Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages
Eco, Umberto
"The bodies of martyrs were repulsive to look upon after their tortures, yet they shone with a brilliant interior beauty"
Beauty in the Middle Ages is a intelligible beauty that is experienced
through the transcendence of God's manifestations in materials, wisdom
in numbers, and reflection in nature.
Apocalypses and/or Metamorphoses
Brown, Norman O.
"Thus, the whole story from genesis to Apocalypse in any event; in any metamorphosis. Therefore it is important to keep changing the subject. The subject changes before our very eyes. It is important to keep changing our mind... The mind, or the imagination, the original shape shifter"
Brown infers the apocalypse as a type of metamorphoses, as a transubstantiation
as a result of a course of action. Direct references were made to
three stories from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Daphne, Actaeon,
and Narcissus. Each of the three has somehow their lives come to
meet the final fate.
Apocalypses, Prophecies, Cults, and Millennial
Beliefs through the Ages
Weber, Eugen
"always apocalyptic apprehensions, fears and hopes to suggest millennial themes, joined by optimism and pessimism, millennium message adaptable to every age"
The book explores the theme of the apocalypse in the Christian tradition. Mentality that takes calendars and centuries for granted back fires and associates temporal progress with senescence, decay, and decline. The notion of uncertainty, prophetic references, and degeneration make cultures very vulnerable at all time to assimilate material and social progress with obsolescence, and associate calendrical conclusions suggesting crises even when they do not coincide with a crisis.
Astrology, its techniques & ethics
Libra, C. AQ
"We must imagine that all that is born, all that comes into being, receives, at the moment of coming into existence, the influence of our planetary system in relation to the spot on earth where the birth takes place"
The book supports the astrological influences which the cosmic forces have on us at our birth. Where we come into existence in the physical body in relation to the signs of the Zodiac and the planets would give rise to shaping our spiritual characteristics, affecting our physical health, and setting out partly our fate.
The concept of Karma is also introduced, Karma meaning action, where
every actions and thought carry an inexorable consequence which can be
shown in a following existence of a life. For every existence there
are three bodies; the physical (the material), the astral (after death,
invisible to the organs of the material body), and the mental (the true
abode of man, assimilates the experiences of the two preceding states).
Buddha and his religion
Barthemlemy, J
"A being can transmigrate into any form whatever without exception, and according to his good and bad actions he will pass to the highest or lower state. Man is rewarded or punished according to his virtues or vices"
This book introduces the life of Sakya-muni and the basic doctrine of Buddhism philosophy, the four noble truths, eight divisions of the Noble Eight fold path, and the twelve conditions.
In Buddhist's beliefs, there is no "apocalypse" for existence is an
eternality that offers pain and misery. To avoid existence is to
reach salvation in the form of Nirvana.
History of the Hour - clocks and modern
temporal Orders
Dorn-van Rossum, Gerhard
"Present of past things is the memory
present of present things is direct perception
present of future things is expectation"
Augustine
"Light and time, the starry heavens were meant to serve man, not the
other way around..."
This book differentiates the early notion of "cyclical time" to our
modern day's "linear time". Civilization once participated themselves,
their cultural activities, and daily functions in nature's cyclical time,
not only in the form the large astrological phenomenon but also the inherent
time of the body. Time keeping devices were made to allow people
to carry on their lives with order, yet the notion of "linear time" since
the industrial revolution has reverse of the power of time regulation back
on the daily lives of civilization.
"the dial of life:
Darkness with eyes open. Light with
eyes open. Light with eyes shut."
Summary notes/
The Face,
1- Kundera inspired by old woman by the pool as he is
waiting for Professor Avenarius. Old woman's smile and gesture belongs
to a twenty-year old girl. The essence of her charm is independent
of time. Kundera thinks of the name Agnes.
2- Kundera awaken by radio weather forecast spoken by
Bernard. Radio speaks about Hemmingway’s new biography that tells
the truth of his life, to correct it from the previous ones. Kundera
pictures Agnes. Kundera contemplates Old woman and Agnes: there
are far fewer gestures in the world than there are individuals-a gesture
is more individual that an individual. A gesture belongs to no one
but is original, using us as an instrument, bearers and incarnations.
It is a Saturday afternoon, Agnes doesn’t like Saturdays because she has
a lot of obligations, after she goes to Sauna. This Saturday is five
years after her father's death.
