Seneca의 'On the Shortness of Life' - Life is long if you know how to use it - 중

life ceases for the rest of us just when we are getting ready for it. Nor is it just the man in the street and the unthinking mass of people who groan over this - as they see it - universal evil: the same feeling lies behind complaints from even distinguished men. (skip) It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. (skip) we are not given a short life but we make it short.

life is long enough if you know how to use it. But one man is gripped by insatiable greed, another by a laborious dedication to useless tasks. (skip) Look at those whose good fortune people gather to see: they are choked by their own blessings. (skip) he has bent his ears to your word, he has let you walk beside him. But you never deign to look at yourself or listen to yourself. So you have no reason to claim credit from anyone for those attentions, since you showed them not because you wanted someone else's company but becuase you could not bear your own.

You are living as if destined to live for ever; (skip) You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.

whatever time was available he devoted entirely to himself. None of it lay fallow and neglected, none of it uner another's control; (skip)
Mark off, I tell you, and review the days of your life: you will see that very few - the useless remnants - have been left to you. (skip) Everone hustles his life along, and is trouble by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. But the man who spends all his time on his own needs, who organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day.

Can anything be more idiotic than certain people who boast of their foresight? They keep themselves officiously preoccupied in order to improve their lives; they spend their lives in organizing their lives. They direct their purposes with an eye to a distant future. But putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune's control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal you are straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately. (skip)
Old age overtakes them while they are still mentally childish, and they face it unprepared and unarmed.

So, however short, it is fully sufficient, and therefore whenever his last day comes, the wise man will not hesitate to meet death with a firm step.

Do you call those men leisured who divide their time between the comb and the mirror? (skip) By these means they cultivate a reputation for elegance and good taste, and to such an extent do their failings follow them into all areas of their private lives that they cannot eat or drink without ostentation.

It would be tedious to mention individually those who have spent all their lives playing draghts or ball, or carefully cooking themselves  in the sun. they are not at leisure whose pleasures involve a seriuos commitment. (skip) But now the Romans too have been afflicted by the pointless enthusiasm for useless knowledge. (skip) such knowledge will not do us any good, but it interest us because of the appeal of these pointless facts. (skip)  but does it serve any good purpose? (skip)
sometimes he wondered whether it was better not to be involved in any researches than to entangled in these.
Of all people only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only those are really alive. For they not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes, but they annex every age to theirs.

it was not in our power to choose the parents (skip) But we can choose whose children we would llike to be. There are households of the noblest intellects: choose the one into whihe you wish to be adopted, and you will inherit not only their name but their property too. (skip) Time is present: he uses it. Time is to come: he anticipates it. This combination of all times into one gives him a long life. 
But life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.

extract yourself from the crowd, (skip) take some of your own time for yourself too.

Stolid pack-animals are much more fit for carrying loads than thoroughbred horses: who ever subdued their noble speed with a heavy burden? Consider too how much anxiety you have in submitting yourself to such a weight of responsibility:

So, when you see a man repeatedly wearing the robe of office, or one whose name is often spoken in the Forum, do not envy him: these things are won at the cost of life.

I've come across people who say that there is a sort of inborn restlessness in human spirit and an urge to change one's abode; for man is endowed with a mind which is changeable and unsettled: nowhere at rest, it darts about and directs its thoughts to all places known and unknown, a wanderer which cannot endure repose and delights chiefly in novelty. This will not surprise you if you consider its original source. It was not made from heavy, earthly material, but came down from that heavenly spririt: but heavenly things are by natuer always in motion, (skip) 
whaat does it matter what ground I stand on?

You really must consider how small your bodies are.

though he piles all these up, they will never sate his insatiable soul; just as no amount of fluid will satisfy one whose craving arises not from lact of water but from burning internal fever: for that is not a thirst  but a disease. (skip) So the man who restrains himself within the bounds set by nature will not notice poverty; the man who exceeds these bounds will be pursued by poverty however rich he is. (skip) It is the mind that creates our wealth,

Homer had one slave, Plato had three, and Zeno, the founder of the strict and manly Stoic philosophy, had none.

No man is despised by another unless he despised by himself. (skip) If a great man falls and remains great as he lies, people no more despise him than they stamp on a fallen temple, which the devout still worship as much as when it was standing.

