Stillness: Ideas for rest and attention. - Page 2

Editor’s note

Stillness

For moments when you want to slow down, reflect or pay attention.

StillnessLiterature

If nothing saves us from death, at least love should save us from life.

The line circulates in Spanish and English under Pablo Neruda's name, but no poem, letter or interview containing it has been found. Pablo Neruda was the pen name of the Chilean poet Ricardo Neftalí Reyes (1904–1973), who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. His Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924) is still the best-selling book of poetry in Spanish. Later he wrote One Hundred Love Sonnets for Matilde Urrutia, the singer who had nursed him through an illness in Mexico and later became his wife.

Pablo NerudaRead card

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Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly.

Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor from AD 161 to 180, wrote these notes to himself in Greek, some in army camps on the Danube frontier; the title Meditations came later. The card follows Gregory Hays's 2002 translation. George Long's 1862 version keeps closer to the Greek: live the rest of your life “according to nature”, which for the Stoics meant living by reason and virtue. The exercise is a memento mori, Latin for “remember that you will die”: count your life as over, and what is left becomes a gift.

Marcus AureliusRead card

StillnessLiterature

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Jung never wrote this sentence; it is a popular paraphrase. The closest passage is in Aion (1951), where he states as a psychological rule that an inner situation not made conscious happens outside us, “as fate”. Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was the Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology. By the unconscious he meant the part of the mind we are not aware of: forgotten memories, feelings we push away. What we refuse to see in ourselves, he argued, returns as conflicts and events that seem to happen to us.

Carl Jung (popular attribution)Read card

StillnessMind

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Without, everything seems discordant; only within does it coalesce into unity. Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.

Jung wrote this on 22 October 1916 to Fanny Bowditch, whom the Boston doctor James Jackson Putnam had sent to him for treatment. The letter opens with the same idea: as long as she looks at other people and projects her own psychology onto them, she can never be in harmony with herself. He adds that he is leaving for military service and will start work with her in December. Popular versions shorten the passage and turn “vision” into “visions”. The letter is in C. G. Jung: Letters, volume 1.

Carl Jung, letter (1916)Read card

StillnessLiterature

A man who lies to himself and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognise truth. He ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love. He yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal. And it all comes from lying, to others and to yourself.

Father Zosima says this in Book Two of The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80), Dostoevsky's last novel. Zosima is a starets, an elder and spiritual guide in a Russian Orthodox monastery. The Karamazovs have come to his cell to settle a quarrel over an inheritance, and the father keeps playing the buffoon. Then he kneels and asks what he must do to gain eternal life. Zosima tells him to give up drink and loose talk, and above all not to lie to himself. The card shortens a modern translation of his answer.

Fyodor DostoevskyRead card

StillnessLiterature

Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately in love with suffering.

In Notes from Underground (1864), the unnamed narrator, usually called the Underground Man, is a bitter retired civil servant in St Petersburg. He is arguing against an idea popular among Russian radicals, set out in Nikolay Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? (1863): people always act in their own rational interest, so a society built on reason would make everyone happy. People want freedom more than comfort, he replies, and some will even choose suffering to prove it: “twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.”

Fyodor DostoevskyRead card

StillnessLiterature

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.

Raskolnikov says this in Part Three of Crime and Punishment (1866). A poor former law student in St Petersburg, he has murdered an old pawnbroker and is now visiting Porfiry Petrovich, the investigating magistrate, who has read his article claiming that “extraordinary” people may overstep the moral law for a great idea. When his friend Razumikhin asks whether such men should not at least suffer for the blood they shed, Raskolnikov replies that a man with a conscience will suffer, then adds this line “dreamily”.

Fyodor DostoevskyRead card

StillnessLiterature

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long shot.

Chaplin probably did say this, but the evidence is indirect. It first appeared in 1972, in the critic Richard Roud's programme notes for a New York gala honouring Chaplin, on his first visit to the United States in twenty years. A 1916 book published under his name already says that tragedy or comedy depends on how you look at it. In a close-up, one face and its pain fill the screen; in a long shot, the figure is small in a wide scene, and a fall can look funny.