3- Agnes hears quarrel in sauna. A newcomer declares
she find cold showers disgusting. Agnes remembers Father talking
about God's computer: a play of permutations and combinations within a
general program which is not a prophetic anticipation of the future but
merely sets the limits of possibilities within which all power of decision
has been left to chance. Our face is a serial number of a specimen,
a prototype. To identify ourselves so passionately to a point of
life and death, only then can we regard ourselves not merely a prototype
but as a being with its own irreplaceable essence. Agnes imagines
what happens after death, imagines the new comer.
4- Father tears up pictures after Mother's death and
moves to bachelors apartment. Turning in a full circle: from solitude
through marriage to solitude. He dies one year after Mother's death.
He transfers his money to Agnes but not Laura.
5- Agnes imagines buying forget-me-not, stares at it
as to see only that single beautiful blue point, to see it as the last
thing she wants to preserve for herself from a world she has ceased to
love. She crosses the street and almost fights with driver.
She remembers Father’s analogy to life boat: she does not hate the world
because nothing binds her to them.
6- Agnes remembers famous German poem. Calmness
after death and being free. She does not enjoy her life because she
has lost her solitude after her marriage. She dreams about going
to Switzerland and never coming back to her husband and daughter.
Imagines solitude with her father in a deep forest.
7- Agnes looks at magazines and is disgusted by faces.
The right of camera has violated all rights: it means that an individual
no longer belongs to himself but becomes the property of others.
Agnes imagines a world without faces: your face is not you.
8- Agnes remembers the young school boy. She also
remembers the other woman who has come to visit Father years ago.
9- Non-solidarity with mankind: her attitude.
Only love could make her attached to the beloved. She wonders if
she really loves Paul. She imagines the newcomer again, who informs
her of the other world. Agnes chooses not to be with Paul in the
next life: the door shutting on the illusion of love.
Immortality,
1- Christine breaks Bettina’s glasses, the act becomes
immortal. Goethe forbids Bettina and her husband to visit again.
Bettina calls her fat sausage, an immortal remark.
2- “From my life” Goethe speaks of earthly immortality,
minor and great.
3- Camera long exists before invention.
4- Goethe meets Napoleon.
5- Bettina sits of Goethe’s lap, like a child.
She reminds Goethe of his own youth.
6- She writes him 52 times, talks to his mother.
Goethe becomes alarmed to hear his life recounted with a different interpretation
from his own. What is at stake is not love, but immortality.
7- Goethe becomes intimate with Bettina, though knowing
that she is dangerous.
8- Goethe writes Poetry and Truth. Bettina gets
married.
9- Christine breaks Bettina’s glasses. Bettina
will not give up. She writes to apologize.
10- Goethe calls her annoying gad fly. Three
stages of life. The dial of life.
11- Goethe dies. Bettina collects letters
and writes a book. Her letters only found later because she doesn’t
see death but only immortality.
12- Bettina’s book both a homage and thrashing.
13- Beethoven and Goethe’s story.
14- Bettina changing the immortality of Goethe
and Beethoven.
15- Goethe meets Hemmingway: eternal trial is immortality.
Hemmingway does not want immortality: when I realized one day that it was
holding me its clutches it terrified me more than death itself. A
man can take his own life but not his own immortality.
16- Goethe makes analogy to his performance of
Faust, where the audience are more interest in Goethe than the play.
17- Goethe dresses ridiculously to scare Bettina.
Fighting,
1- The Sisters. Kundera recalls waking up to Benard’s
announcement on the radio about the accident on the highway. Kundera
cannot imagine the suicidal girl and continues to his novel. Laura
always intimates her sister’s goodbye gesture, which upsets Agnes.
Agnes marries Paul.
2- Dark Glasses. Laura intimates her sister’s dark
glass, but uses them to hide herself. Laura wishes to leave something
behind herself as a musician, Agnes doesn’t want to leave anything.
Father destroys the memories of Mother when tearing pictures. Agnes
defends him but is accused of being negative by Laura.
3- The Body. Dali and Gala analogy. Gala
eats the pet rabbit in order to own it. Laura sees the body as sexual
from the beginning, a priori, constantly and completely. For Agnes
brassiere is to cover defects, the body is only sexual in exceptional moments.
Agnes decides not to meet her lover again after realizing of her own old
age, she then longs for the marital bed in darkness.
