AG: The eyes of fire was..
Student (2): Emotion
AG: Emotion, yeah. It’s all in.. You’ve got this in this thing here [points in his Blake book] – the little page of attributes. But it’s just, particularly, you know, it’s just like as a funny little… – It’d be an interesting painting.
“The weak in courage is strong in cunning”
AG: That’s me! – “cunning”. Everybody knows that one – “The weak in courage is strong in cunning” – how to get around the situation.
“If others had not been foolish, we should be so”
AG: …which is like “The cut worm forgives the plow” or.. “If others hadn’t been foolish..” then we wouldn’t learn, though, we wouldn’t have learned from their example, or their exploration. And so we have to fill in the gap, or fill out their corner and find out what it meant.
Student: It looks like he’s taking a pot-shot at ego in that one too
AG: Mmm-mm, Yeah.. Well people saying,”Well, that guy’s foolish”
Student: Or just that you’re not really yourself, you’re a whole lot…
AG: Mmm-mm, yeah
Student: (That sounds a bit like Newton, his “If I have seen (a) further distance , it was because (I) “stood on the shoulders of giants” – (“If I have seen a little further it was by standing on the shoulders of giants” (Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke, 1676)
AG: Yeah
Student: (Newton)
AG: He stood on the shoulders of whom?
Student: Giants
AG: Newton said that?
Student: Yeah, he was giving credit to his predecessors
AG: That sounds like Blake, actually. It sounds as good as Blake. I never heard that one. Newton said he wouldn’t have seen such a distance unless he stood on the shoulders of giants.
Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately twenty-five minutes in and concluding at approximately twenty-nine-and-a-half minutes in