Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Love strikes me as just so many prickly spokes on the wheel of samsara. And yet, I'm not willing to disregard it completely - i sense i'd be thrown into an almost entirely new (but not entirely!) sort of poverty if I do. Love has to be re-invented -- not my words, someone else's. I wont say whose lest I get obvious and tiresome.

Schopenhauer evidently has a lot to say on the subject:

"The aesthetic experience temporarily emancipates the subject from the Will's domination and raises them to a level of pure perception. "On the occurrence of an aesthetic appreciation, the will thereby vanishes entirely from consciousness."
The personality of the artist was also supposed to be less subject to Will than most: such a person was a Schopenhauerian genius, a person whose exceptional predominance of intellect over Will made them relatively aloof from earthly cares and concerns. The poet living in a garret, the absent-minded professor, Vincent van Gogh in the madhouse, are all (at least in the popular mind) examples of Schopenhauer's geniuses: so fixed on their art that they neglect the "business of life" that in Schopenhauer's mind meant only the domination of the evil and painful Will. For Schopenhauer, the relative lack of competence of the artist and the thinker for practical pursuits was no mere stereotype: it was cause and effect.”

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