4- Addition and Subtraction. Agnes subtracts herself
for cultivating the uniqueness of the self. Laura adds. She
insists her soul on her lovers. Shower analogy: a mere love for showers
can become an attribute of the self only on condition that we let the world
know we are ready to fight for it.
5- Older woman, younger man. Laura announces her
newly beloved, Bernard. Bernard refuses to become a politician, which
his father Bertrand has wanted. Bernard is a journalist.
6- The Eleventh commandment. Journalist’s right
to demand an answer.
7- Imagology. Transformation of ideology to imagology.
8- The brilliant ally of his own gravediggers.
The bear
9- A compleat Ass. Bernard fired: A person is nothing
but his image. Philosophers can tell us that it doesn’t matter what
the world thinks of us, that nothing matters but what we really are.
But philosophers don’t understand anything. As long as we live with
other people, we are only what other people consider us to be. An
illusion of the self.
10- The cat. Bernard slowly leaving Laura.
Laura asks him to marry her.
11- The gesture of protest against a violation
of human rights. Desires turning into rights
12- To be absolutely modern. To be modern
is to be the ally of one’s own gravediggers.
13- To be a victim of one’s fame. Fame belongs
to the one who gives answers, not the one who asks. Bernard does
not want the public to know about Laura, he is ashamed of her.
14- Fighting. Laura will not give up Bernard.
She will fight. The fight for is always connected with the fight
against and the preposition ‘for’ is always forgotten in the course of
the fight in favour of the preposition ‘against’.
15- Professor Avenarius. Avenarius walks
in Metro and rescues the woman, who is harassed by beggars.
16- The Body. Laura plans suicide.
To offer Bernard her body as she believes the body is sexual from the very
star, a priori. Laura confesses to Agnes. Laura volunteers
to collect street corner contributions for lepers.
17- The gesture of longing for immortality.
Comparison of Laura and Bettina who both use the same gesture: Bettina
who aspires to grand immortality, wishes to say; I refuse to die with this
day and its cares, I wish to transcend myself, to be a part of history,
because history is eternal memory. Laura, though she only aspires
to small immortality, wants the same; to transcend herself and the unhappy
moment in which she lives to do something to make everyone who had known
her remember her. What impelled Bettina to help others was not a
passion for good deeds but a longing to enter into direct, personal contact
with God, whom she believed incarnate in history. All her love-affairs
with famous men were nothing but a trampoline upon which she threw her
entire body in order to be tossed upward to the heights where the God incarnate
in history dwells. For Laura, it was nostalgia, the long for lost
history, a longing to call it back and to be present in it.
18- Ambiguity. Laura turns to Paul,
whom she secretly longs for, as a sister-in-law.
19- The clairvoyant. Laura flies to
find Bernard after consulting with Agnes and Paul.
20- Suicide. Laura ends relationship
with Bernard. Threatens to commit suicide but is calmed by Agnes
and Paul. Later returns and confessors to Paul: why hadn’t we met
sooner?
21- Dark Glasses. Laura fights with
Agnes. Laura accuses Agnes being an egocentric woman and beyond the
border of love. Agnes breaks Laura’s dark glasses.
Homo Sentimentalis,
1- Three testimonies
2- Rilke takes side of Bettina
3- Rolland takes side of Bettina
4- Eluard takes side of Bettina
5- Who plants feeling in a heart?
6- Bettina is far less interested in Goethe, the cause
and object of her love is not Goethe but love. True love does not
know of infidelity, it is a fire lit by a divine hand in a human soul,
a torch in whose light the lover looks for the beloved in every metamorphosis.
7- True love is always right, even when it is wrong.
The criterion of good and evil is placed in the individual soul and becomes
subjective.
8- Agnes trains herself not to cry in funeral.
It is part of the definition of telling us that it is born in us without
our will, often against our will. As soon as we want to feel, feeling
is no longer feeling but an imitation of felling, a show of feeling.
This is commonly called hysteria. We have a tendency to show off
our feelings because we all like to ride ourselves on our values.
9- Extra-coital love: a pot on the fire, in which feeling
boils to a passion.
10- Comparison of France and Russia.
11- Many people, few ideas. The basis of
the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of
all feelings. I feel, therefore I am. Hypertrophy of the soul.
12- What is a tear? A tear is suspiciously
provoked by the emotion brought on by Goethe’s contemplation of Goethe.
Agnes dies, Laura sleeps with Paul.
