Aristotle is a skeleton.
January 18 - February 8, 2025
Progress in any aspect is a movement through changes of terminology.
Wisdom asks nothing more.
Art, broadly, is the form of life or the sound or color of life.
Considered as form (in the abstract) it is often indistinguishable from life itself.
A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite.
The imagination wishes to be indulged.
That part of the truth of the world that has its origin in the feelings.
Values other than those merely of the eye and ear.
The aesthetic order includes all other orders but is not limited them.
When one is young everything is physical; when one is old everything is psychic.
I believe in the image.
The satisfactions of nature.
It is necessary to propose an enigma to the mind. The mind always proposes a solution.
Aristotle is a skeleton.
The body is the great poem.
The fundamental difficulty in any art is the problem of the normal.
Society is a sea.
Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.
To touch with the imagination in respect to reality.
Life is not people and scene but thought and feeling.
A change of style is a change of subject.
Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.
To “subtilize experience” = to apprehend the complexity of the world, to perceive the intricacy of appearance.
Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
Text excerpted from Adagia by Wallace Stevens, first published in 1957.