enchantment

adding page because of..

may 2016 – via Maria (commonplace book et al)

@brainpicker

5/10/16 6:02 AM

W.H. Auden on writing, belief, doubt, enchantment, and the artist’s relationship with truth brainpickings.org/2016/05/10/w-h… pic.twitter.com/Y9VCFDi1BS

long before there was the Internet, there was the commonplace book — a creative and intellectual ledger of fragmentary inspirations, which a writer would collect from other books and copy into a notebook, often alongside his or her reflections and riffs. These borrowed ideas are in dialogue with the writer’s own imagination and foment it into original thinking. Over long enough a period of time — years, decades, often a lifetime — the commonplace book, while composed primarily of copied passages, comes to radiate the singular sensibility of its keeper: beliefs are refined, ideas incubated, intellectual fixations fleshed out, and the outlines of a personhood revealed. (Brain Pickings is, in an unshakable sense, a commonplace book.)

Partway between medieval florilegium and modern-day Tumblr, the commonplace book has been particularly beloved by poets, whose business is the revelation of wholeness through the fragmentary. Among the most devoted and masterful practitioners of the art of the commonplace book was the poet W.H. Auden (February 21, 1907–September 29, 1973), who published his in 1970 as A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (public library) — a collection of quotations and reflections, arranged alphabetically by subject, beginning with Accedieand ending with Writing.

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He returns to the subject from a different angle in the entry forEnchantment, which opens with a quote by Hugo von Hofmannsthal:“Where is your Self to be found? Always in the deepest enchantment that you have experienced.” In a sentiment that calls to mind Alan Lightman’s beautiful assertion that “faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand… the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world ,” Auden writes:

The state of enchantment is one of certainty. When enchanted, we neither believe nor doubt nor deny: we know, even if, as in the case of a false enchantment, our knowledge is self-deception.

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When we are truly enchanted we desire nothing for ourselves, only that the enchanting object or person shall continue to exist. When we are falsely enchanted, we desire either to possess the enchanting being or be possessed by it.