Inspirators
Bento (Baruch) de Spinoza (1632-1677)
You don't have to believe in Spinoza's work to be impressed by it and start seeing the world around you differently. We are used to consider our feelings or passions as things of ourselves in the first place, we associate them with an active attitude and initiative, but Spinoza speaks in his Ethics of passivities, passive states, things we undergo passively through outward causes, and calls them confused ideas.
Spinoza was ultramodern because his work was full of hyperlinks even though they didn't exist at the time. If there will ever be practicable electronic books, Spinoza's Ethics will be one of the first works I shall read with one.
For anyone who is into psychology part III of Ethics, 'Nature and the origin of our passions' is a must. You'll have to renounce your beliefs in all kinds of idealistic chimeras for a while but the reward is enormous: a wonderful survey of the inner life of the mammal man, and there is the chance that you'll experience an intense feeling of liberation through what Nietzsche called the highest attainable: amor fati, the love of fate.
Important proposition: 'everything can become a passion'.
A nice English website
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
It was the winter of 1973 and I wanted to become a writer. Alcoholic Jan de Jong often visited the Amsterdam pub 'Marietje' in the Westerstraat. Old and grubby, usually with greenish snot in his beard, he was an ironic observer, that is if he wasn't rolling around the floor wrestling one of the other alcoholics. He ate so little he weighed almost nothing. Once during this winter when I had him sitting on the back of my bicycle, there was an ice-cold wind that, I imagined, went right through the marrow of his bones, but he babbled on cheerfully. I was afraid he would be blown of the bike. I respected him because I'd heard that he once had published a book of poetry. Once when we were talking about writers he mumbled something unintelligible. Something in the emphasis he put on the syllables made me curious. After a few I-beg-your-pardons he shouted, 'There is only one great writer in the world.' I said, 'And who might that be?' Again, I didn't hear his answer at first. Could important facts about life and literature come from such decrepit lungs and from behind such a snotty beard? He had to repeat his answer a few times before I could make it out. That was my introduction to Wallace Stevens.
Some years later, when I was doing Dutch Studies in Amsterdam, I stumbled upon Wallace Stevens in Abrams' Natural Supernaturalism as a modern representative of the Romantic aim to bring people happiness (as far as possible, I suppose).
For years I have been immersing myself in Stevens' poems. Sometimes, after a period of intensive study, aided among others by of the critical essays of Frank Kermode, I think I'm beginning to understand the poems. Immediately they lose all liveliness and become uninteresting. Poems, like novels, are to be experienced rather than understood. I put the Collected Poems away. Six months later I pick it up once more and again it does its magic. Wallace Stevens, president of an insurance company, and one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.
One of the better sites about Wallace Stevens, with an article on Stevens' deathbed conversion to catholicism (if it is really true, because priests are forbidden to blab about confessions).
* * * * * * *
