Kirk Bartha

Written 1167: [The monks of Rievaulx] are welded together by such firm bands of charity that their society is as 'terrible as an army with banners.'

[Kirk Bartha @kirkbartha]

“Pitiful are those who leave the basic word unspoken, but wretched are those who instead of that address the ideas with a concept or a slogan as if that were their name!” Martin Buber, I and Thou

[Kirk Bartha @kirkbartha]

“…relation is reciprocity… inventing is finding. Forming is discovery… ideas are just as little enthroned above our heads as they reside inside them; they walk among us and step up to us.” Martin Buber, I and Thou

[Kirk Bartha @kirkbartha]

“What a splendid religion for the weak to flee to for liberation! He asks for the truth which will set him free; and it is believed that it is expedient for him to be deceived!” Augustine, City of God, Book IV, Chapter 27

[Kirk Bartha @kirkbartha]

“Beauty is one way in which truth occurs in unconcealedness… Art then is the becoming and happening of truth… The nature of poetry, in turn, is the founding (bestowing, grounding, beginning) of truth.” Martin Heidegger

[Kirk Bartha @kirkbartha]

“Hyperbole! can you not rise from my memory triumph-crowned, today a magic scrawl (grimoire) which lies in a book that is iron bound…” Mallarmé, Prose

[Kirk Bartha @kirkbartha]

“Pero comprender puoi che tutta morta fia nostra conoscenza da quel punto, che del futuro fia chiusa la porta.” Dante (regarding prophecy in hell) Canto X

[Kirk Bartha @kirkbartha]

“A fairytale, like a butterfly or a bee, helps itself on all sides, sips at every wholesome flower, and spoils not one.” George MacDonald, The Fantastic Imagination, 1893

[Kirk Bartha @kirkbartha]

In Rilke’s Hours II.34 thinking of Nate out West tree-planting, “My hands are bloody from digging. I lift them, hold them open in the wind, so they can branch like a tree.”

“Zwischen den Hämmern besteht unser Herz” in Rilke’s 9th Duino Elegy

[Kirk Bartha @kirkbartha]

“So they go in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.” Winston Churchill, 1936

[Kirk Bartha @kirkbartha]

“M’illumino d’immenso” Giuseppe Ungaretti

[Kirk Bartha @kirkbartha]

“They moved away from the mirror. Now the two comics were walking together… As he conversed with his companion, he was constantly forced to look back.” Yuri Olesha, Envy

[Kirk Bartha @kirkbartha]

“The emotional-volitional tone of a once-occurrent actual consciousness is conveyed more aptly by the word faithfulness [being-true-to].” Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act

[Kirk Bartha @kirkbartha]

“I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.” Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

[Kirk Bartha @kirkbartha]

“I circle around God, around the primordial tower. I’ve been circling for a thousand years and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?”Rilke’s Book of Hours

[Kirk Bartha @kirkbartha]

“Today I invite you onto the ark, which will bear us across the rapid stream of time and onto new shores… you must be the ambassador of dreams…” Czeslaw Milosz, Treatise on Morals

[Kirk Bartha @kirkbartha]

“Every interpretation has to adapt itself to the hermeneutical situation to which it belongs.” Gadamer, Truth and Method

[Kirk Bartha @kirkbartha]

“Theology cannot again be justified except with audacity.” Franz Overbeck

[Kirk Bartha @kirkbartha]

“We renounce no friendship. But it may be the part of a friend to rebuke a friend’s folly.” JRR Tolkien, The Silmarillion

[Kirk Bartha @kirkbartha]

“If you want a friend, you must wage war on him, and in order to wage war, you must be capable of it, capable of having a ‘best enemy’.” Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship

[Kirk Bartha @kirkbartha]

“Paralyzed by the vacuum of words, by the chasm which has opened between individual perception and the frozen generalities of speech, the writer falls silent.” George Steiner, After Babel