File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2001/heidegger.0105, message 40


Date: Mon, 28 May 2001 10:48:00 -0700
From: Kenneth Johnson <kenn-AT-beef.sparks.nv.us>
Subject: Re: body & soul



Rene Bakker wrote:

>Joseph Conrad, in Under western eyes, writes of Razumov,
>when he is finally all alone and on a little island in Geneva,
>above him a bronze Rousseau, writer of the Social Contract:
>
>""There can no doubt that now I am safe", he thought. His fine ear
>could detect the faintly accentuated murmurs of the current
>breaking against the point of the island, and he forgot himself
>in listening to them with interest. But even to his acute sense of
>hearing the sound was too elusive.
>
>"Extraordinary occupation I am giving myself up to", he
>murmured. And it occurred to him that this was about the only
>sound he could listen to innocently, and for his own pleasure,
>as it were. Yes, the sound of water, the voice of the wind -
>completely foreign to human passions. All the other sounds
>of this earth brought contamination to the solitude of a soul.
>
>This was Mr. Razumov's feeling, the soul, of course, being his own,
>and the word being used not in the theological sense, but standing,
>as far as I can understand it, for that part of Mr. Razumov which was
>not his body, and more specially in danger from the fires of this earth.
>And it must be admitted that in Mr. Razumov's case the bitterness of
>solitude from which he suffered was not an altogether morbid
>phenomenon."


"--the sound of the water, the voice of the wind - completely foreign to
human passions."

yes, this dazzling "solitude of a soul" and a recognition of it as
universally particular echoes to a T Conrad's intuitive grasp at the
heartpoint of my Nietzsche quote in thread "The Irresponsibility of Art":

"It is impossible for the Dionysian man not to understand any suggestion of
whatever kind, he ignores no signal from the emotions, he possesses to the
highest degree the instinct for understanding and divining, just as he
possesses the art of communication to the highest degree. He enters into
every skin, into every emotion; he is continually transforming himself."

Conrad is master communicator here, the great diviner of the untheologic
flow of the emotions and of their transformational headwaters in the heart,
no?

a "place" where "the bitterness of solitude" is an ineffably sweet pleasure
flowing out from within the suprarational irrational heart - all soulfully
unmorbid, to the max!

where the "foreign and irreducible" is our native land -

kenneth

>-----------------------------------
>drs. Ren de Bakker
>Universiteitsbibliotheek Amsterdam
>Afdeling Catalogisering
>tel. 020-5252368
>
>
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