Einstein and Besso sit in a small fishing boat at anchor in the river. Besso is eating a cheese sandwich while Einstein puffs on his pipe and slowly reels in a lure.

“Do you usually catch anything here, smack in the middle of the Aare?” asks Besso, who has never been fishing with Einstein before.

“Never,” Einstein answers, who continues to cast.

“Maybe we should move closer to the shore, by those reeds.”

“We could,” says Einstein. “Never caught anything there, either. You got another sandwich in that bag?”

Besso hands Einstein a sandwich and a beer. He feels slightly guilty for asking his friend to take him along on this Sunday afternoon. Einstein was planning to go fishing alone, in order to think.

“Eat,” says Besso. “You need a break from pulling in all those fish.”

Einstein lowers his lure into Besso’s lap and starts eating. For a while, the two friends are silent. A small red skiff passes by, making waves, and the fishing boat bobs up and down.

After lunch, Einstein and Besso remove the seats in the boat and lie on their backs, looking up at the sky. For today, Einstein has given up fishing.

“What shapes do you see in the clouds, Michele?” asks Einstein.

“I see a goat chasing a man who is frowning.”

“You are a practical man, Michele.” Einstein gazes at the clouds but is thinking of his project. He wants to tell Besso about his dreams, but he cannot bring himself to do it.

“I think you will succeed with your theory of time,” says Besso. “And when you do, we will go fishing and you will explain it to me. When you become famous, you’ll remember that you told me first, here in this boat.”

Einstein laughs, and the clouds rock back and forth with his laughter.

— Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

It is strange how we who are capable of so much suffering, should inflict so much suffering. Strange that the face of a person, whom I scarcely know save that I think we met once on the gangway of a ship bound for Africa — a mere adumbration of eyes, cheeks, nostrils — should have the power to inflict this insult. You look, eat, smile, are bored, pleased, annoyed — that is all I know. Yet this shadow which has sat by me for an hour or two, this mask from which peep two eyes, has power to drive me back, to pinion me down among all those other faces, to shut me in a hot room; to send me dashing like a moth from candle to candle.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

But how to describe a world seen without a self? There are no words. Blue, red — even they distract, even they hide with thickness instead of letting the light through. How describe or say anything in articulate words again? — save that it fades, save that it undergoes gradual transformation, becomes, even in the course of one short walk, habitual — this scene also. Blindness returns as one moves and one leaf repeats another. Loveliness returns as one looks with all its train of phantom phrases. One breathes in and out substantial breath; down in the valley the train draws across the fields lop-eared with smoke.

But for a moment I had sat on the turf somewhere high above the flow of the sea and the sounds of the woods, had seen the house, the garden, and the waves breaking. The old nurse who turns the pages of the picture-book had stopped and had said, ‘Look. This is the truth.’

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Then Jinny came. She flashed her fire over the tree. She was like a crinkled poppy, thirsty with the desire to drink dry dust. Darting, angular, not in the least impulsive, she came prepared. So little flames zig-zag over the cracks in the dry earth. She made the willows dance, but not with illusion; for she saw nothing that was not there. It was a tree; there was the river; it was afternoon; here we were; I in my serge suit; she in green. There was no past, no future; merely the moment in its ring of light, and our bodies; and the inevitable climax, the ecstasy.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it . . . and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one.

— M. F. K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me

Let heaven exist, though my own place be in hell . . .

We also have knowledge of another superstition from that period: belief in what was termed the Book-Man. On some shelf in some hexagon, it was argued, there must exist a book that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books, and some librarian must have examined that book; this librarian is analogous to a god. In the language of this zone there are still vestiges of the sect that worshiped that distant librarian. Many have gone in search of Him. For a hundred years, men beat every possible path — and every path in vain. How was one to locate the idolized secret hexagon that sheltered Him? Someone proposed searching by regression: To locate book A, first consult book B, which tells where book A can be found; to locate book B, first consult book C, and so on, to infinity. . . . It is in ventures such as these that I have squandered and spent my years. I cannot think it unlikely that there is such a total book  [I repeat: In order for a book to exist, it is sufficient that it be possible. Only the impossible is excluded. For example, no book is also a staircase, though there are no doubt books that discuss and deny and prove that possibility, and others whose structure corresponds to that of a staircase.] on some shelf in the universe. I pray to the unknown gods that some man — even a single man, tens of centuries ago — has perused and read that book. If the honor and wisdom and joy of such a reading are not to be my own, then let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my own place be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.

— J. L. Borges, The Library of Babel

,

Even a bureau crammed with souvenirs,
Old bills, love letters, photographs, receipts,
Court depositions, locks of hair in plaits,
Hides fewer secrets than my brain could yield.
It’s like a tomb, a corpse-filled Potter’s field,
A pyramid where the dead lie down by scores.
I am a graveyard that the moon abhors.

