Activations.

Rembrandt, Monk Reading, 1661

Reading is a means of listening.

Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It’s an act: you do it. You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling, shouting rush of the media. You take in what you can and want to take in, not what they shove at you fast and hard and loud in order to overwhelm and control you. Reading a story, you may be told something, but you’re not being sold anything. And though you’re usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another mind. You aren’t being brainwashed or co-opted or used; you’ve joined in an act of the imagination.

I know no reason why our media could not create a similar community of the imagination, as theater has often done in societies of the past, but they’re mostly not doing it. They are so controlled by advertising and profiteering that the best people who work in them, the real artists, if they resist the pressure to sell out, get drowned out by the endless rush for novelty, by the greed of the entrepreneurs.

Much of literature remains free of such co-optation, in part because a lot of books were written by dead people, who by definition are not greedy. And many living poets and novelists, though their publishers may be crawling abjectly after bestsellers, continue to be motivated less by the desire for gain than by the wish to do what they’d probably do for nothing if they could afford it, that is, practice their art—make something well, get something right. Literature remains comparatively, and amazingly, honest and reliable.

Books may not be “books,” of course, they may not be ink on wood pulp but a flicker of electronics in the palm of a hand. Incoherent and commercialised and worm-eaten with porn and hype and blather as it is, electronic publication offers those who read a strong new means of active community. The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.

Ursula K. Le Guin, from “The Operating Instructions”

Happy Birthday, Rembrandt

Rembrandt, Laughing Cavalier, 1628

Of course you will say that I ought to be practical and ought to try and paint the way they want me to paint. Well, I will tell you a secret. I have tried and I have tried very hard, but I can't do it. I just can't do it! And that is why I am just a little crazy. 

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, born on this date in 1606.

Magician.

You see, in The Syndics, Rembrandt is true to life, although even there he still goes into the higher — into the very highest — infinite. But yet — Rembrandt could do something else — when he didn’t have to be true in the literal sense, as he did in a portrait — when he could — make poetry — be a poet, that’s to say Creator. That’s what he is in The Jewish Bride. Oh, how Delacroix would have understood that very painting! What a noble sentiment, fathomlessly deep. One must have died many times to paint like this — is certainly applicable here. Still — one can speak about the paintings by Frans Hals, he always remains — on Earth. Rembrandt goes so deep into the mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language.  It is with justice that they call Rembrandt — magician — that’s no easy occupation.

Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his brother, Theo, 10 October 1885

Activity.

Rembrandt, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, 1653

This is the principal point:  with what kind of activity is man to occupy his leisure?

Aristotle

Grace.

Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, 1629

There is a twilight zone in our hearts that we ourselves cannot see. Even when we know quite a lot about ourselves -- our gifts and weaknesses, our ambitions and aspirations, our motives and our drives -- large parts of ourselves remain in the shadow of consciousness. This is a very good thing. We will always remain partially hidden to ourselves. Other people, especially those who love us, can often see our twilight zones better than we ourselves can. The way we are seen and understood by others is different from the way we see and understand ourselves. We will never fully know the significance of our presence in the lives of our friends. That's a grace, a grace that calls us not only to humility, but to a deep trust in those who love us. It is the twilight zones of our hearts where true friendships are born.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Through.

Rembrandt, Monk Reading, 1661

When evening comes, I go back home, and go to my study. On the threshold I take off my work clothes, covered in mud and filth, and put on the clothes an ambassador would wear. Decently dressed, I enter the ancient courts of rulers who have long since died. There I am warmly welcomed, and I feed on the only food I find nourishing, and was born to savor. I am not ashamed to talk to them, and to ask them to explain their actions. And they, out of kindness, answer me. Four hours go by without my feeling any anxiety. I forget every worry. I am no longer afraid of poverty, or frightened of death. I live entirely through them.

Niccolò Machiavelli, from his letter to Francesco Vettori, December 10, 1513

Friends.

