Sunday, April 6, 2025

Ignorance is bliss

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness
        and get on with the jobs of life.

                John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs

 

 

 

 

 

 

Saturday, April 5, 2025

Poem: Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

        Billy Collins
 
April is National Poetry Month


Friday, April 4, 2025

These times

These are times in which a genius would wish to live.
It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose
of a pacific station, that great characters are formed.
The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties.
Great necessities call out great virtues.
When a mind is raised, and animated by the scenes that engage the heart,
then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant,
wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

    Abigail Adams, in a letter to John Quincy Adams 

 

 

 

 

Thursday, April 3, 2025

Awesome

The highest point a man can obtain is not Knowledge,
or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory,
but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing:
Sacred Awe!

            Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, April 2, 2025

Law

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power.
Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world,
and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.

                Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

 

 

 

 

 

Tuesday, April 1, 2025

April Fool

The fool doth think he is wise,
    but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.

                William Shakespeare, As You Like It

 

 

 

 

 

Monday, March 31, 2025

The second learning

You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and
compelling reason why we observe daylight-saving time.

    Dave Barry, 25 Things I Have Learned In 50 Years, #2