To Sleep Before Evening

An esthete is a person who spends a good amount of their time thinking about art or poetry, who think that not only do you need to write to be understood, but you need your writing to be the thing you are talking about. Walter Pater was the esthete of esthetes.

Lucretius, sublime, Wallace Stevens – the things that we are asked to think about so far. But how can we think about Lucretius and the sublime in relation to each other?

Lucretius was one of the first empiricists, which means that he looks at natural processes and thinks of very different ways that thing have come about. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face...

A response to the question how to live, and what to do:

“To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.

“One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had clung always about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve—les hommes sont tous condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.”

The best of the children of the world spend their pulses in two things: art, and song.

It wouldn't be sublime if it wasn't Lucretian! It only works if you have this brief interview, and nothing on the other sides. Death means nothing for the people who die, it only concerns those who are left there watching. Things are only beautiful because we die – if we had them forever they would have no value to us.

Although drawing it out into prose makes it make more sense, it does not have this same compact beauty that a poem will. We have been dancing around poems, but now it's time to get analytical. Find a poem, and go to work on it.

The jar is probably the third or fourth cousin of the most famous holding container ever – the Grecian urn. A Dominion Jar was a common jar for canning in Stevens' day. It is the act of imagination that creates order in the world.

Look at these 7:
Domination of Black
Snow Man (Dustin)
A High Toned Old Christian Woman
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
Disillusionment of Ten O'clock
Anecdote of the Jar
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

Also
Sunday Morning