The Process

Начало книги

A philosophy that does not culminate in a metaphysic of ecstasy is vain speculation; a mystical experience that is not grounded on a sound philosophical education is in danger of degenerating and going astray.

— Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ’rabi.

[T]he past remains present to the future … the future is already present to the past, just as the notes of a musical phrase, though played successively, nevertheless persist all together in the present and thus form a phrase.

— Ibid.

I understand that the late Henry Corbin was, in recent years, given access to books in Bombay belonging to the present Aga Khan, whose position as head of the Ismaili sect of Islam derives from his presumed descent from Mohammed’s daughter Fatima through the last Old Man of the Mountain. … Corbin and many others know infinitely more than I do about the Ismailis. I know next to nothing: read Marco Polo in my child-hood, became a hashishin in Greece at 19, read my Baudelaire, got syphilis like he did long before penicillin, smoked a lot in the Algerian Sahara and Morocco where I spent what is still more than a third of my lifetime. I did not become an Assassin.

Читать дальше →