Philosophy is but a history of Indians, Chinese, Greeks, academics, Bishop Berkeley, Hume, Schopenhauer, and all the confusions. I just want to share these confusions with you.
Whenever I read a book about aesthetics, I will have an uncomfortable feeling. I will feel that I am reading the works of some astronomers who have never observed the stars. I mean, the way they talk about poetry is very much like it's a chore, rather than what poetry should be, which is passion and joy.
I remember Emerson once talking somewhere about a library being a magic cave filled with dead people. When you open these pages, these dead people can be reborn, can have life again.
In fact, poetry and language are not just a medium of communication, they can also be a kind of passion and a kind of joy. When I understand this truth, I don’t think I really understand these few things. words, but I felt some changes in my heart. This was not a change in knowledge, but a change in my whole being, in my flesh and blood.
I remember George Bernard Shaw saying that Plato was the playwright who created Socrates, just as the four evangelists created Jesus.
I don’t understand Greek, but I remember that the Greek word is really oinopa pontos, which translated into ordinary English is "dark wine-colored sea". …When we speak of the “wine-colored sea,” we are thinking of the hippopotamus and the three-thousand-year gap between him and us. So even though the words may be similar, when we write lines like "The wine-colored sea," we're actually writing something completely different from what Homer wrote.
Although I don’t know if I am a happy person, I still feel that beauty does surround us.
We can say that we already know a lot about poetry. We cannot use other words to define poetry, just like we cannot define the taste of coffee, or we cannot define red or yellow, or we cannot define anger. , love and hatred, or sunrise and sunset, and love for country.
Everyone knows where to look for poetry. When you read the poem, you will feel the texture of the poem, the unique throbbing in the poem.
In fact, if we think deeply about abstraction, we must abandon the idea that words are also metaphors. We have to forget, for example, that the word “consider” has astronomical implications—“consider” originally meant “to be with the stars” or “to draw an astrological chart.”
"I hope to turn into night, so that I can watch you sleep with thousands of eyes." Of course, we feel tender love in this sentence; we feel hope from many angles While looking at the hope of a loved one. We feel the tenderness behind the words.
The sentence "The stars in the sky are looking down" does not make us feel gentle; on the contrary, this metaphor leaves us with the impression of the hard work of men from generation to generation and the starry sky. An arrogant and indifferent gaze.
He stared at her, and then he wondered if there might be an immortal heart beneath this beautiful appearance, or if this girl was just a pretty beast.
"I dreamed of my life, or is this the real life?" I think this sentence is closer to what the poet really wants to say, because behind such an amazing quote, we still have A question. The poet is constantly thinking. I think this hesitation adds to the dreamlike quality of life in this sentence.
If he had said this instead: "Zhuangzi dreamed of tigers, and in his dream he became a tiger." This metaphor would have no meaning. There is something elegant and fleeting about butterflies. If life is really a dream, the best metaphor to suggest it is a butterfly, not a tiger.
Death is like the beginning of night
A suggestion is more effective than any straightforward statement. Maybe people always have a tendency not to like to be lectured by others! I remember Emerson once said: Argument can’t convince anyone.
The moon is called the "mirror of time" - first of all, the image of the mirror gives us the feeling of the moon being bright but fragile; secondly, when we think about the world, we will suddenly recall that what we are seeing now The bright moon I am admiring is quite ancient, full of poetry and mythological allusions, and is almost as old as time.
"A city as red as a rose is half as old as time." If the poet wrote "A city as red as a rose is as old as time", he probably said this. It's all for nothing. But "Half the time is as long" gives us magical accuracy.
I love you forever and a day
Forty winters besieged your face
We read Fran When reading Kafka's "The Castle", everyone knew that this person would not be able to enter the castle in the end. In other words, we cannot really fully believe in happy and successful endings.
Perhaps this is the tragedy of our time! I think Kafka must have been thinking the same thing when he thought about destroying this book: he actually wanted to write a book that was both happy and uplifting, but he just felt that he couldn't do it. Of course, even if he really wrote such a book, no one would think he was telling the truth. This is not the truth of the matter, but the truth of his dream.
"Art is permanent, life is short." (Ars longa, vita brevis) - I should pronounce it as wita brewis (it will definitely sound ugly this way). Let us pronounce it vita brevis - just as we would pronounce it "Virgil" instead of "Wirgilius" for the same reason.
