Love streams

«Why should we import rags and relics into the new hour? In nature, there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things renew, germinate, and spring. Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one... They are all forms of old age; they are rest, conservatism, inertia, not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need of it... This old age need not to creep on a human mind. In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime, but it may be trivial tomorrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.» Emerson, Essays and Lectures

















«Rationalistic philosophy has always aspired to a rounded-in view of the whole of things, a closed system of kinds, from which the notion of essential novelty being possible is ruled out in advance. For empiricism, on the other hand, reality cannot be thus confined by a conceptual ring-fence. It overflows, exceeds, and alters. It may turn into novelties, and can be known adequatly only by following its singularities from moment to moment as our experience grows. Empiricist philosophy thus renounces the pretension to an all-inclusive vision... It stays inside the flux of life expectantly, recording facts, not formulating laws, and never pretending that man's relation to the totality of things as a philosopher is essentially different from his relation to the parts of things as a daily patient or agent in the practical current of events. Philosophy, like life, must keep its doors and windows open.»
William James, Writings, 1902-1910


Ray Carney, o teórico de referência sobre a obra de Cassavetes, propõe no livro The Films of John Cassavetes - Pragmatism, Modernism and the Movies (Cambridge University Press, 1994), um enquadramento filosófico da mesma situado entre os escritos de Ralph Waldo Emerson e William James. Pelas citações recolhidas nesse volume faz todo o sentido. E ainda que o fizesse menos, são óptimas reflexões para transportar para outras situações da vida. A filosofia que importa é susceptível de vir até nós sem que aparentemente façamos nada por isso. Como se procurássemos mais respostas para as mesmas perguntas que se renovam, sempre.