Steel White Table

I’m at home today with nothing better to do than post stuff like this. I found a WordPerfect file on — get this — a floppy disk I found buried in a box full of computer cables. The file is dated February 1999. I was probably writing an undergraduate philosophy paper. Here’s the file:

I was just reading from Hermann Hesse’s book Reflections, specifically from an essay called, “Reality and Imagination.” It’s a hardcover book I got from the library. I’d buy a copy of it for myself, but it’s out of print. Anyhow, this essay I just read is full of stuff worth quoting. [Or so I thought at the time.]

Our soul has in it a magic we can trust; it seeks wholeness and strives to compensate for every gap, every deficiency. It strives to make up for every incapacity by heightened achievement in another field, and in the weakest, most sensitive, most luckless of men it plays its tenderest, most fervent, most beautiful music, in order to praise life… (page 117)

Our actions are not determined by abstract insights or considerations; every step we take in life has its source in the primal ground of our being, in our temperament, our race. Afterwards we cast about for a philosophy that conforms with these unconscious motivations. (page 117)

…the neurosis of present-day writers may, in the last analysis, be a sign of good health; that is, the only possible reaction of men possessed of souls to an age that knows only money and quality and has no soul. (page 119)

Meaning and essence are not somewhere behind things, but in them, in all things. The world has often been condemned as evil because someone has slept badly or eaten too much. The world has often been glorified because someone has just kissed a girl. (page 120)

Everything hostile vanishes and is transcended the moment we succeed in excluding time from our thoughts. (page 120)

We are uneasy only as long as we hope. (page 125)

Okay, then.

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