I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal. [Vladimir Nabokov »Speak, Memory« (1951)]
The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet that thing, for the purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all. [William James »The Variety of Religious Experience« (1902)]
[»Παράδεισος II«, Lorena Kirk-Giannoulis]
Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head. They’re all the time talkin’ about it, but it’s jus’ in their head. [John Steinbeck »Of Mice and Men« (1937)]
Beyond the earth,
beyond the farthest skies
I try to find Heaven and Hell.
Then I hear a solemn voice that says:
'Heaven and hell are inside.'
[Omar Khayyam »Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam«. Translated by Edward FitzGerald (1859)]
Nobody could stand an eternity of Heaven.
[George Bernard Shaw »Man and Superman« (1903)]
[»Zelem #2 {25 m² Himmel}«, R. A. ol-Omoum]
Oh
threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!
One thing at least is
certain - This Life
flies;
One thing is certain and the rest is Lies -
The Flower
that once has blown forever dies.
[Omar Khayyam »Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam«. Translated by Edward FitzGerald (1859)]
[»Παράδεισος IV«, Lorena Kirk-Giannoulis]
Den Himmel überlassen wir den Engeln und den Spatzen.
[Aus: Heinrich Heine »Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen« (1844)]
But I will now go further, and confess to you that men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving. [George Bernard Shaw »Man and Superman« (1903)]
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). [Vladimir Nabokov »Speak, Memory« (1951)]
Wir wurden geschaffen, um im Paradies zu leben, das Paradies war bestimmt uns zu dienen. Unsere Bestimmung ist geändert worden; daß dies auch mit der Bestimmung des Paradieses geschehen wäre, wird nicht gesagt. [Franz Kafka »Nachgelassene Schriften« (1918)]
We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be. [Sigmund Freud »The Future of an Illusion« (1927)]
[»Παράδεισος VI«, Lorena Kirk-Giannoulis]
In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognised by clearing away "prejudice" or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. [Richard Rorty »Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity« (1989)]