Charlie ChaplinRead card

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A day without laughter is a day wasted.

The thought belongs to Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794), a French writer famed for his wit in pre-revolutionary Paris. He wrote: “La plus perdue de toutes les journées est celle où l'on n'a pas ri”, the most wasted of all days is the one on which we have not laughed. He welcomed the Revolution, but his sharp tongue made enemies, and he died in 1794, during the Terror. The saying was published the following year. The Chaplin credit is recent: a character in the 1992 film Shining Through gives it to him.

After Nicolas Chamfort (1795); credited to Chaplin from 1992Read card

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You'll never find rainbows if you're looking down.

The line comes from “Swing Little Girl”, a song Chaplin wrote for the 1969 re-release of The Circus, his 1928 silent comedy in which the Tramp becomes the unwitting star of a travelling circus. A hired singer recorded it first, without success, so the arranger Eric James suggested recording Chaplin too, just for his family. That version, sung by Chaplin at 79, is the one in the film. It plays over the opening credits as Merna Kennedy swings on a trapeze.

Charlie ChaplinRead card

StillnessLiterature

Life is a beautiful, magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish.

Calvero says this in Limelight (1952), which Chaplin wrote, directed, scored and starred in. Calvero, once a famous music-hall clown and now a forgotten drinker in the London of 1914, has saved a young ballet dancer, Terry (Claire Bloom), after she tried to end her life. She believes she can no longer walk and asks what there is to fight for. Everything, he answers: life itself. Chaplin drew on his own early years on the London stage, and Buster Keaton plays his partner.

Charlie ChaplinRead card

StillnessLiterature

What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.

Calvero, the fading clown Chaplin plays in Limelight (1952), says this as he tries to talk Terry, the dancer he has saved, out of her despair. He goes on: desire is the theme of all life, what makes a rose want to be a rose. Sailing to London for the premiere in 1952, Chaplin learned he would not be allowed back into the United States over his alleged communist sympathies. Limelight opened in Los Angeles only in 1972, and in 1973 its music won Chaplin his only competitive Oscar.

Charlie ChaplinRead card

StillnessLiterature

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.

This is aphorism 153 of Beyond Good and Evil (1886). It belongs to Part Four, a set of short sayings modelled on French writers such as La Rochefoucauld. In German: “Was aus Liebe gethan wird, geschieht immer jenseits von Gut und Böse.” The first English translator, Helen Zimmern, knew Nietzsche personally. Nietzsche (1844–1900) argued that good and evil are not fixed opposites. The aphorism does not say that love excuses everything, only that an act of love does not come from weighing rules, so moral bookkeeping cannot fully judge it.

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StillnessLiterature

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship, that makes unhappy marriages.

This line is usually credited to Human, All Too Human (1878), the first book of short, pointed reflections, or aphorisms, by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, but it appears neither there nor in his other published works. The book does hold two close ideas. Aphorism 378 says the best friend will probably get the best wife, since a good marriage rests on a talent for friendship. Aphorism 406 advises anyone about to marry to ask whether they will still enjoy talking with this person in old age.

Friedrich NietzscheRead card

StillnessLiterature

If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe. If you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.

Friedrich Nietzsche, later a leading German philosopher, was the son of a Lutheran pastor. In 1864 he began studying theology at the University of Bonn, but after one semester he gave it up, to his mother's anger, and lost his Christian faith. On 11 June 1865, aged twenty, he explained the change to his devout sister Elisabeth; the words on the card follow his line “Here the ways of men part”. That autumn he moved to Leipzig to study classical philology, the study of ancient Greek and Latin texts.

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StillnessLiterature

We are such stuff as dreams are made on.

Prospero, the overthrown Duke of Milan who now rules a remote island by magic, says this in Act 4 of The Tempest. He has staged a masque, a courtly show of music, dance and costumed spirits, for his daughter Miranda's engagement, then breaks it off when he remembers a plot against his life. The actors, he tells the startled couple, were spirits, and palaces, temples and “the great globe itself” will fade the same way. “Made on” is an older form of “made of”. The play dates from about 1610–11.

