God's friend

For prayer is nothing else than being on terms of friendship with God.

        Teresa of Ávila, Life of Prayer

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Blackberry-Picking

for Philip Hobsbaum

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

                            Seamus Heaney

 

 

 

 

 

Sounds of silence

There is a wonderful stillness here. Especially I love the evenings, when I linger on my verandah and revel in the complete absence of all sound. That is strange, you will say; how can one enjoy sound that is absent, or indeed anything that does not exist! But if you were a musician perhaps you too would be permitted to hear, in the night stillness a sound, as though the earth in its flight through space intoned a deep bass note. 

Pyotr Illych Tchaikovsky,
To My Best Friend: Correspondence Between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck 

 

 

 

Preference

To know what you prefer,
    instead of humbly saying Amen
        to what the world tells you you ought to prefer,
            is to have kept your soul alive.

                         Robert Louis Stevenson, An Inland Voyage 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Uplifted

The effort to understand the universe
    is one of the very few things
        which lifts human life a little above the level of farce
            and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

                    Steve Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory

 

 

 

 

Metaphysical outlaws

If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.

Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

 

 

 

 

Great inventions

The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization.

        John Banville, Paris Review interview