Dialogue on the Threshold

Schwellendialog

09 February 2021

The People

 Here let me be bold enough to express an opinion born of the experiences of our own time. To a friend of enlightenment the word and conception 'the folk' has always something anachronistic and alarming about it; he knows that you need only tell a crowd that they are 'the folk' to stir them up to all sorts of reactionary evil. What all has not happened before our eyes - or just not quite before our eyes - in the name of 'the folk,' though it could never have happened in the name of God or humanity or the law!

Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (1947), Chapter VI, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter

07 February 2021

Phaenomena somni

 Il semble que l'esprit, offusqué des ténèbres de la vie extérieure, ne s’en affranchit jamais avec plus de facilité que sous le doux empire de cette mort intermittente, où il lui est permis de  reposer dans sa propre essence, et à l'abri de toutes les influences de la personnalité de convention que la société nous a faite. La première perception qui se fait jour à travers le vague inexplicable du rêve est limpide comme le premier rayon du soleil qui dissipe un nuage, et l'intelligence, un moment suspendue entre les deux états qui partagent notre vie, s'illumine rapidement comme l'éclair qui court, éblouissant, des tempêtes du ciel aux tempêtes de la terre. C'est là que jaillit la conception immortelle de l'artiste et du poète. C'est là qu'Hésiode s'éveille, les lèvres parfumées du miel des muses; Homère, les  yeux dessillés par les nymphes du Mélès ; et Milton, le cœur ravi par le dernier regard d'une beauté qu'il n'a jamais retrouvée. Hélas! où retrouverait-on les amours et les beautés du sommeil ! Otez au génie les visions du monde merveilleux, et vous lui ôterez ses ailes. La carte de l'univers imaginable n'est tracée que dans les songes. L'univers sensible est infiniment petit.

Charles Nodier, De Quelques Phénomènes du Sommeil (1831)

 It seems that the spirit, resentful of the darkness of the outward life, never frees itself therefrom with greater ease than under the gentle sway of this intermittent death, in which it is permitted to repose in its own essence, sheltered from all the influences of the conventional personality that society has made for us. The first perception that becomes visible through the unexplainable wave of dream is as limpid as the first ray of sunlight that scatters a cloud, and the mind, momentarily suspended between the two states that divide our life, is illumined as swiftly as the lightning that dazzingly courses from the tempests of heaven to the tempests of earth. It is then that the immortal conceit of the artist and the poet bursts forth. It is then that Hesiod awakes, his lips honeyed by the Muses; Homer, his eyes opened by the nymphs of Meles; and Milton, his heart enraptured by the last glimpse of a beauty never regained. Alas! where might we regain the loves and the beauties of sleep! Deprive genius of the visions of the world of marvel and you will deprive it of its wings. The map of the imaginable world is traced only in dreams. The perceptible world is infinitely small.