Conclusion to the Renaissance

Working through Walter Pater's conclusion, I began with wanting to highlight the passages I found to be most important and ones I simply loved...this was difficult because I was basically highlighting the whole thing! So, here are my thoughts on some passages:

"Let us begin with that which is without- -our physical life"

"This at least of flame-like our life has, that it is but concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways." This passage as well as many of Pater's other passages deals with time and memory. I remembered Eliot's lines discussing the two lovers uniting and also his mention of taking one road as opposed to the other. This is what I think of when I read this passage. I have the image of two people walking hand in hand slowly drifting apart and parting ways on goes left, one goes right...and his lines before that allow the image to become blurred and simply show two obscured outlines as they drift further apart. Perhaps I will attempt to draw out this image...though I am a horrible artist.


Pater also talks of thoughts and feelings as a whirlpool. This to me is so precise because often my thoughts are spiraling around in my head or emotions cooped up in this whirlpool, swirling until they emerge with a force greater than one knows.

Thoughts as impressions rather than what language invests in them...constantly changing, coming and going...


Our impressions are limited by time and time passes as we are trying to understand it. Therefore, we are missing out in these limited pulsations and impressions because we are too focused on time.


"What is real in our life fines itself down"
-There is a thin line between what is real and what is fiction. Is this because what is real thins itself out to obscure the real?

"The continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves"
- Like T. S. Eliot Pater focuses on the wasting away of experience and age rather than what we gain. We continuously change in a way that is unknown to us and slowly vanish from this life as time vanishes before our eyes.


Rouse and startle the human spirit to life through philosophy of specualtive culture-constant and eager observation...by constantly engaging in every moment (because each one is new and different) we are able to constantly see something new. Even in the same place we can look through a different lens and find something we had not seen previously. These experiences of seeing something new are intoxicating to the soul and human spirit.



"Not the fruit of experience, but the experience itself, is the end"...But what is experience anyway? If it is the end would experience be death- is that the outcome. Eliot does not believe we learn anything from experience, whereas it seems Pater believes it is not what we learn but the action of what we do!



"every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us,---for that moment only"
-I think this is one of the most beautiful passages I have read. I read this over and over focusing on each word in the passage. It was just a lightbulb moment in which I felt intrigued to be reading these words. In one moment we are able to experience such intense feelings, but it is in that moment only. A moment of passion, excitement that arouses us in a way that we will experience exactly like that...once.


We pass point to point, but are always present at the time when forces unite in their purest energy. That is what the present is- a force of the purest energy that we are always in. That energy moves us from time to time.

Maintaining ecstasy is success in life- agreed. Ecstasy...burning as a gem-like flame would, but eventually the flame goes out...

We have limited pulses which is to say eventually the time of death will come when we are meant to leave this world and travel to another perhaps. We must use those pulses as wisely as possible...

comte/ hegel/ rousseau....I will touch on this later...I have to run to class soon!

"great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity..." Love this!

One last note...this class has made me despise time!!