Tesseract

Aldous Huxley - Island

"The roaring of the engines diminished, the squeaking rhetoric lapsed into an inarticulate murmur, and as the intruding noises died away, out came the frogs again, out came the uninterruptable insects, out came the mynah birds.

"'Karuna. Karuna.' And a semitone lower, 'Attention.'"

 

Jane Kenyon - Happiness

 

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what

was lost, and take from its place the finest

garment, which you saved for an occasion

you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

to know that you were not abandoned,

that happiness saved its most extreme form

for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never

knew about, who flies a single-engine plane

onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes

into town, and inquires at every door

until he finds you asleep midafternoon

as you so often are during the unmerciful

hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.

It comes to the woman sweeping the street

with a birch broom, to the child

whose mother has passed out from drink.

It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing

a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,

and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots

in the night.

                     It even comes to the boulder

in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,

to rain falling on the open sea,

to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

 

(Hat tip to the great and kind Nico Carbellano.)

Patient Healer

 

Kierkegaard - Concluding Unscientific Postscript

"If one who lives in the midst of Christendom goes up to the house of God, the house of the true God, with the true conception of God in his knowledge, and prays, but prays in a false spirit; and one who lives in an idolatrous community prays with the entire passion of the infinite, although his eyes rest upon the image of an idol: where is the most truth? The one prays in truth to God though he worships an idol; the other prays falsely to the true God, and hence worships in fact an idol."

p. 201, as Johannes Climacus

Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Youth Peace Conference 1932

 

"No good at all can come from acting before the world and oneself as though we knew the truth when in reality we do not. The truth is too important for that, and it would be a betrayal of the truth if the church were to hide itself behind resolutions and pious so-called Christian principles when it is called to look the truth in the face, once and for all, and confess its guilt and ignorance. Indeed, such resolutions can have nothing complete, nothing clear about them, unless the whole Christian truth, as the church knows it or confesses that it does not know it, stands behind them. Qualified silence might perhaps be more appropriate for the church today than talk which is very much unqualified. That means protest against any form of the church which does not honor the question of truth above all things."

Why do they call it ergonomics?

"Ergo" as in "You have a body, therefore, sit and stand and walk like you do"?

The bodiless super-sentient beings who'll overcome us in the not-too-distant future will erase any record of my illustrious existence for having so much as suggested such a counter-revolutionary idea – and for not checking Wikipedia first.

The status quo is an active force

To stand athwart history takes strength, devotion to a dying cause takes fortitude, the cleanliness to wash your hands and the radiance to sustain the dream - the status quo is locked in battle with a moving and evolving enemy. The moving and evolving enemy is caught in battle with a statue - the angels cry wet, oily tears.

The self is shifting

The only cause that can inspire consistent devotion is one beyond oneself.

Cold Dust

VS Pritchett - The Myth Makers

We live beyond any tale we happen to enact.

Hyperspace

An Outburst of Maternal Instinct

Telefon Tel Aviv - The Birds

Marge Piercy - To Be of Use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Great Quotes from Great Women

"Light tomorrow with today."
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life."
Sophia Lauren

"The future is made of the same stuff as the present."
Simone Weil

"The day will come when man will recognize woman as his peer, not only at the fireside, but in councils of the nation. Then, and not until then, will there be the perfect comradeship, the ideal union between the sexes that shall result in the highest development of the race."
Susan B. Anthony

"Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training."
Anna Freud

"The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."
Virginia Woolf

"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."
Helen Keller

"To wear your heart on your sleeve isn't a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best."
Margaret Thatcher

"We can do no great things - only small things with great love."
Mother Teresa

"Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody."
Agatha Christie

"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood."
Marie Curie

"The battle to keep up appearances unnecessarily, the mask - whatever name you give creeping perfectionism - robs us of our energies."
Robin Worthington

"Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction."
Anne Frank

"The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain."
Dolly Parton

"New links must be forged as old ones rust."
Jane Howard

"I don't know that there are any short cuts to doing a good job."
Sandra Day O'Connor

"Careful grooming may take 20 years off a woman's age, but you can't fool a flight of stairs."
Marlene Dietrich

"Art is not the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste."
Nikki Giovanni

"A man's home may seem his castle on the outside; inside it's more often his nursery."
Claire Booth Luce

"I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by loving."
Anais Nin

"Women and elephants never forget."
Dorothy Parker

"Art is the only way to run away without leaving home."
Twyla Tharp

"If it makes my body so cold no fire can warm me, I know it is poetry."
Emily Dickinson

"The freer that women become, the freer men will be, because when you enslave someone, you are enslaved."
Louise Nevelson

"Labor: to feel with one's whole self the existence of the world. Love: to feel with one's whole self the existence of another being."
Simone Weil

Fernando Pessoa - Fragment

Master, placid are
All the hours
We lose,
If, in losing them,
Like in a vase,
We put flowers.

