책을 읽으며 (2)

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George Santayana, "The Philosophy of Travel," (in Marc Robinson (ed), "Altogether Elsewhere")에서

 

What is life but a form of motion and journey through a foreign world? Moreover locomotion -- the privilege of animals -- is perhaps the key to intelligence. (p. 41)

 

   In animals the power of locomotion changes all this pale experience [by plants] into a life of passion; and it is on passion, although we anaemic philosophers are apt to forget it, that intelligence is grafted.... [I]t is the possibility of travel that lends a meaning to the images of the eye and the mind, which otherwise would be mere feelings and a dull state of oneself. By tempting the animal to move, these images become signs for something ulterior, something to be seized, and enjoyed. They sharpen his attention, and lead him to imagine other aspects which the same thing might afford; so that insted of saying that the possession of hands has given man his superiority, it would go much deeper to say that man, and all other animals, owe their intelligence to their feet. No wonder, then, that a peripatetic philosophy should be the best. Thinking while you sit ... the mind lapses into dreams; images of things remote and miscellaneous are merged in the haze of memory, in which facts and fancies roll together almost indistinguishably, and you revert to the vegetative state ,,,. Thinking while you walk, on the contrary, keeps you alert; your thoughts, though following some single path through the labyrinth, review real things in their real order; you are keen for discovery, ready for novelties, laughing at every little surprise, even if it is a mishap; you are careful to choose the right road, and if you take the wrong one, you are anxious and able to correct your error. Meantime ... the head is cleared and kept aloft, where it may survey the scene; attention is stimulated by the novel objects constantly appearing; a thousand hypotheses run to meet them in an amiable competition which the evnt soon solves without ambiguity; and the scene as a whole is found to change with the changed station of the traveller, revealing to him his separate existence and his always limited scope, together with the distinction (which is all wisdom in a nutshell) between how things look and what they are. (p. 43)

 

   혹 누군가는 전체 내용에 대해 궁금해 할지 모르는데, 이 에세이는 여덟 단락으로 구성되어 있다. 위 첫 인용은 첫 단락에서, 둘째 인용은 세 번째 단락에서다. 둘째 단락은 이렇게 시작한다: "The shift from the vegetable to the animal is the most complete of revolutions."

   네 번째부터 나머지 단락들의 시작 문장(부분)만 인용하면:

   "A naturalist who was also a poet might describe the summer and winter tours of all animals,"

   "The most radical form of travel, and the most tragic, is migration,"

   "Compared with the emigrant the explorer is the greatest traveller,"

   "In the wake of the explorer another type of traveller is apt to follow, the most legitimate, constant, and normal of all: I mean the merchant,"

   "The latest type of traveller, and the most notorious, is the tourist."

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald, (소설) "The Great Gatsby" (1925)에서

 

I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed -- that voice was a deathless song.

 

"Letter from Johannesburg 1985" (Nadine Gordimer, "The Essential  Gesture: Writing, Politics & Places," 1988)에서

 

Approval of the state's action is not often explicit in my company because it is known that I belong to the minority-within-the-white-minority that opposes the constitution as a new order of oppression in contempt of justice .... (p. 303)

 

It is not true that the South African government is bent on genocide, as some black demagogues have averred (the black man is too useful for that); but it is true that unconscious will to genocide is there, in some whites. So is belief in the old biblical justification for apartheid that has been embarrassedly repudiated by even the Dutch Reformed Church. (p. 304)

 

In terms of ways of life, conditions of daily living are sinisterly much the same for all whites, those who anage to ignore the crisis in our country, and those for whom it is the determining state of mind. Some go to protest meetings. others play golf. All of us go home to quiet streets, outings to the theatre and cinema, good meals and secure shelter for the night, while in the black townships thousands of children no longer go to school, fathers and sons disappear into police vans or lie shot in the dark streets, social gatherings are around coffins and social intercourse is confined to mourning. (p. 309)

 

 

 

Nadine Gordimer, "The Essential  Gesture: Writing, Politics & Places" (1988)