Poem: Goodbye Old Year, You Oaf or Why Don’t They Pay the Bonus?

Many of the three hundred and sixty-five days of the year are followed by dreadful nights, but one night is far, oh yes by far the worst

And that is the night of December the thirty-first

Man can never get it through his head that he is born to be not a creditor, but a debtor

Man always thinks the annual thought that just because last year was terrible, next year is bound to be better

Man is a victim of dope

In the incurable form of hope

Man is a blemishless Polyanna

And is convinced that the advent of every new year will place him in possession of a bumper crop of manna

Therefore man fills himself up with a lot of joie de vivre

And goes out to celebrate New Year’s Ivre

Therefore millions of respectable citizens who just a week before have been perfectly happy to sit at home and be cozily Christmas carolized

Consider it a point of honor to go out on the town and get themselves parolyzed

Therefore the whistles blow toot toot and the bells ring ding ding and the confetti goes confetti confetti at midnight on the 31st of December

And on January 1st the world is full of people who either can’t and wish they could or can and wish they couldn’t remember

They never seem to learn from experience

They keep on doing it year after year from the time they are puking infants till they are doddering octogenerience.

My goodness, if there’s anything in heredity and environment

How can people expect the newborn year to manifest any culture or refironment?

Every new year is a direct descendant, isn’t it, of a long line of proven criminals

And you can’t turn it into a philanthropist by welcoming it with cocktails and champaigne any more successfully than with prayer books and hyminals

Every new year is a country as barren as the old one, and it’s no use trying to forage it

Every new year is incorrigible, and all I can say is for heaven’s sake, why go out of your way to encorrige it

                                            Ogden Nash

 (Transcribed from a YouTube video, so spelling and punctuation not guaranteed)

Resolute

Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he
Who finds himself, loses his misery.

        Matthew Arnold, Self-Dependence

 

 

 

 

 

Please God

The object of a New Year
    is not that we should have a new year,
        it is that we should have a new soul.

                G. K. Chesterton, The Wit and Wisdom of G. K. Chesterton 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Optimism

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs -- all this resinous, unretractable earth.

            Jane Hirshfield

 

 

 

 

 

Great spirits

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man
who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices
and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.

            Albert Einstein, in a letter to Morris Raphael Cohen, 1940

At ease

Loafing" is easy, but "leisure" is difficult. 

    Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

 

 

 

 

 

It's a national holiday

Christmas: It’s the only religious holiday that’s also a federal holiday. That way, Christians can go to their services, and everyone else can sit at home and reflect on the true meaning of the separation of church and state.

Samantha Bee, Reader’s Digest 2008

 

 

 

 

Poem: “Your Luck Is About To Change”

(A fortune cookie)

Ominous inscrutable Chinese news
to get just before Christmas,
considering my reasonable health,
marriage spicy as moo-goo-gai-pan,
career running like a not-too-old Chevrolet.
Not bad, considering what can go wrong:
the bony finger of Uncle Sam
might point out my husband,
my own national guard,
and set him in Afghanistan;
my boss could take a personal interest;
the pain in my left knee could spread to my right.
Still, as the old year tips into the new,
I insist on the infant hope, gooing and kicking
his legs in the air. I won't give in
to the dark, the sub-zero weather, the fog,
or even the neighbors' Nativity.
Their four-year-old has arranged
his whole legion of dinosaurs
so they, too, worship the child,
joining the cow and sheep. Or else,
ultimate mortals, they've come to eat
ox and camel, Mary and Joseph,
then savor the newborn babe.

                Susan Elizabeth Howe 

 

 

 

 

Tis the season

For now I am in a holiday humour.  

            William Shakespeare, As You Like It

 

 

 

 

The great iconoclast

Images, I must suppose, have their use or they would not have been so popular.
(It makes little difference whether they are pictures and statues
outside the mind or imaginative constructions within it.)
To me, however, their danger is more obvious.
Images of the Holy easily become holy images--sacrosanct.
My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time.
He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast.
Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence?
The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.
And most are 'offended' by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not.

                            C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Now Winter Nights Enlarge

Now winter nights enlarge
The number of their hours;
And clouds their storms discharge
Upon the airy towers.
Let now the chimneys blaze
And cups o’erflow with wine,
Let well-turned words amaze
With harmony divine.
Now yellow waxen lights
Shall wait on honey love
While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights
Sleep’s leaden spells remove.

This time doth well dispense
With lovers’ long discourse;
Much speech hath some defense,
Though beauty no remorse.
All do not all things well;
Some measures comely tread,
Some knotted riddles tell,
Some poems smoothly read.
The summer hath his joys,
And winter his delights;
Though love and all his pleasures are but toys,
They shorten tedious nights.

                    Thomas Campion 

Nuts!

On Dec. 22, four German couriers approached American lines under a flag of truce, carrying a message "from the German commander to the American commander."
Asserting that Bastogne was "encircled," the note gave McAuliffe, who was acting commander of the 101st in the absence of Maj. Gen. Maxwell Taylor, two hours to surrender or face "total annihilation." It offered "the privileges of the Geneva Convention" to the would-be POWs.

What came next would be one of World War II's seminal moments. As [Vincent] Vicari, McAuliffe's personal aide, recalls it 60 years later, "General Mac read the note and said, 'Aw, nuts.' Then he asked, 'What should I tell them?' "

Lt. Col. Harry W. O. Kinnard, the division operations officer, said, "Why not tell them what you just said?"

