Hopeless

The main thing you need to know about instructions
is that no one is going to read them—
at least not until after repeated attempts
at “muddling through” have failed.”

        Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think, Revisited

 

 

 

 

Promises

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future,
making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.

        Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Laughter

He told me a joke.
And seeing him laugh has done more for me
Than any scripture I will ever read.

        Meister Eckhart, in Love Poems from God

 

 

 

 

Poem: June

The sun is rich
And gladly pays
In golden hours,
Silver days,

And long green weeks
That never end.
School’s out. The time
Is ours to spend.

There’s Little League,
Hopscotch, the creek,
And, after supper,
Hide-and-seek.

The live-long light
Is like a dream,
and freckles come
Like flies to cream.

         John Updike

 

 

 

 

 

 

No stopping history and change

To say that the future will be different from the present is, to scientists, hopelessly self-evident. I observe regretfully that in politics, however, it can be heresy. It can be denounced as radicalism, or branded as subversion. There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed. It hardly seems necessary to point out in California -- of all States -- that change, although it involves risks, is the law of life.

Robert F. Kennedy, 1964 Address at the California Institute of Technology  

So it began

In preparation for Operation Overlord, the BBC's Radio Londres signalled to the French Resistance with the opening lines of the 1866 Verlaine poem "Chanson d'Automne" to indicate the start of D-Day operations under the command of the Special Operations Executive.

The first three lines of the poem, "Les sanglots longs / des violons / de l'automne" ("The long sobs of autumn's violins"), would mean that Operation Overlord was to start within two weeks. These lines were broadcast on 1 June 1944.

The next set of lines, "Blessent mon coeur / d'une langueur / monotone" ("wound my heart with a monotonous languor"), meant that it would start within 48 hours and that the resistance should begin sabotage operations, especially on the French railroad system; these lines were broadcast on 5 June at 23:15    

        Wikipedia entry

"Chanson d'Automne"

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l'automne
Blessent mon cœur
D'une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l'heure.
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens,
Et je pleure...

Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
De çà, de là,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte...

 

"Autumn Song" (English translation)

With long sobs
the violin-throbs
of autumn wound
my heart with languorous
and montonous
sound.

Choking and pale
When I mind the tale
the hours keep,
my memory strays
down other days
and I weep;

and I let me go
where ill winds blow
now here, now there,
harried and sped,
even as a dead
leaf, anywhere.

 

Poor refuge

I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those
who have lost their natural curiosity and ability to cope with change.

        Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

 

 

 

 

 

Happy days

I can’t remember an unhappy day in New York City.
        I can’t imagine leaving.

                Gay Talese, New York Times interview, January 2025

Flattery gets you everywhere

Invitation is the sincerest flattery.

    Carolyn Wells, Folly for the Wise

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

This is it

When it comes right down to it,
the challenge of mindfulness
is to realize that “this is it.”
Right now is my life.

        Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: The washing never gets done

The washing never gets done.
The furnace never gets heated.
Books never get read.
Life is never completed.
Life is like a ball which one must continually
catch and hit so that it won’t fall.
When the fence is repaired at one end,
it collapses at the other. The roof leaks,
the kitchen door won’t close, there are cracks in the foundation,
the torn knees of children’s pants …
One can’t keep everything in mind. The wonder is
that beside all this one can notice
the spring which is so full of everything
continuing in all directions – into evening clouds,
into the redwing’s song and into every
drop of dew on every blade of grass in the meadow,
as far as the eye can see, into the dusk.  

            Jaan Kaplinski

 

 

 

 

 

Sink or swim

To live or to be alive or, what is the same thing, to be a man,
does not admit of any preparations or preliminary experiments.
Life is fired at us point blank. ...
Where and when we are born,
or happen to find ourselves after we were born,
there and then, like it or not, we must sink or swim.

        José Ortega y Gasset Man and People 

 

 

 

 

 

Out of control

If you can control your emotions,
    chances are you don’t have too many.

            Douglas Coupland, JPod