Walter Pater (1839–1894), an English writer and art critic, closes his book about the Renaissance with a question that arises even when there is no painting before us. If the number of heartbeats available to a person can be counted, how should that person use the senses? Among the things Pater asks us to imagine is the face of a friend. We know it so well that we might easily think there is nothing new to discover there today.
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
– Walter Pater, The Renaissance, o. J., p. 197.[1]
A flame flickers and consumes itself. A gemstone holds its shape. Pater brings the two together in a single image. The stone helps us understand the sharpness he wants a moment to possess. A shade of red, the scent of a particular thing or another person’s gesture deserves to be perceived precisely enough to distinguish it from all its near relations. The flame sets a limit to the time in which we can do that. Even the liveliest impression cannot be kept intact simply by setting it aside for later.
A little further on Pater remarks on the roughness of an eye that sees two people or two situations as alike. His examples come as readily from ordinary acquaintance as from art. The friend’s face stands beside a work of the artist’s hands and a discovery that lifts a previously narrow horizon. At a second meeting the friend has had another experience or has something different on their mind. Looking with yesterday’s eyes may mean missing the very expression that made the meeting worthwhile.
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Here all the little blades of grass and wood and stone and all things are one.
Meister Eckhart (um 1260–vor 1329)
Meister Eckharts mystische Schriften. In unsere Sprache übertragen von Gustav Landauer · p. 126
Our translation from Gustav Landauer’s German rendering
The great mother is the earth. The stones in the earth’s body, I think, are what is meant by her bones. These are what we are told to throw behind our backs.
Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE–17/18 CE)
Metamorphoses · 1951 · p. 30–31
Our translation from the Latin
Perhaps this block of marble is only a heap of infinitely many living bodies, or like a lake full of fish, although the eye can ordinarily distinguish these animals only in bodies that have partly decayed.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)
Brief an Antoine Arnauld vom 30. April 1687 · 1846 · p. 96–97
Our translation
When you bend down towards all this activity, it is almost as if you could overhear the hidden history of how plants grow and the quiet beating of the mountain’s heart.
Very little. One makes marble out of flesh, and flesh out of marble.
Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
Œuvres complètes de Diderot, tome II. Philosophie · p. 105
Our translation
The fleeting sunbeam has been captured and enclosed in your mysterious core.
Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863)
Excerpt. Our translation from the German edition of 1904
I thank you, silent stone, and bend down towards you: I owe you my life as a plant.
The precious stones which are the foundations denote truths Divine shining through in the ultimate of order.
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772)
Arcana Coelestia · 1938 · p. 318
Clause from the cited English edition. Initial capital supplied.
The finest artist has no conception that a single block of marble does not enclose within its excess. Only the hand that obeys the intellect can reach it.
And he the bard, a crystal soul Sphered and concentric with the whole.
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