“I fell in love with him, and it made no sense for me to fall in love with him. We could not possibly have been more different. But maybe that’s where love grows best—in the deep space that exists between polarities.”
― City of Girls
― City of Girls
“If you say that everything—chaos, darkness, anathema— can be reduced to mathematical formulae—then man will go insane on purpose to have no judgement, and to behave as he likes. I believe this because it appears that man’s whole business is to prove that he is a man and not a cog-wheel... And perhaps, who knows, the striving of man on earth may consist in this uninterrupted striving for something ahead, that is, in life itself rather than some real end which obviously must be a static formula of the same kind as two and two make four—I am sure that man will never renounce the genuine suffering that comes of ruin and chaos. Why, suffering is the one and only source of knowledge”
― The Outsider
― The Outsider
“Yet it is the Outsider’s belief that life aims at more life, at higher forms of life, something for which the Superman is an inexact poetic symbol (as Dante’s description of the beatific vision is expressed in terms of a poetic symbol); so that, in a sense, Urizen is the most important of the three functions. The fall was necessary, as Hesse realized. Urizen must go forward alone.
The other two must follow him. And as soon as Urizen has gone forward, the Fall has taken place. Evolution towards God is impossible without a Fall. And it is only by this recognition that the poet can ever come to ‘praise in spite of; for if evil is ultimately discord, unresolvable, then the idea of dennoch preisen is a self-contradiction. And yet it must be clearly recognized and underlined that this is not the Hegelian ‘God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world’. Even if the evil is necessary, it remains evil, discord, pain. It remains an Existential fact, not something that proves to be
something else when you hold it in the right light. It is as if there were two opposing armies:
the Hegelian view holds that peace can be secured by proving that there is really no ground for
opposition; in short, they are really friends. The Blakeian view says that the discord is necessary,
but it can never be resolved until one army has. completely exterminated the other. This is the
Existential view, first expressed by Soren Kierkegaard, the Outsider’s view and, incidentally,
the religious view. The whole difference between the Existentialist and the Hegelian viewpoint
is implicit in the comparison between the title of Hegel’s book, The Philosophy of History, and James Joyce’s phrase, ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ Blake provided the Existentialist view with a symbolism and mythology. In Blake’s view, harmony is an ultimate aim, but not the primary aim, of life; the primary aim is to live more abundantly at any cost. Harmony can come later.”
― The Outsider
The other two must follow him. And as soon as Urizen has gone forward, the Fall has taken place. Evolution towards God is impossible without a Fall. And it is only by this recognition that the poet can ever come to ‘praise in spite of; for if evil is ultimately discord, unresolvable, then the idea of dennoch preisen is a self-contradiction. And yet it must be clearly recognized and underlined that this is not the Hegelian ‘God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world’. Even if the evil is necessary, it remains evil, discord, pain. It remains an Existential fact, not something that proves to be
something else when you hold it in the right light. It is as if there were two opposing armies:
the Hegelian view holds that peace can be secured by proving that there is really no ground for
opposition; in short, they are really friends. The Blakeian view says that the discord is necessary,
but it can never be resolved until one army has. completely exterminated the other. This is the
Existential view, first expressed by Soren Kierkegaard, the Outsider’s view and, incidentally,
the religious view. The whole difference between the Existentialist and the Hegelian viewpoint
is implicit in the comparison between the title of Hegel’s book, The Philosophy of History, and James Joyce’s phrase, ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ Blake provided the Existentialist view with a symbolism and mythology. In Blake’s view, harmony is an ultimate aim, but not the primary aim, of life; the primary aim is to live more abundantly at any cost. Harmony can come later.”
― The Outsider
“The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed slavery of the wife… Within the family he is the bourgeois and his wife represents the proletariat.”
―
―
“الصوفى منقطع عن الخلق غير متصل بالحق كما قال الله لموسى عليه السلام ( واصطنعتك لنفسى ) قطعه عن كل غير ثم قال لن ترانى”
― تهذيب الأسرار في أصول التصوف
― تهذيب الأسرار في أصول التصوف
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Bassel’s 2025 Year in Books
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