A different kind of place

[This] mirror reminds me of a story I once heard about a Persian dervish.

They say that a dervish arrived at a temple and asked the doorman, “What kind of place is this?”

The doorman answered: “This is a place where you must leave envy, lust, greed, anger, hostility, meanness, and the like behind to enter.“

To this, the dervish said, “If I were able to put all these negative traits behind, why would I need to enter this place? I need a place where I can carry in my impurities, and emerge without them.“
 

Alireza Taghdarreh, Light and Language in Thoreau and Rumi

 

 

 

Poem: August Morning

It’s ripe, the melon
by our sink. Yellow,
bee-bitten, soft, it perfumes
the house too sweetly.
At five I wake, the air
mournful in its quiet.
My wife’s eyes swim calmly
under their lids, her mouth and jaw
relaxed, different.
What is happening in the silence
of this house? Curtains
hang heavily from their rods.
Ficus leaves tremble
at my footsteps. Yet
the colors outside are perfect--
orange geranium, blue lobelia.
I wander from room to room
like a man in a museum:
wife, children, books, flowers,
melon. Such still air. Soon
the mid-morning breeze will float in
like tepid water, then hot.
How do I start this day,
I who am unsure
of how my life has happened
or how to proceed
amid this warm and steady sweetness?

                        Albert Garcia

 

 

 

 

 

Looking good

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important.
They don't mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed
in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.

            T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

Believe it

Wear a mask long enough and it becomes your face.
Play a role long enough and it becomes who you are.
Spend enough time pretending something is true
and you might as well believe it.

        Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

 

 

What is all this?

The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers. Each of us emerges from the preconsciousness of babyhood and simply finds himself here, in it, in the world. That experience alone astonishes some people. What is all this — what is the world? And what are we?

Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher

 

 

 

 

Right and wrong

If we were not provided with the knack for being wrong,
we could never get anything useful done.
We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives,
and the wrong choices have to be made as frequently as the right ones.

            Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail

 

 

 

 

Look no further

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

            John Barth, The End of the Road