For a philosophical friend, with similar doubts:

“Space, it follows from the Kantian analysis is empirically real; that is to say, it is real ‘with respect to everything which can be given to us as an external object’.  It is also transcendentally ideal; which means, in Kantian nomenclature, that ‘ with respect to things…considered in themselves ‘ space is not real.  Time, too, in which all perceptions are situated, is empirically real, that is to say it is real ‘with respect to all objects which could ever be given to our senses; and it is transcendentally ideal.  ‘Once we abstract from the subjective conditions of perception it is noting at all and cannot be attributed to the things is themselves.”

S. Korner ‘Kant’ Pg 39 Pelican Books 1955.

So, why follow Kant out to such a limb…on his mission to put metaphysics on a more sure footing (when even greater minds can’t put the epistemology of mathematics on such a sure footing, though mathematics is an a priori and synthetic form of reasoning ((by Kant’s analysis)) and Kant’s metaphysics doesn’t even reach that standard)?

I am stuck with the contradiction of saying that objects are really there, and exist as I perceive them by my senses and by my reasoning…. but then also saying that I can not ever know them as they really are, and may never be able to know them.

Why should these be the limits by which I pursue knowledge?

Also On This Site:  A Few Responses To Kant’s Transcendental Idealism…Link To An Ayn Rand Paper: The Objectivist Attack On Kant…A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”

The Grauballe Man

As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep

the black river of himself.
The grain of his wrists
is like bog oak,
the ball of his heel

like a basalt egg.
His instep has shrunk
cold as a swan’s foot
or a wet swamp root.

His hips are the ridge
and purse of a mussel,
his spine an eel arrested
under a glisten of mud.

The head lifts,
the chin is a visor
raised above the vent
of his slashed throat

that has tanned and toughened.
The cured wound
opens inwards to a dark
elderberry place.

Who will say ‘corpse’
to his vivid cast?
Who will say ‘body’
to his opaque repose?

And his rusted hair,
a mat unlikely
as a foetus’s.
I first saw his twisted face

in a photograph,
a head and shoulder
out of the peat,
bruised like a forceps baby,

but now he lies
perfected in my memory,
down to the red horn
of his nails,

hung in the scales
with beauty and atrocity:
with the Dying Gaul
too strictly compassed

on his shield,
with the actual weight
of each hooded victim,
slashed and dumped.

–Seamus Heaney

Digging through the past and digging at the thing, a body almost lovingly rendered, made alive on the tongue, looking inward and trying to look forward.

Wikipedia’s Grauballe Man page.

Dirda reviews Paul Mariani’s new biography.

‘During his lifetime, Stevens was certainly admired — by fellow poets William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane and Marianne Moore, among others — but many early readers saw him as essentially a verbal dandy. Some critics likened his work to figure skating or tightrope dancing. His chief rival, Robert Frost, even declared that Stevens’s merely wrote about “bric-a-brac.” What’s more, as time went by, the poems grew increasingly abstract and their meaning more and more elusive. They all seemed to have something to do with the power of the imagination or could be construed as gorgeous meditations on time and mortality. In long works such as “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” — and even more so in his talks and essays — Stevens can be well nigh incomprehensible.’

As previously posted:

Helen Vendler here.

Vendler reviewed John Serio’s new “Selected Poems”  of Wallace Stevens.

“Stevens’s conscience made him confront the chief issues of his era: the waning of religion, the indifferent nature of the physical universe, the theories of Marxism and socialist realism, the effects of the Depression, the uncertainties of philosophical knowledge, and the possibility of a profound American culture, present and future.”

and

“Stevens’s poetry oscillates, throughout his life, between verbal ebullience and New England spareness, between the high rhetoric of England (and of religion) and the “plain sense of things” that he sometimes felt to be more American…”

See Also On This Site:  Trying to stick something against his poems: Wednesday Poem: Wallace Stevens-Anecdote of The Jar…Wednesday Poem: Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man…Friday Poem: Wallace Stevens And A Quote By David Hume

“Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. He who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or decisions possible or impossible to execute.”

–Abraham Lincoln

Maybe wisdom can be spun out of quotation sites.

When I went looking for a good hard-boiled detective novel, adrift in Spain and the Spanish language, longing for some raw American English to hold onto, I found Chandler’s High Window.

Here are some quotations of his, if you’re interested.

A lot of writers end badly; and according to the review, Chandler was no exception, though he did give us observations like these:

“Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peaceful. It had the climate they yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America.”

Here is the link.   It’s been a long time since they just reviewed the book and not the author.

‘I am not young enough to know everything.’

–Oscar Wilde