Big mistake

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery,
a metaphor for a proof,
a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths,
and oneself for an oracle,
is inborn in us.

        Paul Valery, The Method of Leonardo da Vinci 

Rhyme and reason

It has been said that history repeats itself. T
his is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.

    Theodor Reik, The Unreachables

 

 

 

 

 

Measuring wonder

I was barked at by numerous dogs who are earning their food guarding ignorance and superstition for the benefit of those who profit from it. Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source. They are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against the traditional "opium for the people"—cannot bear the music of the spheres. The Wonder of nature does not become smaller because one cannot measure it by the standards of human moral and human aims.

Albert Einstein, Letter discussing responses to his essay "Science and Religion" 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Parting words

Remember, I’ll never leave you,
she said, as she got in the car to go to the airport.
And however ridiculous it sounded,
you knew it was true --
as true as anything is in this life.
She wasn’t going anywhere.
A truth-teller in a world of illusion
steady in her course.

 

 

 

 

There will be dancing

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business.

[This incident was the source of a statement commonly attributed to Goldman that occurs in several variants:

If I can't dance, it's not my revolution!
If I can't dance, I don't want your revolution!
If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.
A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.
If there won't be dancing at the revolution, I'm not coming.]

Emma Goldman, Living My Life

 

 

 

 

Worried?

Worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions.
It is time to acknowledge this, perhaps even to learn to do it better.

        Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail

 

 

 

 

Public learning

Life is like playing a violin solo in public
    and learning the instrument as one goes on.

             Samuel Butler, 1895 speech at the Somerville Club

 

 

 

 

 

 

Make of it what you will

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric,
but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

        W.B. Yeats, Essays

 

 

 

The way forward

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship,
one must sometimes go forward by going back.

            John Barth, Chimera

 

 

 

Cause and effect

But churches always have been the leading cause of the need for churches.

        David James Duncan, The River Why

 

 

 

 

Poem: Summer Solstice

By the end of the longest day of the year he could not stand it,
he went up the iron stairs through the roof of the building
and over the soft, tarry surface
to the edge, put one leg over the complex green tin cornice
and said if they came a step closer that was it.
Then the huge machinery of the earth began to work for his life,
the cops came in their suits blue-grey as the sky on a cloudy evening,
and one put on a bullet-proof vest, a
black shell around his own life,
life of his children's father, in case
the man was armed, and one, slung with a
rope like the sign of his bounden duty,
came up out of a hole in the top of the neighboring building
like the gold hole they say is in the top of the head,
and began to lurk toward the man who wanted to die.
The tallest cop approached him directly,
softly, slowly, talking to him, talking, talking,
while the man's leg hung over the lip of the next world
and the crowd gathered in the street, silent, and the
hairy net with its implacable grid was
unfolded near the curb and spread out and
stretched as the sheet is prepared to receive a birth.
Then they all came a little closer
where he squatted next to his death, his shirt
glowing its milky glow like something
growing in a dish at night in the dark in a lab and then
everything stopped
as his body jerked and he
stepped down from the parapet and went toward them
and they closed on him, I thought they were going to
beat him up, as a mother whose child has been
lost will scream at the child when it’s found, they
took him by the arms and held him up and
leaned him against the wall of the chimney and the
tall cop lit a cigarette
in his own mouth, and gave it to him, and
then they all lit cigarettes, and the
red, glowing ends burned like the
tiny campfires we lit at night
back at the beginning of the world.

Sharon Olds

 

 

 

 

 

More practice

Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

Be somebody

Don't terrorize.
Organize.
Don't burn.
Give kids a chance to learn …
The real answer to race problems in this country is education.
Not burning and killing.
Be ready.
Be qualified.
Own something.
Be somebody.
That's Black Power.

    James Brown, Statement after the assassination of Martin Luther King

Practice

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once,
but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

        Bruce Lee, American Legends: The Life of Bruce Lee

 

 

 

 

Ready or not

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.
Life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life,
is so breathtakingly serious!

        Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

 

 

 

 

Play your part

I think out of the dreary sameness of existence,
a measure of dramatic life may be drawn.
Even the most commonplace,
the deadest among the living,
may play a part in a great drama.

From a January 1900 lecture by 17-year-old James Joyce
to the Literary and Historical Society at University College Dublin.

Eternity

Stars and blossoming fruit-trees:
    utter permanence and extreme fragility
        give an equal sense of eternity.

                Simone Weil, Chance

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: My Father Swearing

Bitch, he’d say, always, when he could not work the wood his way,
bitch, as if there were a goddess of all his troubles, grinning,
a woman at the wellspring who skewed the nail, split the joist,
drove his hefted hopes deep into the ground,
bitch, his woe, his wound, his eldest curse.

And we would gather, hidden, my brothers and I,
huddled like shepherds by the door to the shed
to hearken to the litany surely to follow, the dam that would burst,
his power and rage, hammer and tongue.

Bastard then, predictably, and a marriage was made,
like an Adam come lately to a paradise of swearing,
the bitch and the bastard driven out of the garden
to bedevil him further, to beat the bejesus,
like a two-headed god, both mouths washed out with soap,
come to witness, come to share in the blame.

Then son of a bitch, and it all became clear,
a family, procreation, the Gilgamesh epic,
a new generation gathered against him,
and we were the children and he was the father
as he battered the wood, the precision gone out,
gone into the word, the word become flesh.

Then, always, incarnate, the rhythm established,
a flurry, a billingsgate of bitch of a bitch,
and bitch of a bastard, and son of a bitch of a bitch
of a bastard. There structure was born,
prepositional phrases, like blue Chinese lanterns hung out
beneath the moon, this swearing to God, this awful begatting.

We broke at that point, skedaddled, running off to the lilacs,
covering our mouths for fear we’d be heard,
to say in that darkness what was forbidden in the light,
a language mixed with laughter lifting up between the trees,
a forefathers’ song, the words that made the world.

                John Hogden

 

 

 

 

 

Time marches on

There was a man they released [from prison on a wrongful conviction] after forty years, one rolled out in a wheelchair. He said on the news, "I can't think about the lost time because guess what, time doesn't work backwards anyway. I got what's in front of me, same as you." 

         Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You

 

 

 

 

Nothing happens until something moves

Remember, motions are the precursors of emotions.
You can’t control the latter directly
but only through your choice of motions or actions.

        George Crane, Psychology Applied

 

 

 

 

How do we do it?

I am more and more convinced
that our happiness or our unhappiness
depends far more on the way we meet the events of life
than on the nature of those events themselves.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, in Lightning Fast Enlightenment

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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