"What did I just say?"

"You said, 'Nuts,' " Kinnard replied.

McAuliffe scribbled a reply: "To the German commander. Nuts!From the American commander."He handed the message to Lt. Col. Joseph Harper, who had escorted the couriers. To the Germans who didn't understand the Yankee colloquialism, Harper explained: "It means the same thing as 'Go to hell.' "

While World War II historian Barry Turner says McAuliffe's one-word riposte "lost something in translation," others have speculated that "nuts" might be a sanitized version of what the tough paratroop general actually said. Not so, Vicari says. "General Mac was the only general I ever knew who did not use profane language," he said in a telephone interview. " 'Nuts' was part of his normal vocabulary." 

Richard Pyle, Los Angeles Times 2004

What to get him?

The only suitable gift for the man who has everything is your deepest sympathy.

        Imogene Fey, The Reader’s Digest Dictionary of Quotations 

 

 

 

Happy holidays

Once again, we come to the Holiday Season,
    a deeply religious time that each of us observes,
        in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.

                Dave Barry, Christmas Shopping: A Survivor’s Guide

 

 

 

 

 

Antidote

Action is the antidote to despair.

        Joan Baez, Rolling Stone interview 1983

Extravagance

I am sorry to tell you that I am getting very extravagant,
    and spending all my money,
        and, what is worse for you,
            I have been spending yours too.

                    Jane Austen, Letters of Jane Austen 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lighten up

Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has been always the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art. Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies. Remember how the most earnest mediaeval art was full of light and fluttering draperies, of quick and capering feet. It was the one thing that the modern Pre-raphaelites could not imitate in the real Pre-raphaelites. Burne-Jones could never recover the deep levity of the Middle Ages. 

In the old Christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens. The tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the rayed plumes of the angels. But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One “settles down” into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man “falls” into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. 

Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one’s self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity

G. K Chesterton, Orthodoxy

 

 

 

Poem: Be empty of worrying

Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought.
Move outside the tangle of
fear-thinking.
Live in silence.
Flow down and down in always
widening rings of being.

        Rumi

Creating a good story

Caring for people often takes the form of concern for the quality of their stories, not for their feelings. Indeed, we can be deeply moved even by events that change the stories of people already dead. We feel pity for a man who died believing in his wife’s love for him when we hear that she had a lover for many years and stayed with her husband only for his money. We pity the husband although he had lived a happy life. We feel the humiliation of a scientist who made a discovery that was proved false after she died, although she did not feel the humiliation. Most important, we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

The safest road

The safest road to Hell is the gradual one —
the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings,
without milestones, without signposts.

        C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

 

 

 

 

Original virtue

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue.

            Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

Learning

You always learn a lot more when you lose than when you win.

African Proverb

 

 

 

 

The secret

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly
        and in a thousand things well.

                 Horace Walpole, in The Christian Leader 

 

 

 

 

 

Bodhi Day

Now may every living thing,
young or old,
weak or strong,
living near or far,
known or unknown,
living or departed
or yet unborn,
may every thing
be full of bliss.

        The Buddha

 

 

 

 

Poem: Night Singing in a Time of Plague

Can’t you sleep either? After a dark year,
many old friends gone, I thought I heard you sing
outside the window
inches from my ear. Who are you singing for
this time of night? Did I dream you?

Even if I did, I’m with you, robin,
the only ones awake at half-past two
under a full December moon
in city air the colour of spat-out liquorice.
Again. You really are here. One chirrup,

then a song I’ve heard in better times
and other countries. An olive grove on Crete –
where I’d love, love to be right now –
and a Welsh snowstorm,
challenging the gods of loneliness and ice.

Take me to a new world. No. You’ve turned
the music off. A light comes on
between those green-slit stairwells
in flats across the road. Someone else can’t sleep.
But you, I bet, are perky as a Christmas card

among thorns of that shaggy creeper.
Another trill, rich as day. Now a carol,
a wild cantata. What do you know
of months penned in, not seeing anyone,
a hundred thousand people

dead, this country alone? Or the larger thing,
poisoned seas, a dying planet
whole pristine forests burned? Your little tribe
has learned to stay up close
and use what humans bring. Come morning

you’ll be on the sill, waiting for crumbs.
We’re in this together,
this Stations of the Cross situation,
and you are the Advent hymn. Bonkers but brilliant.
Let sleep come softly. Let the heart return.

                                Ruth Padel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Speak up

If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies,
to avert the evil by the processes of education,
the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.

        Louis Brandeis, The Brandeis guide to the modern world

 

 

 

Talent and character

A talent forms itself in solitude,
A character amid the stream of life.

    Johann Wolfgang von Goeth, Torquato Tasso 

 

 

 

 
    

 

Patience

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over,
their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight,
restore their government to its true principles.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Taylor after the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts

Basic tenet?

Even if we accept, as the basic tenet of true democracy,
that one moron is as good as one genius,
is it necessary to go one step farther and
hold that two morons are better than one genius?

    Leo Szilard, The Voice of the Dolphins: And Other Stories 

 

 

 

 

 

Low tide

It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.

Warren Buffett, The Tao of William Buffett

Variety

It is true that we cannot be free from sin,
but at least let our sins not always be the same.

    Teresa of Ávila, Complete Works St. Teresa Of Avila