Idol – ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French idole, from Latin idolum ‘image, form’ (used in ecclesiastical Latin in the sense ‘idol’ ), from Greek eidolon, from eidos ‘form, shape.’
Ecstasy – ORIGIN late Middle English: from Old French extasie, via late Latin from Greek ekstasis ‘standing outside oneself,’ based on ek– ‘out’ + histanai ‘to place.’
*
Many people work on their lives as a pre-memory. They dwell in future perfect tense (a future past-tense).
When they are happy they are literally beside themselves:”Here I am, in this happy situation.”
Everything that happens to them is a story they’ll live out later while they’re telling it. They are only real as the presenter of who they mistake themselves for.
They need witnesses to their self-sufficiency, independence and wisdom to feel themselves self-sufficient, independent and wise. If you managed to bust them on it, they’d feel ashamed, but of precisely the wrong things.
*
“Borges and I”
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page.
– Jorge Luis Borges
*
There’s a peculiar shame to many writers’ personae.
*
Episteme grasps. It can grasp physical objects (the gross) and the types of knowledge that a mind can contain and comprehend (the subtle).
Sophia relates our own finite being to what contains us and transcends our comprehension. Sophia does not grasp – it feels the grasp that unifies the being and articulates the beings that constitute our world.
No self is epistemically known.
*
Eden was lost when we took episteme for sophia.
*
Facts about wisdom are not wisdom.