Log24

Monday, July 1, 2013

Declamation

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:07 pm

Continued from Sunday's post Book Award and last
midnight's post Holding the Frame

The nineteenth-century German writer Rudolf Haym on
German romantic Hellenism—

"In the enjoyment of this fair picture-world, our nation must 
needs delude itself a moment with the dream of Greek felicity 
and Greek repose to awaken directly poorer and more restless 
than before. To Poetry such a delusion was indeed natural, and 
who would dispute it with her after she had offered to our 
enjoyment what was sweetest and most perfect! But we see 
now all at once Metaphysic seized with the same illusion. 
Turning aside from the strait path of sober inquiry and from the 
labour of deliverance through the most conscientious criticism, 
Hegel begins to expand over our spiritual world his ideal that 
was found in Hellas, that was strengthened by exhaustive 
penetration into the ultimate grounds of all religion. A dreamed-of 
and yearned-for future is treated as present. A system tricked 
out with the entire dignity of the science of truth raises itself 
beside our poetry, and with diamond net spins us into an idea 
with which the want, the incompleteness, and the unbeauty of 
our political and historical actuality is at every point in contradiction."

Rudolf Haym, Hegel und seine Zeit  (1857), 91-92, translated 
and quoted in  The Secret of Hegel , by James Hutchison Stirling
(1898 edition, p. 626)

Holding the Frame

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 am

High praise for a 1941 film

Major Barbara  (Gabriel Pascal, 1941) — "There are some performances
that bypass your critical faculties altogether, connecting not with your brain
but with your soul. They are desperately few, those characterisations of
such heightened sensitivity, such emotional resonance that the effect is
both exalting and suffocating. You might chance upon one every three or 
four years, if you're lucky. I don't know why, or how, but every time Wendy
Hiller utters a line or holds the frame in Major Barbara , I am on the verge
of tears." — Rick Burin

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