In English we say "Good Morning" (Good Morning), but in Spanish we say "Buenos dias [Good days]". If "Good morning" in English is translated into Spanish as "Buenos manana", we will feel that this translation is indeed based on the literal meaning, but this statement is not the grammar we actually use.
song of songs ? king of kings ?night of nights
We all know that the lonely and backbone Norwegians will convey their loneliness and their courage through their elegies. , their loyalty, and their feelings about the bleakness of the sea and war. The people who wrote the elegies seemed so close to us across centuries of separation.
Words are not born through abstract thinking, but through concrete things - I think "concrete" here means the same as "poetic" in this example ( poetic) is the same. Let's talk about a word like "dreary": "dreary" means "bloodstained." Likewise, the word "glad" means "polished," and "threat" means "a threatening crowd." These restrictions are abstract words, and they all had very clear meanings at the beginning.
Language does not emerge from libraries, but evolves from the countryside, the vast sea, the trickling rivers, the long nights, and the dawn.
In the case of "night", we might speculate that the word originally represented night itself—darkness, threat, and shining stars. Then, after such a long period of time, the word "night" derived its abstract meaning - that is, the period between dusk, represented by the crow, and dawn, represented by the white dove (Hopefully That's what the Hebrews said).
Yeats: "Physical decay is wisdom; when we were young, / We loved each other so ignorantly."
"The triple night lyre" (the lyre of threefold night). The beauty of this line of poetry struck me. I then looked up the annotations and discovered that the lyre refers to Hercules, who was born by Jupiter in a night that lasted three nights. These explanations provide us with a small anecdote that somewhat overshadows the great mystery, namely, the phrase "the triple night lyre." That's enough - let the poem maintain its enigmatic aspect. We don't have to solve the mystery.
"Look up at this vast and colorful starry sky, / dig a grave for me to lie flat on my back, / I lived a happy life when I was alive, and I was very happy when I died."
Me I feel that the long list of words and explanations and definitions in the dictionary will make us feel that explanations will consume the meaning of the words, and that any new word or vocabulary can be replaced by another word. But I think every word should exist independently and have its own unique meaning. And every poet should think so.
When Lugonnes described the sunset, he described it as "a brightly colored green peacock, showing its golden face without modification." We don't need to worry about the setting sun and its appearance. In what ways are the green peacocks similar - and in what ways are they not like them. It is important that we feel that he is transfixed by the sunset, and that he uses this metaphor to convey to us how he feels. This is what I call a sense of trust in poetry.
An idea occurred to me - the idea that although human life is made up of thousands of moments and days, perhaps those many moments and days can be reduced to one day: this is When we understand ourselves, when we face ourselves. I think when Judas kissed Jesus, he knew immediately that he was already a traitor and that becoming a traitor was his destiny. When I heard Keats's poem, I immediately felt that this was a great experience. I have been experiencing this poem ever since.
From that moment on, I considered myself a "literary".
Now I am going to skip a while and go straight to my years in Geneva. I was a depressed young man at that time. I think young people seem to particularly like this feeling of forcing themselves to be sad; they almost do everything they can to make themselves sad, and they usually succeed. It was probably in 1916 that I read Walt Whitman's poems, and then I felt that my depression at that time was shameful. I feel shameful because I also deliberately read Dostoevsky to make myself even more depressed.
For example, if I say, "Style should be simple", then I don't think we should need to know that the origin of "style" (stylus) means "pen", and "simple" (plain) means exactly "flat". Because if you think about it this way, you will never be able to understand what I said.
"There are still miles to go before I fall asleep,/There are still miles to go before I fall asleep." Because "distance" represents "several days" and "several years" ", even a long, long period of time, and "sleep" will make people associate it with "death". Perhaps my pointing this out will not help your understanding. Perhaps the fun of this poem lies not in interpreting "distance" as "time", nor in interpreting "sleep" as "death", but in feeling the vague hints between the lines.
Of course, my idea at the time was to piece together some brilliant words. Now I think that the pursuit of beauty is actually wrong. I think this concept is wrong because these gorgeous words are actually a symbol of vanity. If your readers feel you are morally deficient, there is no reason for them to admire you or tolerate you.