Pocket mirror ost mead tree1/7/2024 Art from Thomas Wright’s An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, 1750 - the first book to describe the spiral shape of the Milky Way. The terrifying immensity of the firmament’s abyss is an illusion, an external reflection of our own abysses, perceived “in a mirror.” We should invert our eyes and practice a sublime astronomy in the infinitude of our heart… If we see the Milky Way, it is because it actually exists in our souls. would be a skylight through which one might submerge himself in the true Abyss, which is the soul of man. Translated by Borges himself, Bloy writes: No one, Borges argues, has taken this precarious hypothesis to more surefooted ground than the French novelist, poet, and philosophical pamphleteer Léon Bloy (July 11, 1846–November 3, 1917).ĭigging through the surviving fragments of Bloy’s written thought, he surfaces a passage emblematic of Bloy’s uncommon physics of the metaphysical - an 1894 passage fomented by his interest in the teachings of St. The outer world - forms, temperatures, the moon - is a language humans have forgotten or which we can scarcely distinguish. Paul’s famous cryptic statement Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate - loosely translated as We now see through a mirror, enigmatically - Borges considers the tribe of thinkers who have perched their efforts to reconcile knowledge and mystery, the scientific and the spiritual, on the assumption that “the history of the universe - and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives - has an incalculable, symbolical value.” With his characteristic poetic precision, he condenses this common and somewhat tired hypothesis: It takes a special grandeur of spirit to know the limits of your self-knowledge.Ī recent brush with those limits reminded me of a short, stunning essay by Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899–June 14, 1986) titled “The Mirror of Enigmas,” found in his Labyrinths ( public library) - the 1962 collection of stories, essays, and parables that gave us his timeless parable of the divided self and his classic refutation of time. It takes a great sobriety of spirit to know your own depths - and your limits.
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