A Momentary Taste of Being

If your house is on fire, the most urgent thing to do is to go back and try to put out the fire, not to run after the person you believe to be the arsonist. If you run after the person you suspect has burned your house, your house will burn down while you are chasing him or her. That is not wise. You must go back and put out the fire. So when you are angry, if you continue to interact with or argue with the other person, if you try to punish her, you are acting exactly like someone who runs after the arsonist while everything goes up in flames. Anger Thich Nhat Hanh

" They mounted and set off for the house. Ordering the servant to ride on before with the lantern, Leila brought her horse close in so that they might ride knee-to-knee, solaced by the touch of each other’s bodies. They had not been lovers for very long —barely ten days —though to the youthful Mountolive it seemed a century, an eternity of despair and delight. He had been formally educated in England, educated not to wish to feel. All the other valuable lessons he had already mastered, despite his youth —to confront the problems of the drawing-room and the street with sang-froid; but towards personal emotions he could only oppose the nervous silence of a national sensibility almost anaesthetized into clumsy taciturnity: an education in selected reticences and shames." In Mountolive  by Lawrence Durrell, and describing him (Mountolive)

from The Amish Way Donald B. Kraybill, Steven M. Nolt, David L. Weaver-Zecher David Kline was green long before it became trendy. He summarizes his theology for eco-friendly living in these words: "If one's livelihood comes from the earth--from the land, from creation on a sensible scale, where humans are a part of the unfolding of the seasons, experience the blessing of drought-ending rains, and seek God's spirit in all creation--a theology for living should be as natural as the rainbow following a summer storm. And then we can pray, 'Help us to walk gently on the earth and to love and nurture your creation and handiwork.'"

from "The People" in China in Ten Words Yu Hua This was a key moment in my life. I had always assumed the light carried farther than human voices and voices carry farther than body heat. But that night I realized that it is not so, for when the people stand as one, their voices carry farther than light and their heat is carried farther still. That, I discovered, is what "the people" means.

I'm not certain if I will launch seriously into this book, but these two moments only a little apart are amusing. from The Banquet Bug Geling Yan He tries to describe the texture of the delicate flesh, the subtle contact between the meat and this palate and tongue, the slippery sensation it gives when it passes the entrance of the throat, leaving the oral organs in such wonder. But he has no vocabulary for it. Putting together his education with hers, they can barely write a decent letter to their parents without checking a dictionary. **** A neighbor woman yells outside the plastic curtain, asking what's taking them so long and whether they shower hair by hair.  Laughing Dan Dong yells back that he has twelve toe to scour.

from The Marriage Plot Jeffrey Eugenides For thirty-five years she'd been inspecting her corn with Mendelian patience, receiving no encouragement or feedback on her work, just showing up every day, involved in her own process of discovery, forgotten by the world and not caring. And now, finally, this , the Nobel, the vindication of her life's work, and though she seemed pleased enough, you could see that it hadn't been the Prize she was after at all. MacGregor's reward had been the work itself, the daily doing of it, the achievement made of a million unremarkable days. This is how a life means--not in the light of the expectation of others or of our own unreasonable expectations of ourselves, but through following a passion that allows us to BE in a way that no other thing can.  A million unremarkable days that may lead to an overwhelming question--or it may lead to silence. We fail to understand that meaning isn't something you make by willing to make it, b...

The Layers --Stanley Kunitz . I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp_sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: "Live in the layers, not on the litter." Though I ...

An intensely tricky poem to translate--see one translator's struggle here . Le Pont Mirabeau Guillaume Apollinaire Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine Et nos amours Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne La joie venait toujours après la peine Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure Les jours s'en vont je demeure Les mains dans les mains restons face à face Tandis que sous Le pont de nos bras passe Des éternels regards l'onde si lasse Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure Les jours s'en vont je demeure L'amour s'en va comme cette eau courante L'amour s'en va Comme la vie est lente Et comme l'Espérance est violente Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure Les jours s'en vont je demeure Passent les jours et passent les semaines Ni temps passé Ni les amours reviennent Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

from When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me? Saul Frampton      Around this time a fog descended over northern Europe. It covered the Rhine, merging with the reed beds and sea mists. It cloistered the churchyards of France. It slipped inside books, it tarnished sword blades.  It scaled the high walls of Oxford and surrounded Aristotle. It seems to enter flesh itself, and confuse the identities of thins and the very boundaries of mater. And then it settled in men's minds. . . .      Scepticism arrived as a new and intoxicating intellectual force in the sixteenth century.

Flitting like a bumblebee from blossom to blossom--my reading flung wide over the entire field, I'll never make it back to the hive: from When I Am Playing with My Cat How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me? Saul Frampton But with the hardening of religious attitudes that inevitably resulted, Stoicism began to snowball, almost in a kind of ideological feedback loop. For what made is so difficult to displace as an attitude was the fact that it was seen to be quintessentially noble, honourable-- male --and no self-respecting sixteenth-century man who called himself a man would beg to differ, as is affirmed in an emblem from Henry Peacham's Minverva Britannica (1612):  Amid the waves, a mightie Rock doth stand, Whose  ruggie brow, had bidden many a shower, And bitter storme; which neither sea, nor land, Nor JOVES sharpe-lightening ever could devoure: This same is MANLIE CONSTANCIE of mind, Not easly moov'd with every blase of wind. And if so, it speaks vol...