13- Brigitte moves away. Laura replaces Agnes.
14- Comparison of Goethe and Beethoven.
Those who create deserve more respect than those who rule; that creativity
means more power, art more than politics; that the works of art, are immortal.
Yet Goethe doesn’t consider it useful to reveal this unpleasant truth.
He is certain that in eternity it would be they who would bow their heads
first.
15- Rolland praises Bettina but not Christine.
Why?
16- The gesture of longing for immortality only
knows of two points in space: the self here and the horizon far in the
distance. The wanting to make one become oneself. It begins
with a festering, unsatisfied love for the self, a self one who wants to
mark with expressive features and then send (by the gesture of longing
for immortality) on to the great stage of history. Hypertrophied
soul, the fuel without which the motor of history would stop turning.
Christine does not suffer from the hypertrophy of the soul and does not
yearn to exhibit herself on the great stage of history. Sometimes
a person with a hypertrophied soul dislikes seeing because he is burning
in the fire of his self and is never happy. Rolland prefers Bettina
because he too is a friend of progress and tears.
17- Goethe meets Hemmingway for the last time.
Goethe is elegantly dressed. Goethe says art is immortal but not
the artists. The figures people talk about have nothing to do with
them, one is not present in the image. One who doesn’t exist can
not be present. It is difficult to be indifferent to one’s image.
Such indifference is beyond human strength. One is capable of that
only after death. Man doesn’t know how to be mortal – to go to sleep,
to enjoy the delights of non-existence.
Chance,
1- Agnes leaves house with poem of Rimbaud for remembering.
2- Agnes enjoys nature. Paul does not.
3- Comparison of roads and routes. A road is a
tribute to space. A route is the triumphant devaluation of space.
Roads disappear from the human soul, man stops wanting to walk on his own
feet to enjoy it. He no longer sees his own life as a road, but as
a route. Agnes story goes from roads to routes, back to roads.
4- Mute coincidence, poetic coincidence, contrapuntal
coincidence, story-producing coincidence, morbid coincidence.
5- Freedom to declare Bernard compleat ass.
6- The beloved is not comparable. Agnes imagines
the army commander killing Father.
7- Agnes imagines being the princess and chased by enemy-Laura.
A coincidence to be sisters.
8- Agnes leaving for Bern for her job, taking the last
trip.
9- Kundera and Avenarius talk about suicidal girl.
Ground compared to reason. Ground is inscribed deep in all of us,
it is the ever-present cause of our actions. Kundera speaks of the
Reubens, as the incredible lightness of being.
10- Laura and Agnes are compared by the drawing
of arrows. Laura is full of dreams, her head looks up at heaven,
and her body is drawn to earth. Agnes’s body rises like a flame.
And her head is always slightly bowed, a skeptical head looking at the
ground.
11- Avenarius is a lover of Laura’s.
12- Agnes images the toy being given a soul, it
would feel ashamed. The basis of shame is not some personal mistake
of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what
we are without any choice in the matter, and that his humiliation is seen
by everyone. Beauty means that a particular specimen closely resembles
the original prototype. Ugliness, the poetic capriciousness of coincidence.
Beauty reveals the non-individuality, the impersonality of a face.
Father asks not to be looked before death, before entering a world without
faces.
13- Father burns everything about himself before
his death. Laura fights for the rights of the living against the
unjustified demands of the dead. The face that will disappear tomorrow
does not belong to the future dead but purely to the living.
14- Suicidal girl wants to throw herself away,
as if the one doing the throwing and the one being thrown are two different
people. The world, who answer our call, is not hers.
15- Suicidal girl stops at smaller route.
16- To escape Creator’s computer, a world which
you disagree, only by love or cloister. Living, there is no happiness
in that. Living is carrying one’s painful self through the world.
Being is happiness. Being one’s self.
17- Girl is not killed but three other cars crash.
18- Avenarius slashes tires. Caught by police,
accused of murder. Meets Paul who gives a business card. Paul
later finds out that his tires are slashed.
19- Paul receives phone call and rushes to hospital.
20- Agnes does not want Paul to see her dying.
She goes to a world with no faces.
21- Agnes has a smile that Paul does not understand
and that is meant for someone else.
The dial,
1- Thumb test: the movement of hands across the dial of
life.
2- Astrology: you won’t escape your life’s theme.
