Crushing judgments

I hate judgments that only crush and don’t transform.

            Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock 

 

 

 

 

A hard lesson

Time is a great teacher,
    but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

            Hector Berlioz, Letter, November 1856

 

 

 

 

A simple maxim

Where questions of style and exposition are concerned
        I try to follow a simple maxim:
                if you can’t say it clearly
                        you don’t understand it yourself.

                                John Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind

 

 

 

 

Who's counting?

Not everything that can be counted counts,
and not everything that counts can be counted.

        W. B. Cameron, Informal Sociology

 

 

 

Hankering to go on

We hanker to go on,
even in the face of plain evidence
that long, long lives are not necessarily pleasurable
in the kind of society we have arranged thus far.
We will be lucky if we can postpone
the search for new technologies for a while,
until we have discovered some satisfactory things
to do with the extra time.

            Lewis Thomas, Lives of a Cell

 

 

 

 

What God wants

God wants nothing of you
        but the gift of a peaceful heart.

                 Meister Eckhart, The Enlightened Mind: An Anthology of Sacred Prose

 

 

 

Poem: Ode to Mix Tapes

These days, it's too easy to make mix tapes.
CD burners, iPods, and iTunes
Have taken the place
Of vinyl and cassette. And, soon
Enough, clever introverts will create
Quicker point-and-click ways to declare
One's love, lust, friendship, and favor.
But I miss the labor
Of making old school mix tapes-- the mid air

Acrobatics of recording one song
At a time. It sometimes took days
To play, choose, pause,
Ponder, record, replay, erase,
And replace. But there was no magic wand.
It was blue-collar work. A great mix tape
Was sculpture designed to seduce
And let the hounds loose.
A great mix tape was a three-chord parade

Led by the first song, something bold and brave,
A heat-seeker like Prince with "Cream,"
Or "Let's Get It on," by Marvin Gaye.
The next song was always Patsy Cline's "Sweet Dreams,"
or something by Hank. But O, the last track
Was the vessel that contained
The most devotion and pain
And made promises that you couldn't take back.

                            Sherman Alexie