[Today...
It's another winter day. There's not much I want to write here, at the moment.
I'm thinking about: Joseph Joubert, as well as Maurice Blanchot's essay about him, "Joubert and Space" (I first discovered Joubert and Blanchot from Lydia Davis's essay "Fragmentary or Unfinished" from her collection Essays: One).
Some Joubert lines, semi-arbitrarily chosen, from my copy of The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (NYRB, trans. Paul Auster): "His hope to 'change color'" (117); "Dream. Lost memory" (79) (reminds me of my recent watch of Bi Gan's LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT; credit to Josh Lewis for highlighting this line in his Letterboxd review: "The difference between film and memory is that films are always false... Memories mix truth and lies, they appear and vanish before our eyes."); "Let's go; and follow your mistake" (134); "Anger, which purges resentment" (134); "Having found nothing worth more than emptiness, he leaves space vacant" (137); "The ideas of eternity and space have something divine about them, but not those of pure duration and simple extension" (137); "In this painting of our life given to us by our memories, everything is moving and depends on our point of view" (136); "Ash Wednesday; The face. After the face, action. Between the two, attitudes. But before everything, the idea" (136); "And the sun, and its rays. And if, instead of touching you with his glance, someone touched you with his eyes; and if with his fingertip instead of his cane; and if with his hand and not with his glove" (136).
These lines bring to mind ideas about Christ, for me---especially the last one. It reminds me of an essay I wrote in college about the "farness" of the divine in Judaism, in contrast to the "nearness" of the divine in Christianity. I used Emil Fackenheim's essay "Judaism & The Meaning of Life":
"In Judaism, the fundamental and all-penetrating occurrence is a primordial mystery, and a miracle of miracles: the Divine, though dwelling on high and infinitely above man, yet bends down low so as to accept and confirm man in his finite humanity; and man, though met by Divine Infinity, yet may and must respond to this meeting in and through his finitude."For Fackenheim, Spinoza "goes beyond Judaism" in his mixing of the human with the divine in radical immanence. For me, to be like Spinoza is to be like "the sun, and its rays;" not to be like Icarus, but to become the sun and its heat and light in and of itself, a "thing-unto-itself" or "-in-itself:" a kind of radically self-sufficient solipsism. I'm struggling to find the quotation now, but I remember there being a pithy line about Spinoza: something like, his Ethics was the best, truest philosophy---so "it's a shame nobody could have written it." So, we have the human divine in the figure of Christ: intimate, touching us with eyes and fingertip and hand. As the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem goes: "... Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men's faces."