…accordingly how thinking in its absoluteness follows upon a seeming reality.” (Penguin, 1996)
In a later version, still Hannay:
“…thus on how thinking in its absoluteness takes over from a seeming reality.” (Princeton, 2007)
“In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.”
(opening line, Wittgenstein’s Mistress)
“What an extraordinary change takes place … when for the first time the fact that everything depends upon how a thing is thought first enters the consciousness, when, in consequence, thought in its absoluteness replaces an apparent reality.”
— Kierkegaard
(an epigraph to *Wittgenstein’s Mistress*)
In Hannay’s translation:
(September 4, 1837)
“A remarkable transition occurs when one begins to study the grammar of the indicative and the subjunctive, because here for the first time one becomes conscious that everything depends on how it is thought, …
“Whenever a few pages of Kant had tired me out, I fled to Kierkegaard. … This book [Either/Or] confronted me with question after question that I had always divined but never articulated to myself, and excited me more than any other book.”
— Walter Benjamin (at 21, in a letter)
“But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul…”
(Moby-Dick, Ch. 29)
#MelvilleMonday 🐳