“Just as Impressionism could be interpreted as an attempt to take a kind of psychological back-step, so that the artist could produce a suggestion of what the eye registered prior to the brain’s synthesis of a more coherent, knowledge-based image, so Symbolism, in the theories of Moréas, Kahn and Stéphane Mallarmé, could be interpreted as an attempt to suspend a part of the brain’s analytical process and tackle ideas in a more immediate form, prior to the intellectual sieve of interpretation and explanation.”

Brian Stableford, 2016

“The satyrs had first surrounded her, dancing. The long lush grass had hid the lower halves of their bodies and their prancing bestiality, while their hands offered bunches of grapes, fruits and odorant apples—but their hands had soon become bolder. 

“It was afterwards that she became a wanderer, entirely devoted to some mysterious and desperate quest: a philter to create souls within the hairy flesh of prowling goat-foots. She lifted up enormous stones with her frail hands but, instead of a balm or talisman, there were toads or stagnant water sleeping there. Snakes slithered under the dry leaves, hatched from golden eggs, which she believed to be those of peacocks or doves; a seething poison, where a remedy had been promised...”

Henri de Regnier, 1897

“Because of its nature, Symbolist literature was intensely interested in fantastic material, and a good deal of Symbolist fiction is explicitly supernatural. The fact that the Symbolist writers were operating in an age when supernatural notions had all-but-lost the warrant of belief, however, meant that such motifs were very rarely represented as simple matters of fact; indeed, the whole point was that they were symbols, ideas essentially representative of something else, and not mere accidents of happenstance. For the Symbolists, the apparently-supernatural was really the psychological, reflective of internal emotions and obsessions.”

Brian Stableford, 2016

“Zdeněk Liška was a composer of tremendous intensity and imagination.  His scores are among Cinema’s most deeply odd: Kinetic, witty, tuneful, terrifying.”

Link: The Fantastic Mr. Fox: a biographical essay by David Herter

 

“We are emerging from the sacred wood of yesteryear. In the plain that leads us to the next clump of blessed trees, the occult river flows invisibly. Abandoned marbles cover the moss behind us. Forgetfulness is falling over the past gods; the figure of the future gods still remains unknown. What does it matter, since they are both merely images? But mystery follows us to the next halt like a torch-bearer. If you try to interrogate him, I fear that he will only respond with the disappointing word: ‘Seek.’ ”

Gabriel de Lautrec, 1903

 

To Monsieur Claude Achille Debussy

The stones have worn away the tarnished gold of the buskin,

The crook of the staff has cramped your weary hand, evening after evening! and your steps have wandered along the path from the threshold of the house to the silent wood.

Have you not gathered the pale flowers to adorn the urn where the ashes of days dissolve and accumulate? Merciful fate has granted you the grace

of seeing at last the Star rise in the nocturnal sky!

Listen—the water, the wind, the shadow—all your soul trembles, assimilates itself, vegetates, and cries out through the mighty brass and the magical strings,

And Music, in the depths of those evenings when you dream upon yourself, at last master of lethargic destinies,

weaves from your Pasts the fabric of your Dreams!

Henri de Regnier,  1893

“These animules, atoms emanated by our souls, form a sensible atmosphere around us. Our individual soul, or divine guest, partakes more intimately in our joys and dolors, our particular inclinations and personal affections. While assisting in that, our animules have another role to play: they compose the great chain, the great network of general affections. Love broader but sometimes no less passionate, that makes itself felt by an entire people, which, on a given day, lifts them with the same enthusiastic impulse, evidently flows from them. 

“There are ideas in the air, it is often said; in the air there are animules, which imprint thousand of souls with the same impulse simultaneously, exciting them and causing them to palpitate in the magnetic milieu that is their own essence.”

Xavier-Boniface Saintine, 1864

THE HOROSCOPE

Beneath a dying sun in horrible syncopes,

My unhealthy spleens

Were conjuring up, concerning my case, the various horoscopes

Of the doctors.

Everywhere, an unsettling, hostile solitude,

Where every hole

Had some evil cry of insect, reptile,

And owl.

I was on a deserted road, partaking of the abyss

And of the dungeon,

Where the imminent storm blew a sulfurous wind,

Thick and hot,

Along a road bordered by gigantic hedges

That frightened me,

And by mutilated rocks displaying their wounds

With stupefaction.

And I went on, dismayed, thinking: “My illness is worsening!”

Feeling my pulse,

And gnawed by dread, by that vampire-dread

Like lice;

When suddenly, rising up in the uniform mist

Before my steps,

A tall gentleman wearing a top hat

Said to me softly

These words that suited the perfidy

Of his approach:

— “Beware: for you have the illness

Of which I died.”

Maurice Rollinat, 1883

“A somber, rumbling noise was heard under the feet of the two men, as though it were coming from the bowels of the earth, or indeed from the profound depths of an abyss. One might have thought that ghostly phantoms were shattering a glacier and dragging its long-lost occupant back to the surface of the earth.”

Comte Villiers de L’lsle-Adam, 1884

 

“And the idea came to him of a future religion with simple and terrible ceremonies. The science of ancient days had initially dressed the sacred forms. People adored Zeus, like Athene, before knowing what thunder was, and before knowing what lightning was. Science followed religion. Why not suppose, on the contrary, a religion born of science? Did not the theory of universal attraction, the most admirable of modern times, have sufficient beauty to be divinized, while awaiting a new progress of human thought to overturn that theory and find another formula of the universe? Could it not, in the meantime, also count its martyrs and its fanatics?”

Gabriel de Lautrec, 1903

“The tamed masses conducted themselves peaceably in the zones; were allowed to shout: 'Down with new inventions!' Their hostility made it easier for the new rulers to reintroduce quotas for incoming technologists and scientists, and to secure their own position. 

“A circle of cities and regional zones emerged. 

“Over preceding centuries the devices had changed utterly. Machines scattered individually had come together as machine-blocks, machine-houses; colossi-organised pyramids had become machine-organisms. The energy economy had led to the networking of all power plants. The effective radius of the energy generated and transformed had grown to gigantic proportions. The energy was stored at certain points. Alongside power generation plants stood banks of colossi-specialised devices, each dedicated to a particular zone; no longer were there unconnected machines.

“Now—towards the end of the 25th century—the functional specialisation of the townzone regions had became unstoppable: glass cities light cities food cities clothing cities. In research towns away from the specialised cities, discoveries began to pile up. Then, within a few decades, blocks and pyramids of machinery rapidly coalesced. New forces of Nature, gasiform radiant, sniffed out already a century before, were captured by contemporaries of Meki, yoked into devices. Shambling colossi were put to shame by Lilliput-sized devices. Decades centuries of power became defenceless, paralysed by this moment’s glance. Huge machine-cities fell derelict. Inconspicuous in protective casings were delicate devices in which natural forces were imprisoned like ghosts in a jar. Few hands were needed to service them. When you first saw the devices, your heart stood still. You grew used to them, lived under their protection, in comfort and with little gratitude: spoiled offspring of a wealthy family.”

Alfred Döblin, 1924

“Sacred numbers, infinite rhythm, swaying 

Of stars bathed in the flux of the somber ether, 

Glory and decline of nations, course of years, 

Float, passing by regally and sadly!”

Aber Jhouney, 1888

“Our Sages have sometimes asked why tombs are not erected on Mercury as they are on the majority of other Planets—to which the Mercurians reply, briefly but decisively: 'If Tombs and Epitaphs were eternal, the Planet would be incapable of containing them all; if they are perishable, it is not worth the trouble of building them.'”

Chevalier de Béthune, 1750

The impenitent artist who called himself Raphael went into a publisher’s office. Seeing that he had not been able to achieve anything with painting and sculpture, he had devoted himself to poetry. “Monsieur,” he said, “I’ve brought you Vercingetorix Before Caesar, an epic in verse, which I shall have printed at my own expense. I only ask you to put the name of your house on the cover.” 

The editor stared. 

“Oh, have no fear,” said Raphael, “it’s poetry written in the modern fashion. I say that two and two make five at the beginning of every chapter, I mention a young mother who eats her baby with asparagus tips and, half the time, I write things I can’t even comprehend myself. So...” 

“Monsieur...” 

“That’s not all. The work will be printed on emery paper, so that the buyers of my books can always use it for scouring their saucepans.” 

“Monsieur,” replied the editor, with dignity, “here, we only publish works in verse whose pages can serve as fly-paper.” 

Raphael became livid, put his hands to his neck, and fled.

Jean Rameau, 1887

 

“And what astonished him even more, and yet did not astonish him at all, but seemed, on the contrary, to be the most natural thing in the world, was that he soon ceased to distinguish his own face in the mirror, discerning nothing there but a vague green, marshy stagnation—and then he saw, little by little, designed in the floating, melting, scarcely-perceptible features of an apparition on the brink of vanishing, a new face. It was the face of the Undine. She had water-weed for hair, softly serpentine. Her pupils darted a pale glaucous fire, in which all the gray-green of the ambient water was concentrated, She was weeping—and, at the same time, a furtive smile wandered over her wan lips. And all of that was very distant, very alien, very deep, gently and infinitely.”

Jean Richepin, 1921

 

“There, through the monster telescope, the young man saw singular changes taking place on one of the nearer planets. 'What’s that?'

“'Signals. It’s the beginning of the Internationale of Worlds.'

“The young man thought momentarily that he was dealing with a madman, but Dr. Gaël, drawing himself up to his full height, said: 'Pay attention— we’re going to reply.'”

Louise Michel, 1888

 

“The souls of many persons well known on this earth are said to be reincarnated on Jupiter, one of the worlds nearest to perfection; and much surprise has been felt on hearing it stated that persons who, when here, were not supposed to merit such a favour, should have been admitted into so advanced a globe.”

Allen Kardec, 1869

“All the Stars and all the Planets are inhabited, and with a limitless variety, because Nature likes nothing as much as diversity, having thrown it with full hands into those different worlds. None, according to them, is similar to any other; there is always a Sun and Planets, but that repetition excepted, the rest of the symmetry is infinitely diversified; nothing that can be seen and can be known in one Sun is found in another. There are different Animals, different Plants, other human forms, other senses, other knowledge, new ideas, other sentiments, and all of that drawing nearer to the best and most perfect without ever attaining it. They say that all those Suns, so beautiful, so vast and so diverse are as many magnificent habitations that the sovereign Master has prepared for us, and in every one of which we shall have nothing to desire of everything that might make us happy, so long as we want to live in that delightful Fatherland.”

Chevalier de Béthune, 1750

 

"It’s no longer possible to live without the aid of Science, the precious treasure of which increases every day—but that very wealth makes it increasingly difficult to learn; it’s therefore necessary that intelligence becomes increasingly powerful.”

At that moment, a roseate light filled the room, neutralizing that of the lighting microbes. 

“A telephonic communication,” said Sinusia. 

It was, indeed, by such signals that the ancient bells had been replaced. There was no longer any apparent receiver or transmitter; it was sufficient to speak in the direction of the ceiling. The voice was reproduced by a loudspeaker.

Henri Allorge, 1922

 

“I believe that it ought to be the duty of every artist to depart as completely as possible from the place and subject of his previous success.

“The principal fault of the majority of writers and artists is having neither the will nor the courage to break with their successes, failing to seek new paths and give birth to new ideas. Most of them reproduce them twice, three, even four times. They have neither the courage nor the temerity to leave what is certain for what is uncertain, There is, however, no greater pleasure than going into the depth of oneself, setting one’s whole being in motion and seeking for new and hidden treasures. 

“A person who repeats himself is like an imitator, don’t you think? That is the great evil of today. Art has become almost an industry. But, believe me, those who are resigned to this truth are not real artists. If one day I become like that, I shall lay down my pen forever. I shall not complain but quietly go away to tune pianos. Claude Debussy: piano tuner.”

Claude Debussy, 1910