As soon as a hand completes its circle and returns to its starting point,
one phase is finished. When someone is small, he does not realized
that his life contains only one single theme. Rubens recalls young
girl at fourteen.
3- The period of athletic muteness, the period of metaphors,
the period of obscene truth, the period of Chinese whispers, mystic period
(a stream that is impersonal but to him who created us or one of his incarnations).
4- Rubens feels his fate is leading him to a private
life, not a public one, but one in success with women. He gives up
fame in painting in order to devote himself to life itself.
5- Ruben marries a beautiful woman to give up other women.
But they are both captives of pre-coital thinking, which equates love with
the absolute. Love in order to prove itself true, wishes to escape
the sensible, wishes to reject moderation, doesn’t wish to seem probable,
longs to be mad.
6- His short marriage is mere parenthesis in his life.
He divorces and announces that he has landed irrevocably beyond the border
of love.
7- Sells to rich people paintings that he disdains.
The highest morality consists in being useless.
8- Recalls wife: only is there love can the sight of
a woman’s body in the arms of another man arouse amazement and exciting
terror. The old moralizing truth that sex has no meaning without
love is suddenly vindicated and gains new significance.
9- Meets lute-player.
10- Recalls years before when he has met her for
the first time. He has touched her shame.
11- Shame means that we resist what we desire,
and feel ashamed that we desire what we resist. Rubens recalls being
called a voyeur. Shame has disappeared in Europe.
12- What pushes Rubens amorous adventures ‘beyond
the border of love’ is not a lack of feelings, but the desire to restrict
them to the erotic sphere, and to deprive them of any influence whatever
on the course of his life. Always tries to turn them episodic.
Lute-player offers her number to Rubens.
13- Lute player’s dances as she watches herself.
She observes her hips alternately twisting back and forth, she watches
her arms describing circles in front of her breasts and face as if she
wants to hide them, as if she wants to erase them. Her dance is a
pantomime of shame: a constant suggestion of concealed nakedness.
Rubens and lute-player are joined by friend one time, lute-player watches
herself in the mirror as if she is hypnotized while she is undressed.
14- Life is stuffed with episodes.
Aristotle ‘s definition of the episode: no episode is a priori condemned
to remain an episode forever, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself
the possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and
thus changing into a story or an adventure. Lute-player is
a real princess of episode, she has become ‘beloved beyond the border of
love’, the old imperative to slow down the course of events so that sexual
charge of love would not to too quickly exhausted.
15- For Rubens the dial has reached a new number.
He is no longer interested in new women but women of the past.
16- Darkness with eyes open. Light with eyes open.
Light with eyes shut.
17- Rubens tries to recall the women in his memory
but only arrives with a few images in his memory, of the lute-player.
18- The lute-player conceals herself behind her
image. The old teacher disappears for ever behind his image.
The model’s image separates itself from him. A person may conceal
himself behind his image, he can appear for ever behind his image, he can
be completely separated from his image, a person can never be his image.
The lute-player and Reubens both want to present their images to each other,
they don’t want the other to know who’s behind: the value of the physical
presence of the lute-player consists in her ability to continue merging
with her image.
19- Lute-player refuses to see Rubens again.
20- The five periods are over and Rubens has turned
a full circle. He sees woman G. The dial of life.
21- Compares old portraits with new ones.
A face is beautiful because it reveals the presence of thought, whereas
at the moment of laughter man does not think. Laughter arrives after,
it is a convulsion of the face and a convulsed person does not rule himself.
The absence of will and reason has become the ideal human state.
22- Rubens calls lute-player, Agnes, but discovers
that she has died.
23- Rubens is forever haunted by the image of Agnes,
dead.
Celebration,
1- Analogy of the beautiful women. Kundera tries
to understand slashing tires. Kundera speaks of describing someone
by metaphors. Kundera meets Paul.
2- Paul explains that it is more amusing reading about
Hemmingway than reading Hemmingway.
3- Paul introduces Laura. Paul explains Brigitte
has given birth and now living at home and fighting again with Laura who
also has given birth.
4- Laura performs waving gesture for Avenarius and leaves.
Paul also leaves.
5- Hedonists no longer exist. Because all of them
are eager for admiration and not for pleasure. For appearance and
not for reality. Reality no longer means anything to anyone.
If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself
important, if the in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo,
we have but one choice; to take the world as a whole and make it the object
of our game; to turn it into a toy. Avenarius salutes Kundera and
they both depart. Kundera imagines Agnes, holding the forget-me-not
as a last scarcely visible trace of beauty.
