Lines of thought

Gleanings from reading Pater, Kerouac and  Emerson:

“We have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among ‘the children of this world,’ in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.

burning man, painting in Cafe del Sol, Chiang Mai

“….Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion––that it yields you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire for beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.”––Walter Pater, The Renaissance

“Believe in the holy contour of life.”––Belief  & Technique  of Modern Prose, Jack Kerouac

Emerson, in his Journal: “The days come and go like  muffled and gray figures sent from a distant party, but they say nothing and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them silently away.”