Let no one rob me of a single day who is not going to make me an adequate return for such a loss. (skip)
You were born to die, and a silent funeral is less bothersome. So if you must fill your time, write something in a simple style for your own use and not for publication: (skip) Then it is that I forget my rule and principle of restraint, and I am carried too far aloft by a voice no longer my own.

confidence in yourself and the belief that you are on the right path, and not led astray by the many tracks which cross yours of people who are hopelessly lost, though some are wandering not far from the true path. (skip) this steady firmness of mind 'euthymia' (skip)  but I call it tranquillity,

They make one journey after another and change spectacle for spectacle. As Lucretius says, 'Thus each man ever flees himself.' But to what end, if he does not escape himself? He pursures and dogs himself as his own most tedious companion. And so we must realize that our difficulty is not the fault of the places but of ourselves.

We must be especially careful in choosing people, and deciding whether they are worth devoting a part of our lives to them, whether the sacrifice of our time makes a difference to them. For some people actually charge us for our services to them.

Still, you must especially avoid those who are gloomy and always lamenting, and who grasp at every pretext to complaint. (skip) a companion who is agitated and groaning about everything is an enemy to peace of mind.

practised thrift, without which no amount of wealth is enough, and no amount is not ample enough.

The next thing to ensure is that we do not waste our energies pointlessly or in pointless activities: (skip) like ants (skip) purposelessly make their way right up to the topmost branch and then all the way down again. (skip) busy idleness. (skip) It is not industry that makes men restless, but false impressions of things drive them mad. 

We should also make ourselves flexible, so that we do not pin our hopes too much on our set plans, and can move over to those things to which chance has brought us, without dreading a change in either our purpose or our condition,

For it is agonizing always to be watching yourself in fear of being caught when your usual mask has slipped. (skip) there is a big difference between living simply and living carelessly.

Our minds must relax: they will rise better and keener after a rest.

with Aristotle that 'No great intellect has been without a touch of madness,' only a mind that is deeply stirred can utter something noble and beyond the power of others. When it has scorned everyday and commonplace thoughts and risen aloft on the wings of divine inspiration, only then does it sound a note nobler than mortal voice could utter. 


- 세네카의 '시간'에 대한 논의는 너무도 명확하게 가슴에 와 닿는다. 누구에게나 충분한 시간이 있다. 죽음이 오기까지, 다만 제대로 그 시간을 살아내지 않는 것 뿐이다. 너무도 동의한다. 어떻게 BC 5년에 태어나 AD 65년까지 살았던 철학자가 현대에 와서도 심금을 울리는 진리를 이리도 정확하게 이야기할 수 있을까?
책임, 명예, 부, 욕심, 타인의 시선, 등에 항상 흔들리게 됨에도 불구하고 자신의 삶을 제대로 살아내기 위해서 지켜야 할 것들... 미래는 anticipate하고, 현재는 use할 것. 작은 무의미한 일들에서 벗어날 것, 관계의 덫을 피할 것, 절제하고 변화를 수용할 것, 그러다 보면 다다를 평정. 
언젠가 노트에 적었던 것처럼 '평정(tranquillity/serenity)'은 어느순간 다다르는 상태가 아니라, 자신의 소중한 영지처럼 가꾸고 지켜야만 하는 것 같다. 이 순간을 살 수 있도록, 죽음을 맞을때 견고한 발걸음으로 나아갈 수 있도록, 허위 장막을 걷어내고 본질을 볼 수 있는 눈을 가지고, 삶을 보다 온전히 살도록 독려하는 소중한 책.

대부분의 말들은 알고 있었던 것을 명료하게 다시 확인해 주는 부분들. 그러나, 내가 가지고 있는 restlessness에 대해서 보다 잘 인식하게 되었다. 위를 보면 같은 하늘인 것을, 왜 그리도 안주하지 못했었는지... 어떤 땅에 서 있던, (혹은 넘어져 있던), 나라는 인간의 본질은 결국 나인 것을, 중요한 것은 나라는 존재의 본질. 혹은 살아나감.

Gaston Bachelard의 'Air an Dreams' 중

Then the image soar upward and vanish; they rise and are shattered by their very height. Then the realism of unreality is evident. 

Nietzsche could be the representative for a complex of height.

the walk into a soaring.

For Shelley, then, poetic images are all agents of elevation. In other words, poetic images are operations of the human mind insofar as they make us lighter, raise us or elevate us. 

Anyone who rises sees the heights becoming more clearly delineated and differentiated. (skip) The human arrow lives not only its élan, but also its goal. It lives its sky. By becoming conscious of his power to ascend, a human being becomes conscious of his destiny as a whole. To be more exact, he knows that he is matter, a substance filled with hope. In these images, hope seems to become as precise as it can be. It is an upright destiny.

