I Find Very Reasonable The Celtic Belief

The Truth Is That Every Morning War Is Declared Afresh. And The Men Who Wish To Continue It Are As Guilty As The Men Who Began It, More Guilty Perhaps, For The Latter Perhaps Did Not Foresee All Its Horrors.

We May Have Revolved Every Possible Idea In Our Minds, And Yet The Truth Has Never Occurred To Us, And It Is From Without, When We Are Least Expecting It, That It Gives Us Its Cruel Stab And Wounds Us Forever.

These Dreams Reminded Me That, Since I Wished Some Day To Become A Writer, It Was High Time To Decide What Sort Of Books I Was Going To Write. But As Soon As I Asked Myself The Question, And Tried To Discover Some Subject To Which I Could Impart A Philosophical Significance Of Infinite Value, My Mind Would Stop Like A Clock, My Consciousness Would Be Faced With A Blank, I Would Feel Either That I Was Wholly Devoid Of Talent Or Perhaps That Some Malady Of The Brain Was Hindering Its Development.

To Achieve Accurate Knowledge Of Others, If Such A Thing Were Possible, We Could Only Ever Arrive At It Through The Slow And Unsure Recognition Of Our Own Initial Optical Inaccuracies. However, Such Knowledge Is Not Possible: For, While Our Vision Of Others Is Being Adjusted, They, Who Are Not Made Of Mere Brute Matter, Are Also Changing; We Think We Have Managed To See Them More Clearly, But They Shift; And When We Believe We Have Them Fully In Focus, It Is Merely Our Older Images Of Them That We Have Clarified, But Which Are Themselves Already Out Of Date.

This Labour Of The Artist To Discover A Means Of Apprehending Beneath Matter And Experience, Beneath Words, Something Different From Their Appearance, Is Of An Exactly Contrary Nature To The Operation In Which Pride, Passion, Intelligence And Habit Are Constantly Engaged Within Us When We Spend Our Lives Without Self-communion, Accumulating As Though To Hide Our True Impressions, The Terminology For Practical Ends Which We Falsely Call Life.