Magni Formica Laboris

"Actually there is a subconscious element in the verbal component as well. Speech is language projected by voice. Just as singing intensifies the expressive power of the sound of the voice through the formalization of its inflections, poetry---like good prose, for that matter---intensifies the expressive powers of the language through the formalization of the choice and ordering of words" (34).

Important quotations: 1. "Music is similar to language. Expressions like musical idiom or musical accent are not metaphors. But music is not language. Its similarity to language points to its innermost nature, but also toward something vague. The person who takes music literally as language will be led astray by it" (401). 2. "...quite a few things in music come rather close to the 'primitive concepts' that are dealt with in epistemology" (401). 3. "In comparison to signifying language, music is a language of a completely different type. Therein lies music's theological aspect. What music says is a proposition at once distinct and concealed. Its idea is the form of the name of God. It is demythologized prayer, freed from the magic of making anything happen, the human attempt, futile, as always, to name the name itself, not to communicate meanings" (402). 4. "Music aims at an intention-less language, but it does not separate itself on

A few quotes from: Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold's Ghost. First Mariner Books, New York: 1999. 1. Furthermore, unlike many other great predators of history, from Genghis Khan to the Spanish conquistadors, King Leopold II never saw a drop of blood spilled in anger. He never set foot in the congo. There is something very modern about that, too, as there is about the bomber pilot in the stratosphere, above the clouds, who never hears screams or sees shattered homes or torn flesh" (4). 2. Joseph Conrad found in Africa "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience" (4). 3. Past the Canary Islands you would enter the Mare Tenebroso : "In the medieval imagination [writes Peter Forbath], this was a region of uttermost dread... where the heavens fling down liquid sheets of flame and the waters boil... where serpent rocks and ogre islands lie in wait for the mariner, where the giant hand of Satan reaches up from the f