5 Comments
User's avatar
Mary Jane Eyre's avatar

Great choice for Blake! I’ve loved The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ever since I heard Alan Watts quote the line: “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise”

Expand full comment
Paul Franz's avatar

Surely we need one more aphorism, this time from Yeats, to cap this off:

"You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence."

Expand full comment
John Pistelli's avatar

Thank you, Paul—one of my favorites!

Expand full comment
Paul Franz's avatar

Tempted to add A. R. Ammons's line, "Hegel is not the winter," but that's a line from a poem, not an aphorism per se, and anyhow I regard Ammons as somewhat overrated and am therefore reluctant to signal boost. (I like my Biblical American outback served much rarer--that is, to say, much more McCarthyan!)

Expand full comment
John Pistelli's avatar

Hegel feels like the winter to me! Re: Ammons: never went past the anthology pieces myself. I keep taking that same new walk.

Expand full comment