…nature of the absurd, which is that it is an experience to be lived through, a point of departure, the equivalent, in existence, of Descartes’s methodical doubt. The absurd is, in itself, contradiction.
– Albert Camus: ‘The Rebel, An Essay on Man in Revolt’, 1956
The Nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the café, I am the one who is within it.
– Jean Paul Satre: ‘Nausea’, 1938
Kermode admires in Sartre’s “La Nausee” the tension between paradigmatic form and contingent reality; but it seems to me clear that the viscous “reality” of “La Nausee” is just as much a fiction as any lies constructed in “bad faith,” although the former may be a fictive version of the world derived from the less explicit, probably unconscious perceptions of “order.” Are our fictions ever checked or qualified by anything but other fictions?
– Leo Bersani: ‘Variations On a Paradigm’, New York Times, 11 June 1967
Only blankness, complete awareness, distinterestedness; the “artist-as-artist” only, of one and rational mind, “vacant and spiritual, empty and marvelous,” in symmetries and regularities only; the changeless “human content,” the timeless “supreme principle,” the ageless “universal formula” of art, nothing else.
– Ad Reinhardt: ‘Timeless in Asia’, Art News, January 1960
Not yet found
Though he teaches Oriental art history (at Brooklyn and Hunter colleges), Reinhardt denies any undue Eastern influences on his purist pursuits. “Artists,” he says, “should have a kind of Malrauxian point of view, in which the whole history of art is known to and is part of them. Otherwise, they’re idiots, children” (his lip curls) “or romantics.”
– Grace Glueck: ‘Mr. Pure’, New York Times, 13 November 1966
We get the sense of sweet relief at the words ‘shuffled off this mortal coil’ but mixed with the bottomless doubt about what may follow then.
– C. S. Lewis: ‘Hamlet, The Prince or The Poem’, 1942
The ‘presence‘, ‘absence’ and ‘both’,
Of the probans in similar instances,
Combined with those if dissimilar instances,
There are three combinations in each of three.
The top and the bottom are valid,
The two sides are contradictory.
The four corners are inconclusive through being too broad,
The centre in inconclusive through being too narrow.
– R. S. Y. Chi: ‘The Treatise on the The Wheel of Reasons by Acārya Dignāga in ‘Buddhist Formal Logic’, Part 1, 1961
…Plato was well aware of the fact which Aristotle urges as a flaw in his theory, namely that it is impossible for all his figures to fill up space with entire continuity. In the structure of air and water there must be minute interstices of void; there must also be a certain amount of void for the reason that, the universe being a sphere it is impossible for rectilinear figures exactly to fill it up.
– John Cook Wilson: ‘On the Interpretation of Plato’s Timaeus’, 1889
Mr. Reinhardt is a puzzler. His tenacity over so long a period in the service of an increasingly tight premise is admirable. But the logical application of this premise (apparently, that by infinitely painstaking selection and discarding an artist may extract an irreducible essence from color and geometry, the bases of painting) has led him, , as it did not lead Mondrian, close to the discovery that essence but a void may lie at the end of his search.
– John Canaday: ‘Art, Running the Gamut’, New York Times, 21 October 1960
John Canaday, art critic of The New York Times, writing in 1960 of Mr. Reinhardt’s search for severe purity, said it “has led him, as it did not lead Mondrian, close to the discovery that essence but a void may lie at the end of his search.
– New York Times: ‘Ad Reinhardt, Painter, is Dead’, 1 September 1967
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.
Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.
– Lao Tzu: ‘Tao Te Ching’
And of course we have it now, the sense of an ending. It has not diminished, and is as endemic to what we call modernism as apocalyptic utopianism is to political revolution. When we live in the mood of end-dominated crisis, certain now-familiar patterns of assumption become evident. Yeats will help me to illustrate them.
– Frank Kermode: ‘Sense of An Ending’, Oxford University Press, 1967
Indeed, Kermode argues that our apocalyptic views of disorder, of crisis and perpetual transition in the contemporary world are contemporary ways of making sense of the world, of giving it an intelligible order. They are variations on a paradigm of sense-making statements which are constant in human history.
– Leo Bersani: ‘Variations On a Paradigm’, New York Times, 11 June 1967
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