Words&Dirt

“This Confucian conception of person makes no appeal to superordinate, substantive categories such as ‘soul,’ ‘self,’ ‘will,’ ‘faculties,’ ‘nature,’ ‘mind,’ ‘character,’ and so on, but instead locates person gerundively as the embodied, social activity of thinking and feeling within the manifold of relations that constitutes family, community , and the natural environment.  ‘Person’ thus understood is a complex event rather than a discrete ‘thing,’ a process of ‘becoming’ rather than an essential ‘being,’ an on-going ‘doing’ rather than an autonomous ‘is,’ a configuration of concrete, dynamic, and constitutive relations rather than an individuated substance defined by some subsisting agency.”

––Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary, by Roger T. Ames, pg. 213

“Wolf Larsen did not laugh, though his gray eyes lighted with a slight glint of amusement; and in that moment, having stepped forward quite close to him, I received my first impression of the man himself, of the man as apart from his body and from the torrent of blasphemy I had heard him spew forth.  The face, with large features and strong lines, of the square order, yet well filled out, was apparently massive at first sight; but again, as with the body, the massiveness seemed to vanish and a conviction to grow of a tremendous and excessive mental or spiritual strength that lay behind, sleeping in the deeps of his being.  The jaw, the chin, the brow rising to a goodly height and swelling heavily above the eyes,––these, while strong in themselves, unusually strong, seemed to speak an immense vigor or virility of spirit that lay behind and beyond and out of sight.  There was no sounding such a spirit, no measuring, no determining of metes and bounds, nor neatly classifying in some pigeonhole with others of similar type.

The eyes––and it was my destiny to know them well––were large and handsome, wide apart as the true artist’s are wide, sheltering under a heavy brow and arched over by thick black eyebrows.  The eyes themselves were of that baffling protean gray which is never twice the same; which runs through many shades and colorings like intershot silk in sunshine; which is gray, dark and light, and greenish gray, and sometimes of the clear azure of the deep sea.  They were eyes that masked the soul with a thousand guises, and that sometimes opened, at rare moments, and allowed it to rush up as though it were about to fare forth nakedly into the world on some wonderful adventure,––eyes that could brood with the hopeless sombreness of leaden skies; that could snap and crackle points of fire like those which sparkle from a whirling sword; that could grow chill as an arctic landscape, and yet again, that could warm and soften and be all a-dance with love-lights, intense and masculine, luring and compelling, which at the same time fascinate and dominate women till they surrender in a gladness of joy and of relief and sacrifice.”

––The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London, pg. 15-6