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ellephuonglinhnguyen's reviews
890 reviews
The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy by Mehmet Emin Özcan, Stephen Corrin, Mircea Eliade
3.0
For the moment let us remember the following: if streams, galleries of mines, and caves are compared to the vagina of the Earth-Mother, everything that lies in the belly of the earth is alive, albeit in the state of gestation. In other words, the ores extracted from the mines are in some way embryos: they grow slowly as though in obedience to some temporal rhythm other than that of vegetable and animal organisms. They nevertheless do grow—they 'grow ripe' in their telluric darkness. Their extraction from the bowels of the earth is thus an operation executed before its due time. If they had been permitted the time to develop (i.e. the geological rhythm of time), the ores would have become ripe metals, having reached a state of 'perfection'. We shall shortly be citing concrete examples of this embryological conception of ores. But we are in a position to appreciate even at this point the responsibility assumed by the miners and metallurgists by their intervention in the obscure processes of mineral growth. They had at all costs to justify their intervention, and to do this they had to claim that they were, by their metallurgical procedures, superseding the work of Nature. By accelerating the process of the growth of metals, the metallurgist was precipitating temporal growth: geological tempo was by him changed to living tempo. This bold conception, whereby man defends his full responsibility vis-à-vis Nature, already gives us a glimpse of something of the work of the alchemist.
So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ
3.0
Friendship has splendours that love knows not. It grows stronger when crossed, whereas obstacles kill love. Friendship resists time, which wearies and severs couples. It has heights unknown to love.
The Last Temptation of Christ by Peter A. Bien, Nikos Kazantzakis
Did not finish book.
Did not finish book.
Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen
3.0
Dear Roshi
I am dead now
I died before you
just as you predicted
in the early 70s