4 Quotes Tagged: aestheticism

I endeavored to renounce society, that I might avoid temptation. But it was a poor religion; so far as it prevailed, only tended to make me gloomy, stupid, unsociable, and useless.

Кад се предмету каже име, уништава се три четвртине онога уживања у песми које се састоји у постепеном погађању: наговестити и евоцирати – то је оно што машту усхићује.

To name an object is to suppress three-fourths of the enjoyment of the poem which is made up of gradual discovery: to suggest it, that is the dream.

Thus those who are deluded into supposing that they possess being as such often endeavour to make man forget himself. Man is dissolved in fictions of being and yet these fictions themselves always conceal a possible road back to man; hidden dissatisfaction may lead to the recovery of the authentic seriousness which becomes real only in existential presence and casts off the ruinous attitude of those who take life as it is and do what they please.

There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann.