Category Archives: Existential

26-Trak

Framework

Willow Glen Plaza
Odd August (6-day week!) <- click to get current month

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, and, indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the Earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire–why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express & admirable; in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals–and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

23-Cosm

Everything

Map of the Universe According to Tycho Brahe’s System

Copperplate engraving on paper, hand colored from the Atlas Coelestis seu Harmonia Macrocosmica (Amsterdam, 1660)

How do you feel about it all?

21-Hail

MACBETH:
Speak if you can. What are you?
FIRST WITCH:
All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Glamis!
SECOND WITCH
All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!
THIRD WITCH
All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!
BANQUO
Good sir, why do you start and seem to fear things that do sound so fair? I’ th’ name of truth, are you fantastical, or that indeed which outwardly you show? My noble partner you greet with present grace and great prediction of noble having and of royal hope, that he seems rapt withal.

MACBETH
Stay, you imperfect speakers. Tell me more. A prosperous gentleman, and to be king stands not within the prospect of belief.
Witches vanish.
BANQUO
The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, and these are of them. Whither are they vanished?
MACBETH
Into the air, and what seemed corporal melted, as breath into the wind. Would they had stayed!
BANQUO
Were such things here as we do speak about? Or have we eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner?
MACBETH
Your children shall be kings.
BANQUO
You shall be king.


It is the part of ourselves we do not normally admit to consciousness, let alone expression in action, that slips past the inner censor into our dreams and fantasies.

OUR REBEL EMOTIONS by Bernard Mobbs (1970)


This devilishly charming fellow is only a human nature characteristic. He is human nature itself; the corporeal personality honoring, respecting, reverencing, adoring and worshipping itself as king and as god in his own world.

THE WORD – A PHILOSOPHY (1958) by Edna Sarah Beardsley (re: devil)


12-Murk

Shadows

It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me.

Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems–aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet.

Yes, there is death in this business of whaling–a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then?

And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.

Chapter 3 – The Chapel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville