#Walter pater

[thefugitivesaint]

Errol Le Cain (1941-1989), ''Cupid and Psyche'' by Walter Pater, 1977 Source

[grandhotelabyss]

I hope Tumblr can forgive the piquant way these Twitter anons phrase some things, because the above mapping is basically correct, except that the phenomenon mapped is bigger than America's recent generational divides—bigger, in fact, than America. I give you, for example, the peroration of an article by friend-of-the-blog Nancy Armstrong. The article was published in 2001, before social media and when the Zoomers were still in the cradle. Armstrong's polemical target is Richard Rorty, whom she likens to the Victorian English liberals Mill and Arnold, seeing all three as panicked by the encroachment of popular heterogeneity upon the sphere of a unified national culture, whether late-19th-century English culture or late-20th-century American culture. For the purposes of anon's framing, Rorty (b. 1931) is a Boomer and Armstrong (b. 1938) is a Zoomer, but, as you see from the dates, that can't be right. What anon takes to be American Zoomer ideology goes back at least to the first Late Victorians who rebelled against Arnold (Mill/Arnold = Boomers; Pater/Wilde = Zoomers), themselves the distant founders of our queer politics defined by the separation of sign (gender) from referent (body), which, as anon rightly says, have become the power politics of empire today in a world-historical incidence of what I have in a narrower but related circumstance traced as the path "from counterculture to hegemony."

In our present cultural milieu, it is even less practical to believe that the cultural turn can be reversed by detaching politics from culture and restoring the mimetic priorities of old-fashioned realism than to long for the aesthetic autonomy of New Criticism or look for hope in the inspirational works of our literary tradition. To come to this conclusion is to admit that any responsible political action rests on understanding the degree to which the world we inhabit actually depends on the way that we read and represent the things and people in it. Changing an established world picture is an admittedly monumental task that may well begin and end in the literary classroom. But precisely because our Victorian forebears were so successful in establishing their picture of the world as the world itself, the fantasy that one can remake one’s culture through criticism is not only a legacy that they bequeathed to us. That fantasy also offers an effective means of displacing the picture of a world divided into homogeneously populated nations that our Victorian forebears worked so hard to put in place. The crises that arise when that old ideal of the nation is severely challenged do not disrupt or threaten American culture. Our culture is a culture in crisis, and some of us like it that way.

—Nancy Armstrong, "Who's Afraid of the Cultural Turn?" differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 12.1 (2001)

[vital-information]

“[Walter] Pater’s Madonna seems burdened by her knowledge of the profound difference that Christ’s birth will make. Pater suggests that Mary is saddened in particular by the inevitability of her own deification as a result of having borne the Son of God. As he describes the infant Christ guiding his mother’s hand to trace out the words of the Marian Liturgy, Pater suggests that the Virgin was exalted against her will...

What is depressing to Pater, it seems to me, about the moment of her glorification is that it entails the forgetting of her life of obscurity and servitude. Once God looks on her humiliation, it is transformed into glory: as if magically, her shame is transmuted into pride. Pater suggests that if such a deification means erasing the record of one’s life on earth, it might be better to resist it.”

Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History

[pandaemoniumpancakes]

For the essence of humanism is that one belief of which he seems never to have doubted, that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality—no language they have spoken, no oracle by which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate or expended time and zeal.

Walter Pater, from ‘Pico della Mirandola’ in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry.

[marshmellow-dragon]

Walter Pater sent Oscar Wilde a letter saying, "I was at home sick and when I read your story. I loved it. It really comforted me at a time when I was in pain." Thank you Mr. Pater. That was exactly what happened to me, so thank you for your ability to premonish my life experiences and for your letter to Mr. Wilde telling him exactly what I want to tell him now.

[puffinet]

In all these instances, then, Dionysus punishes his enemies by repaying them in kind. But a deeper vein of poetry pauses at the sorrow, and in the conflict does not too soon anticipate the final triumph. It is Dionysus himself who exhausts these sufferings. Hence, in many forms—reflexes of all the various phases of his wintry existence—the image of Dionysus Zagreus, the Hunter—of Dionysus in winter—storming wildly on the dark Thracian hills, from which, like Ares and Boreas, he originally descends into Greece; the thought of the hunter concentrating into itself all men's forebodings over the departure of the year at its richest, and the death of all sweet things in the long-continued cold, when the sick and the old and little children, gazing out morning after morning on the dun sky, can hardly believe in the return any more of a bright day. Or he is connected with the fears, the dangers and hardships of the hunter himself, lost or slain sometimes, far from home, in the dense woods of the mountains, as he seeks his meat so ardently; becoming, in his chase, almost akin to the wild beasts—to the wolf, who comes before us in the name of Lycurgus, one of his bitterest enemies—and a phase, therefore, of his own personality, in the true intention of the myth. This transformation, this image of the beautiful soft creature become an enemy of human kind, putting off himself in his madness, wronged by his own fierce hunger and thirst, and haunting, with terrible sounds, the high Thracian farms, is the most tragic note of the whole picture, and links him on to one of the gloomiest creations of later romance, the werewolf, the belief in which still lingers in Greece, as in France, where it seems to become incorporate in the darkest of all romantic histories, that of Gilles de Retz.

Greek essays, Walter Pater

[idrinkcoffeeallthetime]

A book, like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happy accident counts with us for something more than its independent value.

Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean

[orpheusdrinkinga40inadeathbasket]

the sugarcubes, "traitor" / walter pater, "diaphaneité"

[polyanthea]

With him the beginning of life has all the characteristics of resurrection: it is like the recovery of suspended health or animation, with its gratitude, its effusion, its eloquence.

-Walter Pater on Michelangelo, in The Renaissance (1873)

[geopolicraticus]

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Walter Pater and an Aestheticist Philosophy of History    

Sunday 04 August 2024 is the 185th anniversary of the birth of Walter Horatio Pater (04 August 1839 – 30 July 1894), who was born in London’s East End on this date in 1839.

Pater’s book on the renaissance, first published in 1873 as Studies in the History of the Renaissance, and revised in 1877 as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, culminated in a passionate philosophy of life based on the ideals of the renaissance, as Pater understood them from his Victorian perspective: “To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” But can this philosophy of life be translated into a philosophy of history?

Quora:              https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/ 

Discord:           https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD

Links:               https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/

Newsletter:     http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/

Text post:        https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/walter-pater-and-the-aesthetic-conception

Video:              https://youtu.be/WuU2u6ZSVh0

Podcast:          https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/TG76ZJNMMLb

[e-sodergran]

...

[thefugitivesaint]

Errol Le Cain (1941-1989), ''Cupid and Psyche'' by Walter Pater, 1977 Source

[karmaalwayswins]

We're in Hell "What White Noise Tells Us About The Mona Lisa" (2023)

Entertaining video essay that discusses the history of Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa", the experience of viewing it as a painting, and the experience of viewing it as an iconic image (aided by the ideas of Don Delillo and Walter Benjamin).

[porqueamamosler]

"Livros são umas espécie de refúgio claustral, das vulgaridades do mundo de hoje."

Walter Pater (1839-1894)

[pandaemoniumpancakes]

A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?    To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike.

Walter Pater, from ‘Conclusion’ in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry.

   “While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend [...] With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, well shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.”

   “Theory, hypothesis, beliefs depend a great deal on temperament; they are, so to speak, mere equivalents of temperament.” (from Chapter XX in Marius the Epicurean)

[littleouroboros]

Just starting my NG++ run