“If soul may look and body touch,
Which is the more blest?”
W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright
The Lady's Second Song http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1639/, st. 3 <br class="br">Last Poems (1936-1939)
Memories of Ice (2001)
“If soul may look and body touch,
Which is the more blest?”
W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright
The Lady's Second Song http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1639/, st. 3 <br class="br">Last Poems (1936-1939)
Will Carleton (1845–1912) poet.
Out of the old House, Nancy, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Ivan Illich (1926–2002) austrian philosopher and theologist
We the People interview (1996)
Context: Traditionally the gaze was conceived as a way of fingering, of touching. The old Greeks spoke about looking as a way of sending out my psychopodia, my soul's limbs, to touch your face and establish a relationship between the two of us. This relationship was called vision. Then, after Galileo, the idea developed that the eyes are receptors into which light brings something from the outside, keeping you separate from me even when I look at you. People began to conceive of their eyes as some kind of camera obscura. In our age people conceive of their eyes and actually use them as if they were part of a machinery. They speak about interface. Anybody who says to me, "I want to have an interface with you," I say, "please go somewhere else, to a toilet or wherever you want, to a mirror." Anybody who says, "I want to communicate with you," I say, "Can't you talk? Can't you speak? Can't you recognize that there's a deep otherness between me and you, so deep that it would be offensive for me to be programmed in the same way you are."
Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet
La fama che invaghisce a un dolce suono
Voi superbi mortali, e par si bella,
E un'ecco, un sogno, anzi del sogno un'ombra,
Ch'ad ogni vento si dilegua e sgombra.
Canto XIV, stanza 63 (tr. Wickert)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)
Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) American architect
Source: Kindergarten Chats (1918), Ch. 10 : A Roman Temple
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer
Source: Why I Wake Early