Stillness: Ideas for rest and attention. - Page 5

Editor’s note

Stillness

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

StillnessLiterature

I have yet to know a poor man who has nostalgia for poverty.

In A Writer's Notebook (1949), the novelist W. Somerset Maugham suggested that the rich and famous Chaplin secretly longed for the slums of his London childhood; walking with him through the poorest part of Los Angeles, Maugham saw his face light up. Chaplin answered with this line in My Autobiography (1964): poverty, he wrote, had no charm and had taught him only a warped sense of values. He knew it first hand. At seven he was sent to the Lambeth workhouse, where destitute people were housed in return for work.

Charlie ChaplinRead card

StillnessLiterature

This is a ruthless world, and one must be ruthless to cope with it.

Henri Verdoux, the title character of Charlie Chaplin's dark comedy Monsieur Verdoux (1947), is a sacked bank clerk who now marries rich widows and kills them for their money. One rainy night he takes in a young woman just out of prison, meaning to poison her, then spares her. As she leaves, he sums up his outlook with this line. She disagrees: the world is clumsy and sad, but kindness can make it lovely. Years later they meet again; she has grown rich and he has lost his family.

Charlie ChaplinRead card

StillnessLiterature

We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory.

Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) was a French doctor who spent four years as an army surgeon in the First World War and won the Prix Goncourt, France's best-known literary prize, in 1918. He wrote La Possession du monde (The Heart's Domain) during the war. Shortly before this line he recalls that the war let him see his child only seven times, each time barely recognising him; now he keeps seven images of him. Our feelings, he adds, take their true colour only later, like prints in a photographer's gold bath.

Georges Duhamel, The Heart's Domain (1919)Read card

StillnessLiterature

Do not trust your memory. It is a net full of holes. The most beautiful prizes slip through it.

From La Possession du monde (The Heart's Domain, 1919), which the French writer Georges Duhamel wrote while serving as an army surgeon in the First World War. In a chapter on sharing one's discoveries with others, he recalls a friend who said almost every day that he had had a beautiful thought that morning and lost it. So keep a small notebook, Duhamel advises: the soul is a rushing river carrying mud, grass, flowers and gold, and the nuggets must be set aside before the current takes them.

Georges DuhamelRead card

StillnessLiterature

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

This is maxim 12 of 'Maxims and Arrows', the opening section of Twilight of the Idols, which Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in just over a week in 1888 at Sils Maria in the Swiss Alps. He ends it with a jab: people do not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does. The line became famous through the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived four Nazi camps. In Man's Search for Meaning (1946) he wrote that prisoners who had a reason to live, such as someone waiting for them, held out better.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 'Maxims and Arrows' §12Read card

StillnessLiterature

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

This is the whole of aphorism 483, 'Enemies of Truth', in Human, All Too Human (1878). It was Friedrich Nietzsche's first book of aphorisms, short self-contained remarks, and appeared after his break with his former idol, the composer Richard Wagner. Near the end of the book he defines a conviction as the belief that, on some point, one holds the absolute truth. A lie can be caught and corrected; a conviction stops a person looking further. A decade later, in The Antichrist, he put it bluntly: convictions are prisons.

Friedrich NietzscheRead card

StillnessLiterature

Man would rather will nothingness than not will.

In the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Friedrich Nietzsche asks why ascetic ideals, ideals of self-denial such as poverty, humility and chastity, have meant so much to people. His answer: we cannot bear suffering that seems pointless, and would rather give it any meaning, even one that turns us against life, than none. This horror of emptiness, he says, is the basic fact of the human will: it needs a goal. The sentence appears near the essay's start and again as the book's last line.

Friedrich NietzscheRead card

StillnessLiterature

The poison from which weaker natures perish strengthens the strong, and they do not call it poison.

From aphorism 19, 'Evil', in The Gay Science (1882), 'gay' here meaning joyful. Nietzsche asks readers to look at the lives of the best and most fruitful people and nations: could a tree meant to grow proudly skywards do without bad weather and storms? Envy, hostility and hardship, he suggests, may be among the conditions of great growth. He knew hardship himself: illness had forced him to give up his professorship at Basel in 1879. Later he put it more briefly: what does not kill me makes me stronger.

Friedrich NietzscheRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

This line is not in Nietzsche's writings. Quote Investigator, a website that traces famous sayings, found no link to him before a 2003 internet post, a century after his death. The image is far older: in 1813 the French writer Germaine de Staël wrote that life can feel like a ball where you cannot hear the music, so the dancing looks mad. The Times called a version an old proverb in 1927, and comedian George Carlin spread it in 1997. Nietzsche, though, loved dance as an image of free thought.

After Germaine de Staël, De l'Allemagne (1813); credited to Nietzsche much laterRead card

StillnessLiterature

He who destroys illusions in himself and others is punished by the ultimate tyrant, Nature.

From section 7 of On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1874), the second of Friedrich Nietzsche's four Untimely Meditations. Then a young professor at Basel, teaching classical philology, the study of ancient Greek and Latin texts, he argued that his age was drowning in history. Scholarship that only takes things apart, he wrote, destroys the illusions that love and faith live on, and leaves those who practise it tired of life. He puts this sentence in quotation marks but does not say whose words they are.

Friedrich NietzscheRead card

StillnessLiterature

To thine own self be true.

Polonius, chief adviser to the King of Denmark, says this in Act 1, Scene 3 of Hamlet (around 1600) to his son Laertes, who is leaving for France. It caps a string of advice: listen to everyone but say little, dress well but not gaudily, neither a borrower nor a lender be. He promises that if you are true to yourself, then as night follows day you cannot be false to anyone. Yet Polonius soon sends a servant to Paris to spy on his son.

William ShakespeareRead card

StillnessLiterature

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

In Act 2, Scene 2 of Hamlet, the prince greets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, old school friends whom the new king, Claudius, has sent for to find out what is troubling him. Disgusted by his mother's hasty marriage to Claudius, Hamlet calls Denmark a prison. When Rosencrantz disagrees, Hamlet answers with this line: to them it is no prison, but to him it is one. The idea is ancient: around AD 100 the Greek philosopher Epictetus taught that people are upset not by things but by their judgements about them.

William ShakespeareRead card

StillnessLiterature

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

The words are Ferdinand's, son of the King of Naples, but the audience hears them from Ariel. In Act 1, Scene 2 of The Tempest, one of the last plays Shakespeare wrote alone, the spirit tells his master Prospero how he raised the storm. Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, was overthrown by his brother; now his enemies' ship is passing his island. Ariel describes flames on the masts and everyone but the sailors leaping overboard, Ferdinand first, hair on end, crying this line. Yet nobody is hurt.

William ShakespeareRead card

StillnessLiterature

I am no bird, and no net ensnares me.

Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre in 1847 as Currer Bell, a name chosen so that critics would not judge the book as a woman's. In Chapter 23, on a midsummer evening in the orchard, Jane, a governess, confronts her employer, Mr Rochester, who has let her believe he will marry the wealthy Blanche Ingram. Poor, plain and little as she is, she says, she has as much soul and heart as he. When he likens her to a wild, frantic bird, she answers with this line. Moments later he proposes.

Charlotte BrontëRead card

StillnessLiterature

Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.

Mary Shelley was 18 when she conceived Frankenstein in the rainy summer of 1816, after Lord Byron challenged his friends at the Villa Diodati near Geneva to write ghost stories. Abandoned by his maker, the scientist Victor Frankenstein, the lonely Creature begs him for a companion. Victor begins one in Orkney, then, afraid of what the pair might become, tears it apart. This line is the Creature's answer. He warns that he will be with Victor on his wedding night, and on that night Victor's bride, Elizabeth, is killed.

Mary ShelleyRead card

StillnessLiterature

If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

The closing line of 'Ode to the West Wind', which Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in the autumn of 1819 in the Cascine woods near Florence. Across five parts the wind drives leaves, clouds and waves: a destroyer that also carries seeds to sleep through winter. At the end Shelley begs it to scatter his words among mankind like sparks from a fire. It was a hard year: his three-year-old son William had died in June, and in August cavalry had charged a peaceful crowd demanding reform at Peterloo in Manchester.

