Log24

Review:
 
A Constant Idea and
A Constant Idea: 759.

A Constant Idea: 759

From Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 1919:

"Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture tomorrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before."

— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy 

The number 759 is courtesy of Plato; the quotation 759 above is courtesy of Shakespeare.  The song that Shakespeare suggests is "A Day in the Life of a Fool."

A Constant Idea

"From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool [of daily life] is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. 'Hamlet' or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself."

— Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past," 1939-40, in Moments of Being