Allan Bloom - The Closing of the American Mind

Indignation is the soul's defense against the wound of doubt about its own; it reorders the cosmos to support the justice of its cause. It justifies putting Socrates to death. Recognizing indignation for what it is constitutes knowledge of the soul, and is thus an experience more philosophic than the study of mathematics.

The longer you delay

The more you doubt

Women are earth and water

Men are fire and air.

Religion

When understanding fails, love.

Kierkegaard - Diapsalmata

Af alle latterlige Ting forekommer det mig at være det allerlatterligste at have travlt i Verden, at være en Mand, der er rask til sin Mad og rask til sin Gjerning. Naar jeg derfor seer en Flue i det afgjørende Øieblik sætte sig paa en saadan Forretningsmands Næse, eller han bliver overstænket af en Vogn, der i endnu større Hast kjører ham forbi, eller Knippelsbro gaaer op, eller der falder en Tagsteen ned og slaaer ham ihjel, da leer jeg af Hjertens Grund. Og hvo kunne vel bare sig for at lee? Hvad udrette de vel, disse travle Hastværkere? Gaaer det dem ikke som det gik hiin Kone, der i Befippelse over, at der var Ildløs i Huset, reddede Ildtangen? Hvad Mere redde de vel ud af Livets store Ildebrand?

Kierkegaard - Letter to Henriette Kierkegaard 1847

I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.

Kant - Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven

In the universal silence of nature and in the calm of the senses the immortal spirit’s hidden faculty of knowledge speaks an ineffa­ble language and gives us undeveloped concepts, which are indeed felt, but do not let themselves be described.

不將語黙對

In the Mumonkan, a monk asks Master Fuketsu "Both speech and silence transgress. How can we not do so?" Fuketsu replies "I always remember the spring in Konan, where the partridges sing. How fragrant the countless flowers!"

Barack Obama - January 20, 2009

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

Abraham Lincoln c. August 1, 1858

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

William Wordsworth

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky.
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Wallace Stevens - Of Mere Being






The palm at the end of the mind,

Beyond the last thought, rises

In the bronze distance. 




A gold-feathered bird

Sings in the palm, without human meaning,

Without human feeling, a foreign song. 




You know then that it is not the reason

That makes us happy or unhappy.

The bird sings. Its feathers shine. 




The palm stands on the edge of space.

The wind moves slowly in the branches.

The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down. 


Eric Schulman - The History of the Universe in 200 Words

Quantum fluctuation. Inflation. Expansion. Strong nuclear interaction. Particle-antiparticle annihilation. Deuterium and helium production. Density perturbations. Recombination. Blackbody radiation. Local contraction. Cluster formation. Reionization? Violent relaxation. Virialization. Biased galaxy formation? Turbulent fragmentation. Contraction. Ionization. Compression. Opaque hydrogen. Massive star formation. Deuterium ignition. Hydrogen fusion. Hydrogen depletion. Core contraction. Envelope expansion. Helium fusion. Carbon, oxygen, and silicon fusion. Iron production. Implosion. Supernova explosion. Metals injection. Star formation. Supernova explosions. Star formation. Condensation. Planetesimal accretion. Planetary differentiation. Crust solidification. Volatile gas expulsion. Water condensation. Water dissociation. Ozone production. Ultraviolet absorption. Photosynthetic unicellular organisms. Oxidation. Mutation. Natural selection and evolution. Respiration. Cell differentiation. Sexual reproduction. Fossilization. Land exploration. Dinosaur extinction. Mammal expansion. Glaciation. Homo sapiens manifestation. Animal domestication. Food surplus production. Civilization! Innovation. Exploration. Religion. Warring nations. Empire creation and destruction. Exploration. Colonization. Taxation without representation. Revolution. Constitution. Election. Expansion. Industrialization. Rebellion. Emancipation Proclamation. Invention. Mass production. Urbanization. Immigration. World conflagration. League of Nations. Suffrage extension. Depression. World conflagration. Fission explosions. United Nations. Space exploration. Assassinations. Lunar excursions. Resignation. Computerization. World Trade Organization. Terrorism. Internet expansion. Reunification. Dissolution. World-Wide Web creation. Composition. Extrapolation?

Time fights fire

With water.

Grand Ayatollah Yousof Sanei

حتي كساني كه با انتحار مي‌‏آيند و مي‌‏زنند عده‌‏اي را مي‌‏كشند، آن هم به عنوان عمليات انتحاري، اينها در قعر جهنم هستند

Sigmund Freud - Psychoanalysis

The treatment is begun by the patient being required to put himself in the position of an attentive and dispassionate self-observer, merely to read off all the time the surface of his consciousness, and on the one hand to make a duty of the most complete honesty while on the other hand not to hold back any idea from communication, even if (1) he feels that it is too disagreeable or if (2) he judges that it is nonsensical or (3) too unimportant or (4) irrelevant to what is being looked for. It is uniformly found that precisely those ideas which provoke these last mentioned reactions are of particular value in discovering the forgotten material.

He quieted the rage

He cut the silence with laughter.

Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein

"Philosophical puzzles arise because we tend to mix up one language game with another. For example, people puzzle over the nature of something they call the soul. But this may be just because they're thinking of the soul along the lines of a physical object. They're confusing one language game with another... We learn to use words because we belong to a culture, a form of life, a practical way of doing things. In the end, we speak as we do because of what we do, and all of this is a properly public affair. Philosophers in the tradition of Descartes start from the lonely self, brooding over its private sensations. I want to overturn this centuries-old model. I want to start from our culture, our shared practical life together, and look at how we think and feel, and say it in these public terms."

"Damned right I..."

The ultimate defense.

Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling

If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all – what then would life be but despair?

Boy with a Coin

What is Enlightenment?

You live stupidly as long as you think the intelligence of others is more important than your own.

To the strong he gave a body

To the weak he gave a will.

Your moods are a rhyme

Your exclamations a breath between the lips
Your periods a gasp of composure
You tighten the folds of the temporal when
You loosen the rhythms of the unnecessary.

Nietzsche - On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

Roger McGough - Survivor

Everyday,
I think about dying.
About disease, starvation,
violence, terrorism, war,
the end of the world.

It helps
keep my mind off things.

The irresistible symmetry of interdependence

"To be human is to be dependent, and to accept the dependence of others on us. Accepting our need for others when we are weak, and our responsibility for others when we are strong is one of the main entry points into the deeper dimensions of existence, to the fully human life."

Michael Casey
MercatorNet interview April 10, 2008

Tocqueville - Democracy in America

"Not content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but one reaction and one Creator, he is still embarrassed by the primary division of things and seeks to expand and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole. If one finds a philosophical system which teaches that all things […] are only to be considered as the several parts of an immense Being who alone remains eternal in the midst of the continual flux and transformation of all that composes Him, one may be sure that such a system, although it destroys human individuality, or rather just because it destroys it, will have secret charms for men living under democracies. All their habits of mind prepare them to conceive it and put them on the way toward adopting it. It naturally attracts their imagination and holds it fixed. It fosters the pride and soothes the laziness of their minds.

"Of all the different philosophical systems used to explain the universe, I believe that pantheism is one of those most fitted to seduce the mind in democratic ages. All those who still appreciate the true nature of man’s greatness should combine in the struggle against it."

Stuck in the sky

I am above boredom in theory. There is always something to do (in theory).

There is always somewhere to walk when the sky is ever around me.

Alexandra

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans…

Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass…

You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

Excerpt from Desiderata by Max Ehrmann

Honesty out of time

Outside your daily desires
Beyond the frowning gate
Above your wilting tongue
I am unraveling hate.

Shao Yung (1011-1077)

A man mustn’t seek his reflection in flowing water;
He must seek it in water that is still.
Flowing water has no form,
While still water provides a fixed entity.

But neither should a man seek his reflection in water.
He should seek his reflection in other men.
Water's mirror may show a man's face,
But a human mirror exposes a man's spirit.

Can you hear me now?

The names of God are too many to list

But God did not desire a list. He only asked for devotion. For what possible perfect reason but that he smiles when a sinner chants his names as the lover smiles when the blush of her lover fades.

Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being

     Stroking Franz's arms in bed in one of the many hotels where they made love, Sabina said, "The muscles you have! They're unbelievable!"
     Franz took pleasure in her praise. He climbed out of bed, got down on his haunches, grabbed a heavy oak chair by one leg, and lifted it slowly into the air. "You never have to be afraid," he said. "I can protect you no matter what. I used to be a judo champion."
     When he raised the hand with the heavy chair above his head, Sabina said, "It's good to know you're so strong."
     But deep down she said to herself, Franz may be strong, but his strength is directed outward; when it comes to the people he lives with, the people he loves, he's weak. Franz's weakness is called goodness. Franz would never give Sabina orders. He would never command her, as Tomas had, to lay the mirror on the floor and walk back and forth on it naked. Not that he lacks sensuality; he simply lacks the strength to give orders. There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.
     Sabina watched Franz walk across the room with the chair above his head; the scene struck her as grotesque and filled her with an odd sadness.
     Franz set the chair down on the floor opposite Sabina and sat in it. "I enjoy being strong, of course," he said, "but what good do these muscles do me in Geneva? They're like an ornament, a peacock feather. I've never fought anyone in my life."
     Sabina proceeded with her melancholy musings: What if she had a man who ordered her about? A man who wanted to master her? How long would she put up with him? Not five minutes! From which it follows that no man was right for her. Strong or weak.
     "Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said.
     "Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.
     Sabina realized two things: first, that Franz's words were noble and just; second, that they disqualified him from her love life.