Percy Bysshe ShelleyRead card

StillnessLiterature

Forever is composed of nows.

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) spent almost her whole life in Amherst, Massachusetts. Of her nearly 1,800 poems, only about ten were printed while she lived, all anonymously. She copied hundreds into some forty little booklets of folded sheets tied with string, which her sister Lavinia found after her death. This poem, from one of those booklets, first appeared in print in 1929. It says eternity is not another kind of time waiting elsewhere: take away the dates, let months and years run together, and what remains is the present moment.

Emily DickinsonRead card

StillnessLiterature

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), author of Middlemarch. Quote Investigator, a website that traces famous sayings, found this line in none of her novels, poems or letters. It first appears as hers in June 1881, six months after her death, among passages readers sent to the magazine Literary News for a contest, with no source given. A likely ancestor is a line by the poet Adelaide Anne Procter in Dickens's magazine in 1859: 'We always may be what we might have been.'

George Eliot, commonly attributedRead card

StillnessLiterature

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

Daniel Deronda (1876) was George Eliot's last novel. Its hero, raised as an English gentleman, discovers that he was born Jewish. In Chapter 42 he joins Mordecai, a poor, gravely ill Jewish scholar, at 'The Philosophers', a working men's debating club in a London tavern. There Mordecai argues that the Jewish people can choose to renew their national life, like the Egyptians, who could not choose the Nile's flood but chose to dig channels for its water. Eliot's sympathetic picture of Jewish life was rare in Victorian fiction.

George EliotRead card

StillnessLiterature

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

De Profundis is the long letter Oscar Wilde wrote in Reading Gaol in 1897, near the end of a two-year sentence with hard labour for 'gross indecency', the charge then used against gay men. Addressed to his former lover Lord Alfred Douglas, it could be written but not sent, and each page was taken away as he finished it. In this passage he quotes the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson: nothing is rarer in anyone than an act of their own. A shortened version appeared in 1905.

Oscar Wilde, De ProfundisRead card

StillnessLiterature

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Lord Henry Wotton says this to Dorian near the end of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian, weighed down by his crimes, accuses Henry of poisoning him with a French novel, which Wilde admitted at his trial was, or almost was, Huysmans's À rebours. Henry laughs it off: art does not influence action. The magazine version of 1890 had been condemned as immoral. For the 1891 book Wilde added a preface: there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book, only books well or badly written.

Oscar WildeRead card

StillnessLiterature

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

In the last chapter of George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945), the animals find that the Seven Commandments painted on the barn wall have been replaced by this single rule. The ruling pigs have turned 'All animals are equal' inside out. Orwell wrote the fable about the Russian Revolution and its betrayal under Stalin. With the Soviet Union a wartime ally, several publishers turned it down, T. S. Eliot at Faber among them, and the manuscript was nearly lost when a German flying bomb wrecked Orwell's London flat in 1944.

George OrwellRead card

StillnessLiterature

In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

George Orwell (1903–1950), author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, is often credited with this line, but it has never been found in his books, essays or letters. Its earliest known appearance is at the front of a 1982 book on the uranium industry by V. G. Venturini, signed “G. Orwell” with no source. The idea is older: in 1898, speaking about Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer wrongly convicted of treason, the French socialist Jean Jaurès said that when a society lives only by lies, truth is revolutionary.

Attributed to Orwell from 1982; no source in his workRead card

StillnessLiterature

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

This is the last sentence of The Great Gatsby (1925), by the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940). Its narrator, Nick Carraway, is thinking of Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire who shaped his life around winning back Daisy, the woman he had loved five years earlier. In Gatsby, Nick sees what we all do: we push towards the future while the past keeps pulling us back. The novel sold poorly; Fitzgerald died thinking himself a failure. The line is now carved on the gravestone he shares with his wife, Zelda.

F. Scott FitzgeraldRead card

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