waste

Romantic sincerity

1. Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e. the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all simply views of one object seen from different angles.
2. In poetry too every whole can be a part and every part really a whole.
3. As soon as one begins to see all in everything what one says usually becomes obscure. One begins to speak with the tongues of angels.

Exemplary sentences from the OED

Small sparkes and spinthers of divine light
As one same ground indifferently doth breed
Their scintillation or their trepidation
The sky is of a dead milk-white
Me rewis that the worlde began.

Newes war sparpelit athort the countrey
Round cinereous bodies
We must be sparesome now
Your groat meal, and gray meal; sand, dust, and seeds
Counterfayted of brimstone and quicke siluer.

Men and wyfmen and children deserited
We dydon swa swa ∂u us hete
I quitted all the rest 
The yeax and vomite followed
Very dark green, almost black
In a reuen dych myn mete is don.

We bei∂ all siker of godes behate
Sa hawtane and dispitous
He makth him siek, whan he is heil
Destroyeth the myght and the rygour of the sowle.

A sort of meta

"The race is not always to the … shit!", Tom read, disappointed.

Losing face

Quassim Cassam, quoted in Cheryl Chen:

…egocentric spatial perception involves a sense of oneself as a bodily presence in the world. For it is one's Body [sic] that is at the origin of egocentric space, and in relation to which other bodies are experienced as being to the left or right, above or below.

It is one's body (I assume, not having read the book from which the quotation is taken, the one's Body is something more involved) that is in fact at the origin of egocentric space, and in relation to which etc.; that need not mean that egocentric spatial perception involves a sense of oneself as a bodily presence, even to the extent of meaning that experiencing something as left involves a sense of what direction to turn one's head to bring it into view as neither to the left nor to the right. (Even someone who takes an enactive or sensorimotor approach to perceptual experiences could, I think, say that, though I can't recall if anyone who takes such an approach whom I've read does.)

I stopped reading Chen's article at the point at which I saw the quotation (just in order to write this post, not for good or anything), so I don't yet know what she will say about it; I stopped, though, because Cassam's claim harmonizes poorly with an experience which I have occasionally had, not, it is true, both recently and often, but recently (while camping) and formerly often, of being, in a strange way, almost surprised to remember, or realize the significance of the fact (it is hard to know how to put this), I have a face, and it looks a certain way, and other people see it when they look at me.—In the preceding period it is as if I have, rather, a moving view on the world, and a voice which originates from more or less the origin of that view. This attitude can more easily be brought on if I have not seen myself in a while, which makes camping congenial to it; it obviously does not survive the realization that I am so attitudinizing, which need not be brought on by mirrors or the like, though it can, strangely, survive all sorts of face-oriented activities such as eye-rubbing.

It may be that Bodies differ enough from bodies that this doesn't touch on anything Cassam says; I don't know. (For instance, if a Body is something like Merleau-Ponty's "phenomenal body"—at least as I think of that—it needn't be anything worrisome, though if that is the case I'm not sure how much support awareness as a Body can lend materialism about self-awareness, which is the subject of Chen's essay.) Qassam and Chen are really just the occasion for my noting the phenomenon, because I find it interesting, especially when it occurs, and also because whenever I try to describe it to others, I mostly get strange looks.