“If there is a single moment … to give meaning to Emerson's life, it would be this moment when he recognized that his proper response to the world must be astonishment, his proper expression celebration.”
Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Robert D. Richardson 6
American historian 1934Related quotes
Appendix VI : A few principal rituals – Liber Reguli.
Magick Book IV : Liber ABA, Part III : Magick in Theory and Practice (1929)
Context: A parabola is bound by one law which fixes its relations with two straight lines at every point; yet it has no end short of infinity, and it continually changes its direction. The Initiate who is aware Who he is can always check is conduct by reference to the determinants of his curve, and calculate his past, his future, his bearings, and his proper course at any assigned moment; he can even comprehend himself as a simple idea.
“There is no proper meaning … every expression is essentially tropic.”
Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, Mass. 1987) p. 348 ([10.1093/camqtly/bfs004]).
Source: Dying Earth (1950-1984), Cugel's Saga (1983), Chapter 2, section 3, "The Ocean of Sighs"
Man's Search for Meaning (1946; 1959; 1984)
Look at us, Binx — my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me — we're sinning! We're succeeding! We're human after all!
The Moviegoer (1961)
"A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz", in The Aleph (1949); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
Variant: Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment — the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
