Claude Debussy in a 1903 letter on asceticism and cosmogonic pantheism

Naturally, I am aware of how well-founded are such aspirations and apostolic enthusiasms. Nothing is so
exciting as playing at being a little Buddha: living on one egg and two
glasses of water a day and giving the leavings to the poor, chewing over the endless ravings of cosmogonic pantheism, that hotchpotch of the divine forces of nature, of voluptuous mingling of the “I” and the “not-I”, dissolving into the cult of the universal soul.

From a letter of Claude Debussy, 1903

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September digest: archaeological finds, exhibitions, museums, theatre and the Church

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Frederic Leighton

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Claude Debussy in a 1903 letter on asceticism and cosmogonic pantheism

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September digest: archaeological finds, exhibitions, museums, theatre and the Church

Frederic Leighton

Attempts to resolve the problems of many years of uncontrolled mass migration

Characters from Gogol's "Petersburg Tales" on the pedestal of the monument to Nikolai Gogol on Nikitsky Boulevard, photograph of the 1960s