- John Clare, "The Progress of Rhyme"Chew-chew chew-chew" and higher still,
"Cheer-cheer cheer-cheer" more loud and shrill,
"Cheer-up cheer-up cheer-up"—and dropped
Low—"Tweet tweet jug jug jug"—and stopped
One moment just to drink the sound
Her music made, and then a round
Of stranger witching notes was heard
As if it was a stranger bird:
"Wew-wew wew-wew chur-chur chur-chur
Woo-it woo-it"—could this be her?
"Tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew
Chew-rit chew-rit"—and ever new—
"Will-will will-will grig-grig grig-grig."
Sunday, March 20, 2011
The Nightingale's Song
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Nietzsche, "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life"
ReplyDeleteThe stronger the roots which the inner nature of a person has, the more he will appropriate or forcibly take from the past. And if we imagine the most powerful and immense nature, then we would recognize there that for it there would be no frontier at all beyond which the historical sense would be able to work as an injurious overseer. Everything in the past, in its own and in the most alien, this nature would draw upon, take it into itself, and, as it were, transform into blood. What such a nature does not subjugate it knows how to forget. It is there no more. The horizon is closed completely, and nothing can recall that there still are men, passions, instruction, and purposes beyond it. This is a general principle: each living being can become healthy, strong, and fertile only within a horizon. If he is incapable of drawing a horizon around himself and too egotistical to enclose his own view within an alien one, then he wastes away there, pale or weary, to an early death. Cheerfulness, good conscience, joyful action, trust in what is to come--all that depends, with the individual as with a people, on the following facts: that there is a line which divides the observable brightness from the unilluminated darkness, that we know how to forget at the right time just as well as we remember at the right time, that we feel with powerful instinct the time when we must perceive historically and when unhistorically. This is the specific principle which the reader is invited to consider: that for the health of a single individual, a people, and a culture the unhistorical and the historical are equally essential.