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Trust in the eternal laws of the gods has vanished, and the Oracles, which pronounced on particular questions, are dumb. The statues are now only stones from which the living soul has flown, just as the hymns are words from which belief has gone. The tables of the gods provide no spiritual food and drink, and in his games and festivals man no longer recovers the joyful consciousness of his unity with the divine. The works of the Muse now lack the power of the Spirit, for the Spirit has gained its certainty of itself from the crushing of gods and men. They have become what they are for us now – beautiful fruit already picked from the tree, which a friendly Fate has offered us, as a girl might set the fruit before us. It cannot give us the actual life in which they existed, nor the tree that bore them, nor the earth and the elements which constituted their substance, not the climate which gave them their peculiar character nor the cycle of the changing seasons that governed the process of their growth. So fate does not restore their world to us along with the works of antique Art, it gives not the spring and summer of the ethical life in which they blossomed and ripened, but only the veiled recollection of that actual world.

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, on the unhappy consciousness.

Fernando Hernández Urias interviews José Luis Amores, of the Spanish publishing house, Pálido Fuego, which brought out Spurious in Spanish translation a couple of years ago (as Magma). Dogma to follow soon. 

Neil Stewart reviews Wittgenstein Jr at The Salt House.

I like this little post from Absolute Write Water Cooler.

Some quotations from Jens Bjørneboe:

Literature must have a religious dimension if it is really to be literature at all. An unmetaphysical poem is artistically speaking an unrealistic poem; it is false if it conveys nothing of life's macabre double bottom, of all things' ambiguity. If a writer is not clear that our whole crumb of a human life is one long wandering on thin ice over coal-black water, then everything he writes is boring. It is insignificant.

Arnulf Øverland at 70

I've been writing for eight years, and it is only now that I'm beginning to discover what I've actually let myself in for. It's incomprehensible that anyone engages in something which is so utterly impossible. Every word, every comma, every sentence is a problem. Nothing writes itself any more, every page I produce I regard with the very deepest suspicion.

from an interview in Aftenposten (1959)

It's well known that madness doesn't always express itself in a lack of logic, but just as often in the fact that logic is all that remains of reason; counting and ordering is all that's left of the lunatic's consciousness. The meaninglessness screams, but the pedantry is perfect. Everything is made by a mad schoolmaster.

from Powderhouse

Laughter means distance. Where laughter is absent, madness begins. The moment one takes the world with complete seriousness one is potentially insane. The whole art of learning to live means holding fast to laughter; without laughter the world is a torture chamber, a dark place where dark things will happen to us, a horror show filled with bloody deeds of violence.

from Moment of Freedom