place) as if they were bourgeois Victorian women? . . .
According to Pyrrho of Elis since nothing can be known the only proper attitude is imperturbability. Pyrrho of Elis, here is infantile anxiety. While I am writing pieces of childhood come away. How do I put the pieces back?
What is it about "documents" that seems to require their relegation to the bedroom (a private place) as if they were bourgeois Victorian women? . . .
According to Pyrrho of Elis since nothing can be known the only proper attitude is imperturbability. Pyrrho of Elis, here is infantile anxiety. While I am writing pieces of childhood come away. How do I put the pieces back?
from
Diogenes
Laërtius, Life
of Pyrrho,
translated by Robert Drew Hicks (1925):
Pyrrho of
Elis was the son of Pleistarchus, as Diocles relates. According to
Apollodorus in his Chronology,
he was first a painter; then he studied under Stilpo's son Bryson:
thus
Alexander in his Successions
of Philosophers.
Afterwards he joined Anaxarchus, whom he accompanied on his travels
everywhere so that he even forgathered with the Indian Gymnosophists
and with the Magi. This led him to adopt a most noble philosophy, to
quote Ascanius of Abdera, taking the form of agnosticism and
suspension of judgement. He denied that anything was honourable or
dishonourable, just or unjust. And
so, universally, he held that there is nothing really existent, but
custom and convention govern human action; for no single thing is in
itself any more this than that.
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