Ovid - The Metamorphoses
Gregory, Horace
"Then Jove raised thunderbolt against the earth-
And checked the blow. Would heaven
break in fire,
And flames pour over earth from pole to
pole?
He then remembered that the Fates had scored
A certain distant hour when sea and land,
Earth and the vault of heaven would consumed
In universal fire. He put aside
The lightning spear Cyclopean hands,
Made as his weapon to assert his will:
Another doom for man came to his mind
A death that stormed beneath the waves,
and fell
From air; and then dark rain began to fall."
Ovid's Metamorphoses explains natural phenomenon, supernatural powers, and human conducts through a collection of myth telling that at the same time embraces the theme of transformation - Omnia Mutantur.
An interpretation of the creation and the end
of the world is given in Book I. Prior to the Nature or God's creation
all was Chaos. However as man is made, degeneration slowly occurs
over time, from the Age of Gold, Silver, Bronze, to the Age of Iron.
Man no longer respects Nature and a flood is unleashed to rid of all evils
before an regeneration would take place.
Time and Timekeepers
Milham, Willis I.
"to measure time there must be an event that repeats itself again and again with perfect regularity and precision"
The book introduces the instruments that have been developed in the past two millenniums to keep time. It begins with the concept of observing the relative location of cosmic bodies in the planes of the ecliptic and vernal equinox. Until the uses of sundials, civilizations had to relate time keeping with astrology and relied on the measurement systems of sedestrial time, true apparent time, mean solar time, and standard solar time.
Water-clocks (clepsedra) and hour-glasses (clepsenmia) were devices which were no longer passive in the sense that they did not require the sun, but take the active driving power from other forms of nature - the flow of water and sand. This meant an independent system of keeping time that would serve their function regardless of relationship between the earth and the cosmos.
Mechanical devices were introduced in 1400's. The escapement,
which presented itself in many forms, such as the foliot or the pendulum,
was the key invention in regulating the usual driving power of a weight.
Mechanical clocks, being more practical in size and handling, gradually
replaced the other instruments. Their precision were maximized
with the help of the industrial revolution.
"Let us return to our question, and ask to which pattern did its constructor work, that which remains the same and unchanging or that which has come to be? If the world is beautiful and its maker good, clearly he had his eye on the eternal; if the alternative is true, on that which is subject to change. Clearly, of course, he had his eye on the eternal; for the world is the fairest of all things that have come into being and he is the best of causes."
Plato explains the origin of the world, as well as the causes of natural phenomenon by reasoning.
Critias
Plato
"But when the divine element in them became weakened by frequent admixture with mortal stock, and their human traits became predominant, they ceased to be able to carry their prosperity with moderation. To the perceptive eye the depth of their degeneration was clear enough, but to those whose judgment of true happiness is defective they seemed, in their pursuit of unbridled ambition and power, to be at the height of their fame and fortune. And the god of gods, Zeus, who reigns by law, and whose eye can see such things, when he perceived the wretched state of this admirable stock decided to punish them and reduce them to order by discipline."
Plato refers to the ideal society as depicted in Republic,
which is believed to have had once truly existed on the continent of Atlantis.
This myth speaks of a flourish and highly prosperous civilization that
falls into degeneration and finally punished by a violent ending.
Untimely Meditations - on the uses and
disadvantages of history of life
Nietzsche, Friedrich
"Thus the animal lives unhistorically: for it is contained in the present, like a number without any awkward fraction left over; it does not know how to dissimulate, it conceals nothing and at every instant appears wholly as what it is; it can therefore never be anything but honest. Man, on the other hand, braces himself against the great and ever greater pressure of what is past: it pushes him down or bends him sideways, it encumbers his steps as a dark, invisible burden which he can sometimes appear to disown and which in traffic with his fellow men he is only too glad to disown, so as to excite their envy. That is why it affects him like a vision of a lot paradise to see the herds grazing or, in closer proximity to him, a child which, having as yet nothing of the past to shake off, plays in blissful blindness between the hedges of past and future..."
Nietzsche questions the need of the services of
history, he argues that an excess of history is harmful to the living man.
History pertains to the living man in three respects: it pertains to him
as a being who acts and strives, as a being who preserves and reveres,
as a being who suffers and seeks deliverance.