Tesseract

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.

American Articulation

Effusion or minimalism? False dichotomies or truisms? Fear or hope?

We wonder how to speak of the equality we imagined. We liken equality to love. We decide the gospel is worth fighting for. We colonize. We run ahead of our good intentions. We wake from our dream of peace. We call ourselves pragmatists. We triumph the individual voice. We mock it before the immense responsibility of global public interest. We enjoy profound questions. We are a spiritual people. We want peace of mind more than peace on earth. We forget ourselves in sorrow. We remember ourselves in regret. We put every person on the margin in order to form a more perfect union. We put a blindfold on justice, we flip her a coin and she does not catch it. We steal her sword and sing hymns about plowshares. We let lambs lie down with lions. We throw boys at bombs. We like our Savior when he wielded the whip. We write stories about the Rapture, we include car accidents. We sympathize with the suicide bomber. We shock the world and ask it to trust us. We dim the future with dust smoke fire gas metal wire and naked flesh, as we imagine there must be more. We feel fevered and afraid. We want answers. We refuse to settle for our own.

Aldous Huxley - Island

     "With nothing between the cortex and the buttocks," said Dr. Robert. "Or rather with everything - but in a condition of complete unconsciousness and toxic stagnation. Western intellectuals are all sitting-addicts. That's why most of you are so repulsively unwholesome. In the past even a duke had to do a lot of walking, even a moneylender, even a metaphysician. And when they weren't using their legs, they were jogging about on horses. Whereas now, from the tycoon to the typist, from the logical positivist to the positive thinker, you spend nine tenths of your time on foam rubber. Spongy seats for spongy bottoms - at home, in the office, in cars and bars, in planes and trains and buses. No moving of legs, no struggles with distance and gravity - just lifts and planes and cars, just foam rubber and an eternity of sitting. The life force that used to find an outlet through striped muscle gets turned back on the viscera and the nervous system, and slowly destroys them."

...

     "But what you can get out of a book is never it. At bottom," Dr. Robert added, "all of you are still Platonists. You worship the word and abhor matter!"
     "Tell that to the clergymen," said Will. "They're always reproaching us with being crass materialists."
     "Crass," Dr. Robert agreed, "but crass precisely because you're such inadequate materialists. Abstract materialism - that's what you profess. Whereas we make a point of being materialists concretely - materialistic on the wordless levels of seeing and touching and smelling, of tensed muscles and dirty hands. Abstract materialism is as bad as abstract idealism; it makes immediate spiritual experience almost impossible. Sampling different kinds of work in concrete materialism is the first, indispensable step in our education for concrete spirituality."

William Jennings Bryan - Campaign Speech, 1896

"There are two ideas of government.  There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below.  The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them."

Kitty with a Knife

The Knife - Vegetarian Restaurant

Enrico Fermi

One should never underestimate the pleasure we feel at hearing something we already know.

Final Fantasy

My impulse is always to immortalize every hour, but I forget so many of them! Does the universe then remember, may these soldiers, martyrs, priests, and idiots still be considered immortal? My impulse is only hubris and ingratitude, if ultimately I exist as if am entitled to immortality, as if I earn it and deserve it. If not, if I exist like every hour is most importantly a gift, if I allow myself to roll in dirt and be bathed in gratitude, then perhaps I may yet receive immortality as well.

A person becomes impatient with pure contemplation. He becomes critical of his critical powers. Not only the unthinking part of him, which wishes for pure stasis or motion (let's say), but the thinking part as well. The thinking part wishes to feel. The feeling part longs to transfigure. And the soul wishes to return, to the dirt of the earth, the beat of breath, desire aflame, and the cool clean drink of water which all find contemplation irrelevant.

Pure contemplation is another element altogether; infinity reflected turns out to be nothing more than the void. The void does not and can not grow like life can. The void will not be anthropomorphized or vitalized, and we will not stop anthropomorphizing and vitalizing it until we at last attribute humanity and vitality not to It or to God, but instead to ourselves.

In the eye of God two lovers sparked and consumed each other. And God blinked. But in another world, where truth reigns instead of trembling, those sparks exploded and bathed the void in light. This is my last faith.

A Fine Frenzy - Almost Lover