The wings invisible are those that fly the farthest.  - Gariele D'Annunzio, The Dead City - 

It is most often blue or black; it flies upward or downward.

The wing, an essential attribute of flight, is the ideal cachet of perfection in almost all realms. Our soul, escaping from the corporeal envelope that holds us down in this lower life here on earth, is incarnate in a glorious body, lighter and faster than any bird.

the dream, like Toussenel's God, creates the soaring spirit before creating the bird.

We lack wings, but we always have enough strength to fall.  - Paul Claudel, Positions et propositions -

vertiginous falls into bottomless pits.

Lucifer, cast out of heaven, fell for nine days.

it is the will that dreams.

the imagination of the fall as a kind of sickness of the imagination of rising, as an inexpiable nostalgia for heights. 

My fall creates the abyss; in no way is the abyss the cause of my fall. I will see light again, but it will not matter; nor will it matter that I will be returning to the living. (skip) I can never have a feeling of having risen again because the fall is the destiny of my dreams. (skip) Unhappy is he whose dream suffers the abyss.

The dynamic sensation of the "weakening of the soul" occurs in a weighted atmosphere.

Nietzsche showed us that depth found in the heights.

When we lands, he should be on a level just a bit higher than the one from which he took off, so that, contrary to what Thomas de Quincy noted, for a long time the dreamer retains the impression that he has not "come down" completely, and he will be able to continue to live his ordinary life in the heights of his aerial flight.

"I knew that there was a wind hidden in the heart of things."   - Guy Lavard, Poetique du ciel -

Luminous air and aerial light, 

We discover the source of this imaginary light - the light that is born within us - in the meditation that frees us from our daily troubles. In place of the enlightened spirit, an enlightening soul is born. 

emerging light, an early morning light where blue, pink, and gold mingle. Nothing garish. Nothing vivid. Here is a beautiful synthesis round and diaphanous, pale alabaster lighted by the sun!

The elevation of the soul goes hand in hand with its serenity. There is a dynamic connection between light and height. (skip) "The abyss is troubled darkness."

When the feeling of elevation reaches its peak, the universe is as peaceful as the mountaintops.

"Today you will read me and I shall live through you."

When we have seen more clearly that Nietzsche's cosmos is a cosmos of the heights, then we will also understand that this soothing water it the Sky.

Nietzchean light is an arrow, a sword. It inflicts a cold wound.

For Nietzsche, in fact, air is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy. (skip) aerial joy is freedom.

Neither by land nor water, but in the air, the journey to the highest and coldest of solitary places.

Through air and cold, it is the silence that is breathed, it is the silence that is an integral part of our very being.

Those who can breathe the air of my writings know that it is an air of the heights, a strong air. (skip) The ice is near, the solitude tremendous - but how calmly all things lie in the night! How freely on breathes! How much one feels beneath oneself!   - Nietzsche, Ecce Homo -

"he who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance: one cannot fly into flying."

cast yourself entirely into the depths in order to be able to rise up entirely toward the summits, 

Whatever was difficult

Sank into blue forgetfulness -     -Nietzsche-

This tranquility is certain because it has been conquered.

the pine tree at the edge of the abyss. (skip) the tree's struggle to resist the forces of gravity. 

upright, braced, standing straight; it is vertical. It does not get its spa from subterrean water; it does not owe its solidity to the rock; (skip) Nietzschean will. One wants to remain as it is. The other wants to rise up. (skip)  The temptation of the abyss tonalizes the sky.

the seventh solitude

when constraint and contrivance and guilt steam beneath us like rain."

Weight does not weigh on the world but on our souls, our minds, our hearts - it weighs on man. To one who triumphs over weight, to the superman, will be given a super-nature - that very nature that is imagined by an aerial psyche.

celestial blue: (skip) 

"sky blue" is always a concept, never a primary image.

The one who dreams in the serenity of the night finds the marvelous web of time that is resting.

Distance is abolished. An infinity of communion erases an infinity of size. The world of stars touches our soul: it is a world of gazing. 

CLOUDS (skip) a reverie without responsibility.

How can one take it along when one is only a cloud 

With holes in his pockets?

But nothing seems amazing to this little bit of nothingness that glides.

Nothing seems so heavy that it cannot be taken along.    - Supervielle -

the function of the imagination of clouds is an invitation to ascend.