Koninck, Philosopher with an Open Book, after Rembrandt's Philosopher in Meditation,1645

BOOKS and THOUGHTS

Old ghosts that death forgot to ferry

Across the Lethe of the years -

These are my friends, and at their tears

I weep and with their mirth am merry.

On a high tower, whose battlements

Give me all heaven at a glance,

I lie long summer nights in trance,

Drowsed by the murmurs and the scents

That rise from earth, while the sky above me

Merges its peace with my soul's peace,

Deep meeting deep. No stir can move me,

Nought break the quiet of my release:

In vain the windy sunlight raves

At the hush and gloom of polar caves.

Aldous Huxley

Happy Birthday, Rembrandt

Rembrandt, An Old Man in Military Costume, about 1631

Rembrandt van Rijn was born on this day in 1606.

Simon Schama's "Rembrandt" from his Power of Art series ...

Happy Birthday, Rembrandt

Rembrandt, An Old Man in Military Costume (detail), 1631

Rembrandt van Rijn was born on this day in 1606.

Schama's masterful "Rembrandt" from his Power of Art series ...

Tracy Chevalier and Schama present their ideas on the depiction of the human condition in the works of Vermeer and Rembrandt, respectively ...

Strength.

Rembrandt, Scholar Reading, 1631

When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously “experience” an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from all Dasein of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes then, there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the question: what for? — where to? — and what then? 

The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline and to appraise it as such. This simple observation has nothing to do with cultural pessimism — nor with any optimism either, of course; for the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings to a mass, the hatred and mistrust of everything creative and free has already reached such proportions throughout the whole earth that such childish categories as pessimism and optimism have long become laughable.

Martin Heidegger

Happy Birthday, Rembrandt

Rembrandt, The Supper at Emmaus, 1629

Rembrandt van Rijn was born on this day in 1606.

Accessible.

Command.

To learn to see- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides.

This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality.

One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Top:  Rembrandt, Self-portrait, 1628

Middleman: Reynolds, Self-portrait, 1749

Bottom: Richmond, Self-portrait, 1840

Thank you, Kurt.

Happy Birthday, Rembrandt

Rembrandt,  The Prophetess Anna, 1631

Rembrandt van Rijn was born on this date in 1606.

Try to put well in practice what you already know; and in so doing, you will in good time, discover the hidden things which you now inquire about. Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know. 

Rembrandt

The Rembrandt episode of Simon Schama's masterpiece, Power of Art ...

Experience.

I’ve had this experience at the Met of being in a room with Rembrandts and having the uncanny feeling of these people, these faces surrounded by black, looking through their windows at you.

Richard Butler

Practice.

Rembrandt, An Old Man in Military Costume, 1631

Try to put well in practice what you already know; and in so doing, you will in good time, discover the hidden things which you now inquire about. Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know. 

Rembrandt

Imagine.

Rembrandt, Self-portrait (detail), 1634 

Imagine someone pointing to a place in the iris of a Rembrandt eye and saying, "The walls of my room should be painted this color."

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Happy Birthday, Rembrandt

Rembrandt, Philosopher Studying with an Open Book, 1627

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born on this date in 1606.

Of course you will say that I ought to be practical and ought to try and paint the way they want me to paint. Well, I will tell you a secret. I have tried and I have tried very hard, but I can't do it. I just can't do it! And that is why I am just a little crazy.

Rambrandt

Simply.

Rembrandt, A Scholar Reading, 1631

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

L.P. Jacks

See.

Rembrandt, Old Man in Military Costume (detail), 1631

To love your neighbor is to see your neighbor. To see somebody, really to see somebody, you have to love somebody. You have to see people the way Rembrandt saw the old lady, not just a face that comes at you the way a dry leaf blows at you down the path like all other dry leaves, but in a way that you realize the face is something the likes of which you have never seen before and will never see again. To love somebody we must see that person's face, and once in a while we do. Usually it is because something jolts us into seeing it.

Frederick Buechner

Thank you, Execupundit.