metonymy4u

Consider the introduction given by two authors separated by land, language and years. Descartes and Hesse, embarking on heart felt journeys, pause and give us a glimpse of their own personal idea of beginnings. Each according to each. How different their speech. How varied our animal lives and…how spacious the earth!—


“Several years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true, and that consequently what I afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful; and from that time I was convinced of the necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of building from the foundation, if I desired to establish a firm and abiding superstructure in the sciences. But as this enterprise appeared to me to be one of great magnitude, I waited until I had attained an age so mature as to leave me no hope that at any stage of life more advanced I should be better able to execute my design. On this account, I have delayed so long that I should henceforth consider I was doing wrong were I still to consume in deliberation any of the time that now remains for action. To-day, then, since I have opportunely freed my mind from all cares and am happily disturbed by no passions, and since I am in the secure possession of leisure in a peaceable retirement, I will at length apply myself earnestly and freely to the general overthrow of all my former opinions. “


“Novelists when they write novels tend to take an almost godlike attitude toward their subject, pretending to a total comprehension of the story, a person’s life, which they can therefore recount as God Himself might, nothing standing between them and the naked truth, the entire story meaningful in every detail. I am as little able to do this as the novelist is, even though my story is more important to me than any novelist’s is to them–for this is my story; it is the story of a person, not of an invented, or possible, or idealized, or otherwise absent figure, but of a unique being of flesh and blood. Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and people–each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature–are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every person is more than just themselves; they also represent the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every person’s story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every person, as long as they live and fulfill the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration…. I wanted nothing more, than to seek to live what from within me wanted to come out. Why was that so very difficult?”