— Charles Baudelaire, LXXVI

,

How paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory . . . The memory of a particular image  is but regret for a particular moment; the houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

— Marcel Proust

Truth is what stands the test of experience.

Albert Einstein

The real meaning of the Dharma . . . must be directly experienced.

Siddha Nagarjuna

•

Let us get down to bedrock facts. The beginning of every act of knowing, and therefore the starting-point of every science, must be in our own personal experience.

Max Planck

Personal experience is . . . the foundation of Buddhist philosophy. In this sense Buddhism is radical empiricism or experimentalism.

D. T. Suzuki

•

The common root from which scientific and all other knowledge must arise . . . is the content of my consciousness.

Sir Arthur Eddington

The Truth itself . . . can only be self-realized within one’s own deepest consciousness.

Buddha

•

Science . . . is based on personal experience, or on the experience of others, reliably reported.

Werner Heisenberg

From the lips of your teacher you have learned of the truth of Brahman as it is revealed in the scriptures. Now you must realize that truth directly and immediately. Then only will your heart be free from any doubt.

Shankara

•

Experimenters search most diligently, and with the greatest effort, in exactly those places where it seems most likely that we can prove our theories wrong. In other words we are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

Richard P. Feynman

In our world error is continually the handmaid and pathfinder of Truth; for error is really a half-truth that stumbles because of its limitations; often it is Truth that wears a disguise in order to arrive unobserved near to its goal.

Sri Aurobindo

•

It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference.

Sir Arthur Eddington

The external world is only a manifestation of the activities of the mind itself, and . . . the mind grasps it as an external world simply because of its habit of discrimination and false-reasoning. The disciple must get into the habit of looking at things truthfully.

Buddha

•

We should not let everything else atrophy in favor of the one organ of rational analysis. . . . It is a matter, rather, of seizing upon reality with all the organs that are given to us, and trusting that this reality will then also reflect the essence of things, the “one, the good and the true.”

Werner Heisenberg

Transcendental intelligence rises when the intellectual mind reaches its limit and if things are to be realized in their true and essential nature, its processes of thinking must be transcended by an appeal to some higher faculty of cognition.

Buddha

•

We can only reason from data and the ultimate data must be given to us by a non-reasoning process — a self-knowledge of that which is in our consciousness.

Sir Arthur Eddington

Emptiness is the result of an intuition and not the outcome of reasoning. . . . It is the Praja that sees into all the implications of Emptiness, and not the intellect.

D. T. Suzuki

,

[From Einstein and Buddha: the parallel sayings, Editor Thomas J. McFarlane]

Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. . . . Listen . . . today, we are gods!

— Vladimir Nabokov, “Gods”

To be God, naked, solar, in the rainy night, on a field: red, divinely, manuring with the majesty of a tempest, the face grimacing, torn apart, being IMPOSSIBLE in tears: who knew, before me, what majesty is?

— Georges Bataille

“Bataille denudes himself, exposes himself, his exhibition aims at destroying all literature. He has a holocaust of words. Bataille speaks about man’s condition, not his nature. His tone recalls the scornful aggressiveness of the surrealist. Bataille has survived the death of God. In him, reality is conflict.”

— Jean Paul Sartre

WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. And our new crisp Sisal-like look in wool broadloom is $19.84 a sq. yd. (padding and installation not included). At $19.84 it’s well worth watching, Big Brother.

— Print advertisement for the Einstein Moomjy Carpet Company in New York, early 1984

I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time. I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production.

— George Orwell, letter to Brenda Salkeld, 1933

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as  the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is no a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe.

— Virginia Woolf,  “Modern Fiction“

I will read in the book that is propped against the bottle of Worcester sauce. It contains some forged rings, some perfect statements, a few words, but poetry. You, all of you, ignore it. What the dead poet said, you have forgotten. And I cannot translate it to you so that its binding power ropes you in, and makes it clear that you are aimless; and the rhythm is cheap and worthless; and so remove that degradation which, if you are unaware of your aimlessness, pervades you, making you senile, even while you are young. To translate that poem so that it is easily read is to be my endeavor. I, the companion of Plato, of Virgil, will knock at the grained oak door. I oppose to what is passing this ramrod of beaten steel. I will not submit to this aimless passing . . . . I will reduce you to order.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

I am one person — myself. I do not impersonate Catullus, whom I adore. I am the most slavish of students, with here a dictionary; there a notebook in which I enter curious uses of the past participle. But one cannot go on forever cutting these ancient inscriptions clearer with a knife. Shall I always draw the red serge curtain close and see my book, laid like a block of marble, pale under the lamp? That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under the drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves