MUSINGS OF
GREAT MINDS
Joseph Mazzini on
The Family. The family is the country of the heart. There is an angel in the family, who by the
mysterious influence of grace, of sweetness, and of love, renders the
fulfillment of duties less wearisome, sorrows less bitter. The only pure joys of unmixed with sadness
which it is given to man to taste upon earth are, thanks to this angel, the
joys of the family. He who through
fatality of circumstances has been unable to live the serene life of the
family, beneath the wings of this angel, has a shadow of melancholy resting
upon his soul, and a void in his heart which nothing can fill. Bless God who
created this angel, oh you who have the joys and consolations of the
family. Do not hold them of little
account because you imagine that you can find elsewhere more ardent joys or
more immediate consolation for your griefs.
The family contains an element of good rarely found elsewhere,
constancy. Its affections wind
themselves slowly around you, unheeded, but tenacious and enduring as the ivy
round the tree; they follow you hourly, and identify themselves silently with
your life. Often. you are not aware of
them, because they are a part of yourselves; but when you lose them you feel
that an indefinable something, something intimate and necessary to your
existence, is gone. You wonder restless
and uneasy. You may still be able to
find brief joys or consolations; but not the supreme consolation, not calm, the
calm of the wave upon the lake, the calm of trustful sleep, the sleep which
stills the child upon its mother’s breast.
The angel of the
family is woman. Mother, wife, or sister, woman is the caress of life, the
soothing sweetness of affection shed over its toils, a reflection for the
individual of the loving providence which watches over humanity. In her there is treasure enough of consoling
tenderness to allay every pain. Moreover
for every one of us she is the initiator of the future. The mother’s first kiss teaches the child
love; the first holy kiss of the woman he loves teaches man hope and faith in
life; and love and faith create a desire for perfection and the power of
reaching towards it step by step; crate the future, in short, of which the
living symbol is the child, link between us and the generations to come. Through her the family, with its divine
mystery of reproduction, points to eternity.
(Joseph Mazzini
was born at Genoa in 1805. He was
educated at the university there. In
1830 he joined the secret society of the Caronari and was consequently banished
from Italy. He settled in London in
1837, but soon returned to the continent to spend the rest of his life and
instigate revolutionary movements. He
died at Pisa in 1872.)
ARNOLD TOYNBEE ON
THE WORD ‘LOVE’. In modern Western
languages the word love is used in two meanings that are not only
different but are actually antithetical.
In both meanings, love means desire, but in one meaning it means a
desire to give and to help, while in the other meaning it means a desire to
take and to exploit. Two different words
are needed.
I agree that, in
the modern world, even the kind of love that means giving, not taking, tends to
evaporate through being made impersonal.
Impersonal love seems to me to be a contradiction in terms,
because self-devoting love, as we know it from experience, is a personal
feeling. One person experiences it for
another person, and that experience leads him to take action---if necessary at
extreme cost to himself---to help the other person.
(Toynbee,
Arnold Joseph (1889-1975) was an English historian and reformer. He is known for his 10-volume “A Study of
History” (1934-54).
HAVELOCK ELLIS ON
DANCING. Dancing and building are the
two primary and essential arts. The art of dancing stands at the source of all
the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the
beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person, and in the end they
unite. Music, acting, poetry proceed in
the one mighty stream; sculpture, painting, all the arts of design, in the
other. There is no primary art outside these two arts, for their origin is far
earlier than man himself, and dancing came first.
That is one reason
why dancing, however it may at times be scorned by passing fashions, has a
profound and eternal attraction even for those one might suppose farthest from
its influence. The joyous beat of the
feet of children, the cosmic play of philosophers’ thoughts, rise and fall
according to the same laws of rhythm. If
we are indifferent to the art of dancing we have failed to understand, not
merely the supreme manifestation of physical life, but also the supreme symbol
of spiritual life.
The significance
of dancing, in the wide sense, thus lies in the fact that it is simply an
intimate concrete appeal of a general rhythm, that general rhythm which marks
not life only but the universe, if one may still be allowed so to name the sum
of the cosmic influences that reach us.
We need not, indeed, go so far as the planets or the stars and outline
their ethereal dances. We have but to
stand on the sea-shore and watch the waves that beat at our feet, to observe that
at nearly regular intervals this seemingly monotonous rhythm is accentuated for
several beats, so that the waves are really dancing the measure of a tune. It need surprise us not at all that rhythm,
ever tending to be moulded into a tune, should mark all the physical and
spiritual manifestations of life.
Dancing is the primitive expression alike of religion and of love----of
religion from the earliest human times we know of and of love from a period
long anterior to the coming of man. The
art of dancing, moreover, is intimately entwined with all human tradition, of
war, of labour, of pleasure, of education, while some of the wisest
philosophers and the most ancient civilizations have regarded the dance as the
pattern in accordance with which the moral life of men must be woven. (Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) was an English
psychologist and writer).
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