The soul's landscapes are more marvelous than the landscapes of the starry sky. They have not only Milky Ways made up of millions of stars, but even their dark abysses are living, embracing an infinite life whose very overabundance darkens and stifles. And these abysses where life is consumed can in a moment be illuminated, liberated, and changed into Milky Ways.

To live in a great tree under its enormous leafy crown is always, for the imagination, to be a bird. The tree is a source of power for flight.

the bleeding tree, the tree that weeps?

There is someone

In the wind.    - Guillevic, Terraque -

And life is so great that even autumn has a future.

It is to truly turn your face to the wind and defy its force.

The wind's forehead appears

Like dawn in the forest.   - Emile Verhaeren - 

the word is willed before it is spoken. In this way, pure poetry is formed in the realm of the will before appearing on the emotional level. For this reason it is all the more true that pure poetry is far from being the art of representation. Created in the silence and solitude of being, with no connection to hearing or sight, poetry seems to me to be the primary phenomenon of the human aesthetic will.

Willed and re-willed, the origins of poetry's vocal values are cherished in their essential expressions of will. (skip) The will finds them in the silence and emptiness of being, (skip) will to logos. (skip) in the silence of our own being, what it is we will to become, we need to convince ourselves of our own becoming and to exalt it for ourselves.

There are musicians who compose on blank paper, in silence and immobility. Their eyes wide open, they create, by a gaze that stretches into emptiness, a kind of visual silence, a silent gaze that effaces the world in order to silence its noises; they write music. (skip) life waits; harmony is about to come. (skip) They no longer belong to a world of echoes or resonances. (skip) 

There are also silent poets, silencers who start by quieting an overly noisy universe and all the hubbub caused by its thunderous sound. (skip) the literary image, allows us to live slowly the time of its blooming.

the written language is creating its own universe.

a literary image is an explosive.

The moment that a thought, cleverly hiding beneath its images, lies in the shadow waiting for a reader, noises are muffled, the reading begins, and it is a slow, dreaming reading. (skip)  And when this silence has fallen, then we can understand the strange expressive burst, the elan vital of a confession:

And sometimes we discover a great line of poetry, one that contains such suffering or such a great thought that the reader - the solitary reader - murmurs: and that day, I shall read no further.

As Baudelaire writes on the first page of My Heart Laid Bare: "Evaporation and concentration of the Self. That is the crux."

for it seems that to express the ineffable, the evasive, the aerial, every writer needs to develop themes of inner wealth, wealth that bears the weight of inner certainty. 

- Bachelard의 'Water and Dreams'를 읽은지 몇 개월이 지나 손에 들게 된 책. 
바슐라드의 물질에 대한 상상력은 무한하면서도 가슴 뜨금할 정도로 본질을 꿰뚫는다. 그의 문학적/예술적 상상의 고찰 범위에 해당하지 않는 것이 있을까 싶을 정도로.
때로는 같은 생각, 같은 언어가 곳곳에 배어 가슴 저리기도 하고, 무의식적으로 감춰진 내면을 구체적으로 서술해주는 문장을 만나 가슴 속 시원해지기도 하며, 대기에 대한, 하늘에 대한 인간의 상상을 읽었다. 지난해 현실을 떠나 반쯤 상승하는 구름을 그리며 내면의 실체를 발견하게 된 이후라 더욱더 마음에 와 닿았는지 모른다. 

니체형 인간, 정상을 향해 발을 떼는 인간, 하늘을 동경하는 인간, 비상을 꿈꾸는 인간, 얽매이지 않는 인간, 절벽에 발을 딛고 하늘로 뻗는 소나무와 같은 인간... 정상과 고독을 동경하기에 이해받지 못하고 외로운 인간, 그럼에도 하늘로 향한 시선을 거두지 못하는 인간. 비상을 향한 갈망을 삼키는 인간, 그 갈증으로 부풀어 올라 타들어가는 인간. 눈을 감아도 보이는 창공에 어쩔 쭐 모르는 발없는 정신을 다잡고 사는 인간, 세찬 바람에 고개를 세우고 걸어올라가는 인간,  아무것도 아님을 알면서도 아무것도 아님을 응시하는 인간. 위로가 필요하다면, 아마도 이 책이... 
그럼에도 불구하고, 같은 갈망이 번뜩 정신을 사로잡게 되면, 시공을 초월한 어느 시간 문장으로 만날 수 있기를, 바슐라르가 말한 대로 의지에의 문장에 존재의 허무함의 무게를 실어... 
그리고 그 문장이 가슴을 치면 고개를 들어 잠시 중얼거리고 그 날은 더이상 읽지 않기로...