Noctilume @ReignofQuality

"... not only to preserve but even to strengthen the roots that are still fixed in the primal ground? This is the real question of our existence."

"... question, which we think of crucial importance: Might it be possible to lessen the fear even as the automatism progresses or, as can be foreseen, approaches perfection? Would it not be possible to both remain on the ship and retain one's autonomy of decision - that is, ..."

"Whether our modern instance represents a very unusual kind of fear or whether it is simply the return of one and the same cosmic anxiety in the style of the times - we will not pause on this but will rather raise the opposite ..." - Ernst Junger, "The Forest Passage" (1951)

"Magic is nothing else but the wisdom of The Creator revealed and planted in the creature." - Thomas Vaughan, "Magia Adamica" (1650)

"... Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love." - J. R. R. Tolkien, Letter to Christopher Tolkien (1944)

"The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.”

"... Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite--I will call it Eucatastrophe." - J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories" (1947)

For Plato and the Christian tradition, beauty leads up toward the good For Mishima it leads down: to look hard at beauty is to meet "the darkest thoughts that exist in this world," because beauty is perfect and life falls short

Mishima's narrator, Mizoguchi, a stutterer and a priest's son, grows obsessed with the temple's beauty until it seems to stand between him and life itself

"Originally I was not possessed by gloomy thoughts. My concern, what confronted me with my real problem, was beauty alone. But I do not think that the war affected me by filling my mind with gloomy thoughts. When ..." - Yukio Mishima, "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion" (1956)

Fancy, by contrast, only rearranges fixed memories Coleridge drew on Schelling's philosophy of art, and through Owen Barfield the distinction passed into the Inklings' conversations about myth and imagination

Every act of seeing, he says, echoes God's own creative "I AM.” The secondary Imagination is the poet's version of the same power, working with the will: it breaks perceived things down in order to remake them as a new unity

"The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I ..." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Biographia Literaria" (1817)