The most anthologized poem in the English language, but worth another look anyway.                                 TO AUTUMN.                                   John Keats                                                                                    1.     SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,         Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;     Conspiring with him how to load and bless         With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;     To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,       ...

from "The Whisperer in Darkness" H. P. Lovecraft I hope--devoutly hope--that they were the waxen products of a master artist, despite what my inmost fears tell me. Great God! That whisperer in darkness with its morbid odour and vibrations!  Sorcerer, emissary, changeling, outsider. . . that hideous repressed buzzing. . .  and all the time in that fresh, shiny cylinder on the shelf. . . poor devil. . . "prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill" . . .  For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance--or identity--were. . . H. P. Lovecraft is one of the greats.  This is one of the four or five major canonical stories--but each tale has its own compelling interest.  And if only for his influence on major writers of our own day, one should take time to peruse the occasionally florid, sometimes purple prose of HPL and get a glimpse of the cosmic horrors he made his metier.

from When I am Playing with My Cat, How Do I know That She Is Not Playing with Me? Saul Frampton Our zeal performs wonder when it seconds our inclinations to hatred, cruelty, ambition, avarice, detraction, rebellion. But moved. . . toward goodness, benignity, moderation, unless by miracle some rare disposition prompt us to it, we stir neither hand nor foot. Our religion is intended to eradicate vices whereas it covers, nourishes, incites them.  (Quoting Montaigne) All too true and frightening, and so how much more frightening, then, when words, spoken innocently enough and without guile or intent to deceive can be used to foment division and unrest.  Words of faith, rightly used and wrongly construed still result in the negative that Montaigne conceives here.  So our doctrine must not only be sound, but soundly worded so that there can be nothing within it that can be taken to detract from the value of another human being--nothing that can be interpreted to mean th...

I wanted to preserve this random Quotation that showed up on the site because, while I may not necessarily agreed with all that it entails, I think it captures a sense of mystery perfectly.  Oh, and it is lovely, absolutely lovely. Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

The most merciful thing in the world, I think is the inability of the human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. H. P. Lovecraft--the open of "The Call of Cthulhu"

From very early on in the novel: "Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me." Kerouac argued that his novel was not an encouragement to much of what followed him, but rather a quest, a quest for a kind of religious salvation.

from Book of Sketches Jack Kerouac   Ah Neal--the shaggy whiteface cows are arranged in stooped   dejected feed, necks   bent, upon the earth   that has a several mood under several   skies & openings--Ah   the sad dry Land ground   that's open between grasses whip't bald by the endless Winds--   the clouds are bunched up on the Divide of the horizon, are shining   upon they city--the little fences are lonely-- The commentary made in a journal entry on an earlier passage works as well for this: There is about this a poetic naivete that is endearing because it is undemanding. The lines break where the lines break without much thought of rule or order or consequence or meaning or rhythm or any of the other guiding lights of well-considered poetry--and yet because it lacks these almost by design, it has an kind of swinging, free and open rhythm--a movement all its own and not replicable without trying and trying ...

Stolen, not borrowed, because it struck me as powerful, meaningful, and useful. God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason. -  Dag  Ha mmarskjöld , born on this date in 1905 Books inq. 

Literary criticism is the sincerest form of fiction.  It wasn't actually this book that inspired the thought, but it helped to carry the thought to its fruition--I was reading a book on Ulysses by one of the great Joyce scholars and thought what an elaborate array of fictive devises had been invented to explain what essentially needs no explanation.  Literary criticism was the predecessor (and now shares the domain with) fan fiction. I'll elaborate more on that point at another time--but for now let's consider Wendell Berry's book on William Carlos Williams.  What I profoundly admired in this book was not so much the image of Williams or of Williams's poetry that comes forth (upon reading the book I did not/do not feel inspired to run out and try to push myself--once again--through the book-length maundering Paterson ) but some of the observations about literature, life, and writing that occur along the way.  For example from The Poetry of William Carlos Willia...

Ms. Armstrong is likely to offend those who abide by a strict literal interpretation of scripture, but her words support those of us who have to answer the question--"Why the difference between the God of the Old Testament and the one in the New?" from Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life Karen Armstrong There is a great deal of tribalism in both the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Hence we fince tests such as the book of oshua, which describes Israel's brutal slaughter of the ingigenous people of Canaan, and the book of Revelation, which imagines Christ slaughtering his enemies in the Last Days. Not surprisingly, some have been puzzle by the Charter for Compassion's call "to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate." But we have to remember that people have not always read scripture in the way it is read today. Rabbinic midrash was not interested in the original mean...