The brief treatise that has made possible as many conquests throughout history as it has caused problems. Should you want to read/study it thoroughly, then I would suggest Gerald F. Else’s edition (to be more completely found in his Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument).

“Guiltless I gaz’d; heav’n listen’d while you sung;
And truths divine came mended from that tongue.
From lips like those, what precept fail’d to move?
Too soon they taught me ‘twas no sin to love.”

—Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard, 59-72 (lines in photo).

دونك قناة عملتها اليوم سمَّيتها بالأنچلوسكسونية bōchord (بمعنى مكتبة: من bōc أي كتاب، وhord أي مخزون أو ذُخر أو مِكْنَز)، سأنشر فيها —بصيغة PDF أو EPUB— شيئًا من ما أتعامل معه من كتب تمرّ علي إما في دراساتي وإما في قراءاتي، بمختلِف اللغات، منها ما يَندُر كثيرًا ومنها ما لا يُعرف إلا قليلًا (حتى لو كان متوفِّرًا) ومنها ما يكاد يكون منسيًّا تمامًا ومنها ما أراه مهمًّا فقط، ومن ثَمّ منها أيضًا ما صوَّره بعض الناس الأفاضل لي بطلبٍ منّي (ولعلّنا نعثر على مزيدٍ من الأفاضل!). فليتابعها مَن يهتمّ وليُعرِّف غيره بها.

https://t.me/boc_hord

«لا يصحّ القول إن فهمَ كل شيء يقتضي مغفرة كل شيء، ولكن يصحّ أنه ما من أحدٍ يحيى حقَّ الحياة إلا صاحب إدراك».

—Joachim Wach, Das Verstehen. Grundzüge einer Geschichte der hermeneutischen Theorie im 19. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr, 1926), vol. I, p. V.

عندما أقْلِب وأقَلِّب الإنترنت شبرًا شبرًا بحثًا عن كتابٍ ما بإحدى اللغات فلا أجده:

«Any one who has a feeling for history cannot but, even if personally he had not been pushed down by a harsh fate into the sunken roads of melancholy, cannot but, I say, feel a deep sadness. Waste, omission, irretrievable omissions, and the failure of the fairest plans—these are what a lover of history finds everywhere in history and in nature. One should not be too hard on the so-called conservatives without having carefully studied their case beforehand. It is striking that the most thoughtful men of our age—like Leo, Görres, Baader, Schelling, and others—stretch their arms toward the past, that their desires are somewhat backward-looking. Such geniuses have, in my opinion, a deep-seated awareness of the failure of the divine purposes in history which drives them to swim against the current. They sense that the creating, shaping, weaving hand of nature (and history, which is the same thing) suddenly trembled as it was working on the finest and fairest fabric of the past, that the thread fell out of its hand and the happiness of nations and ages was thus irretrievably lost. So they are driven by a powerful instinct to go back and seek the fallen thread and join it again to the fabric. This is, perhaps, the most moving and tragic fault and mistake of great natures.

The history of mankind is repeated in concentrated form in the history of the individual human being. I am aware of what I have omitted to do, wasted, done wrongly, and that is the source of my trouble.

You appeared to me as the lovely, full, unfathomably painful embodiment of my ruined happiness. Omitted! Lost! Oh, Sophie, I must break off. My unhappiness makes me dizzy when I think what you are.»

—Nikolaus Lenau, Poems and Letters of Nikolaus Lenau, tr. Winthrop H. Root (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.), Letter from Lenau to his beloved Sophie, Stuttgart, undated, 209.

One might outgrow his phase of (philosophical) pessimism,—aye, true, it is even necessary for an intellect within which is ingrained a passionate penchant for holisticity and fair-mindedness; but a man of melancholic and wistful temperament retains such a temperament everlastingly, even in the fairest and most blissful moments of his life.