William ShakespeareRead card

StillnessLiterature

The course of true love never did run smooth.

Lysander says this in the first scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream, a comedy Shakespeare wrote around 1595. Hermia, the woman he loves, has just been told that under Athenian law she must marry her father's choice, Demetrius, or face death or a life as a nun. Comforting her, Lysander says that in every tale he has read or heard, true love has met some obstacle: rank, age, family, war, death or illness. The two decide to run away into the woods, where fairies turn their troubles into comic confusion.

William ShakespeareRead card

StillnessLiterature

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.

Helena says this alone at the end of the first scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream. She loves Demetrius, who has left her for her friend Hermia, and she knows all Athens thinks her just as beautiful. Her conclusion is that love judges not by what the eyes see but by what the mind imagines. Her next line explains an old image, “And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind”: the Roman god of love was often shown blindfolded. Later a magic flower proves her right, changing the lovers' hearts overnight.

William ShakespeareRead card

StillnessLiterature

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Polonius, the elderly chief adviser to the king of Denmark, says this in Act 2 of Hamlet, written around 1600. He has come to tell the king and queen that he has found the cause of Prince Hamlet's strange behaviour, promises to be brief, then talks in circles until Queen Gertrude cuts in: “More matter, with less art.” The joke is that the court's most long-winded man is praising brevity. In Shakespeare's day “wit” meant intelligence rather than humour: a sharp mind says much in few words.

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StillnessLiterature

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

Catherine Earnshaw says this to Nelly Dean, the housekeeper, in chapter 9 of Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily Brontë's only novel. She has just accepted a proposal from Edgar Linton, a wealthy neighbour, but confesses that she loves Heathcliff, the orphan raised alongside her. Heathcliff, listening unseen, hears her say that marrying him would degrade her and slips away before this declaration. That misunderstanding drives the rest of the story. Brontë published the novel under the pen name Ellis Bell and died a year later, aged 30.

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StillnessLiterature

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

This is the opening line of Endymion, a poem of about 4,000 lines that John Keats published in 1818, at 22. It retells the Greek myth of Endymion, a shepherd loved by the moon goddess. The lines that follow explain the claim: the loveliness of a beautiful thing grows and never passes into nothingness. Keats had trained as a surgeon and apothecary, and a reviewer in Blackwood's Magazine mocked the poem and told him to go back to his shop. He died in Rome in 1821, aged 25.

John KeatsRead card

StillnessLiterature

Hope is the thing with feathers.

The American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) wrote this poem around 1861 in Amherst, Massachusetts. Hope is a small bird perched in the soul, singing a tune without words that never stops. It sings sweetest in a storm, and the poem ends on its quietest point: in the coldest land and on the strangest sea, it never once asked her for a crumb. Dickinson published only about ten of her nearly 1,800 poems in her lifetime; this one appeared in 1891, five years after her death.

Emily DickinsonRead card

StillnessLiterature

The soul selects her own society.

Emily Dickinson wrote this poem around 1862, in her most productive years, after she had largely withdrawn from social life in Amherst, Massachusetts. The soul chooses its own company and then shuts the door, unmoved when chariots stop at its low gate or an emperor kneels on its mat. In the last stanza it picks one person from a whole nation and closes its attention like stone. The poem was first printed in 1890, four years after her death, under the editors' title “Exclusion”.

Emily DickinsonRead card

StillnessLiterature

I dwell in possibility.

Emily Dickinson wrote this poem around 1862, in her most productive years. “Possibility” here means poetry, which the poem calls a fairer house than prose. It then builds that house: more windows, better doors, rooms like cedars that no eye can see into, and the sky for an everlasting roof. The poet's work inside is to spread her narrow hands wide to gather Paradise. For a writer who seldom left her family home, it says that imagination has more room than the world. The poem was first published in 1929.

Emily DickinsonRead card

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