even*cleveland: 'a single path'

'a single path'

The labyrinth is perhaps one of the oldest, and certainly one of the most mysterious symbols known to mankind. It has been looked upon as an object of fear and hope. It has been perceived as a representation of hell and redemption, and it has even been used to symbolize far off lands and cities. Labyrinths are unique in that they are a geometric shape which does not occur naturally, and as a result they point to the creative genius of humanity.

"Labyrinths: Their Origins & Development," Loyola University Medieval Studies blog.

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In a labyrinth there is a single path that twists and turns but entails no dead ends or choices ... The labyrinth walker is ignorant and confused while immersed in the process ... When you are walking in a maze or labyrinth your vision is constricted, but [when viewed from above] you see the whole pattern ... the labyrinth is [a metaphor], just as a pilgrimage is an allegory, for the path of life.

Patricia Monaghan and Eleanor G. Viereck, Meditation: The Complete Guide.

Pictured: the labyrinth on the portico of Lucca Cathedral. The Latin inscription reads: "Here is the Cretan labyrinth that Daedalus built. From it no one who entered could escape except Theseus, who succeeded through the grace of Ariadne’s thread." The thread was understood to be a metaphor for faith.

Photo: Lucca labirinto by Beatrice - foto personale. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 it via Wikimedia Commons.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

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