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 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.

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"

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. 

A quotation from a review on the USCCB movie review site: "Religiously honorable, but aesthetically tentative drama" If that doesn't describe the vast majority of the art labelled Christian, I can't think of anything better.  While I would be ecstatic over successful "Christian" Art, too often the label is used to indicate substandard writing and art in the Name of God.  It's a shame that this should so often happen.  Not all, but at least enough to give one pause when it comes to the purchase of "Christian" artwork.

Beckett recalling Joyce through an interview And here, for my future edification and delight is the source of an anecdote that I had never truly trusted: He was very friendly. He dictated some pages of Finnegan's Wake to me at one stage. That was later on when he was living in that flat. And during the dictation, someone knocked at the door and I said something. I had to interrupt the dictation. But it had nothing to do with the text. And when I read it back with the phrase 'Come in' in it, he said, 'Let it stand.'

Céline on joy

Probably too much ink has been spent writing about Ms. Rice's relgious convictions and opinions. Nevertheless, I like this piece greatly--it echoes some of my own thoughts and it portrays a phenomenon too common in Christianity. From "Nice Anne Rice" So Anne now 'follows Christ', but what Christ? It will be the loving, sympathetic teacher, gentle Jesus who is, well, somewhat effeminate really. Anne was a flower child in college, so her Jesus will be the kind of hippie Jesus we're all familiar with from that generation--a long haired, groovy kind of beach bum who meditates on mountaintops, mixes with down and outs and delivers a real cool anti establishment, John Lennon kind of sermon. Then when Anne or her son is 'persecuted' by the hard hearted, hypocritical religious leaders she'll understand how Jesus was persecuted too. That's a real nice Jesus, and that kind of Jesus isn't unknown to the gospels, but remembering that her...

"Whipped Cream"

Einstein--Seven Quotes

Malnutrition I knew once of a person who bragged that she was able to get through her entire college career taking only one course outside of the discipline she had chosen to major in.  She held a Ph. D. in one of the sciences.

Evil as It Appears to Atheists and Theists from which I derive the quotation du jour: " Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct. "  F. H. Bradley

Lord Chesterfield against laughter

A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all the other virtues. shamelessly stolen from Julie at Happy Catholic. I would add, in addition, that it is also parent of serenity itself.  A grateful heart--truly grateful--finds little time for fretting.

Recalling his birthday yesterday: C. S. Lewis Quotation 1 Super Apologist, Supertaster

An excerpt with a point-- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Eliot and Bellow are distracting us

The knoll has been tolling now for more than a century-- Edith Wharton on the death of the book.