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

 

 

 

 

Fake consolation

Almost anything that consoles us is a fake.

        Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good 

 

 

 

 

 

Just listen

Whatever life we have experienced,
if we can tell our story to someone who listens,
we find it easier to deal with our circumstances.

        Margaret Wheatley, Turning to One Another 

 

 

 

 

On the verge

I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.

     Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

 

 

 

 

Ultimate concern

We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one's total orientation to life. Religion is whatever the individual takes to be his ultimate concern. One's religious attitude is to be found at that point where he has a conviction that there are values in human existence worth living and dying for. 

Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself 

Poem: The Laughing Heart

Your life is your life
Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
Be on the watch.
There are ways out.
There is a light somewhere.
It may not be much light but
It beats the darkness.
Be on the watch.
The gods will offer you chances.
Know them.
Take them.
You can’t beat death but
You can beat death in life, sometimes.
And the more often you learn to do it,
The more light there will be.
Your life is your life.
Know it while you have it.
You are marvelous
The gods wait to delight
In you.

        Charles Bukowski

 

 

 

 

 

Nothingness and everything

One might hold that nothingness as a natural state
is derivative from a very powerful force toward nothingness,
one any other forces have to overcome.
Imagine this force as a vacuum force,
sucking things into nonexistence or keeping them there.
If this force acts upon itself, it sucks nothingness into nothingness,
producing something or, perhaps, everything, every possibility.

        Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations

 

 

 

 

Good advice

Students, when you want to say something,
think about it three times before you say it.
Speak only if your words will benefit yourselves and others.
Do not speak if it brings no benefit.

Shobogenzo Zuimonki, Things Overheard at the Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma

 

 

 

 

 

Hidden bonus

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

        Margaret Drabble, The Middle Ground

 

 

 

 

 

Digging for common ground

There’s common ground in most conflict,
though it may take a little digging to unearth it beneath all the bullshit.

    Robin Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

 

 

 

 

In order

First delight, then instruct.

    Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Gustav Friedrich Waagen
    On the Purpose of the Berlin Gallery

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Convenient belief

It is convenient that there be gods,
and, as it is convenient,
let us believe that there are.

        Ovid, Ars Amatoria

 

 

 

Poem: Dislocation

I envy those who envy me for traveling.
Sometimes I sit on a foreign street in a busy cafe,
imagining you wishing you were here,
feeling for the first time the thrilling flush
of wanting to be elsewhere,
the frisson of happiness that wishes bring.
And so I sit quietly knowing that now
it’s time to figure out just what it is
I meant to do here.

        Simon Constam

 

 

 

 

Get your story straight

A story that supports the status quo
is generally considered to be neutral
and is not questioned in terms of its objectivity
while one that challenges the status quo
tends to be perceived as having a ‘point of view’ and therefore biased.

    Sharon Beder, Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism

 

 

 

Different things

What people say,
what people do,
and what they say they do
are entirely different things.

Margaret Mead, Teaching Music Through Performance In Band (attributed)

 

 

 

Keep it going

Keep the circus going inside you, keep it going,
    don't take anything too seriously,
        it'll all work out in the end.

             David Niven, The Other Side of the Moon

 

 

 

 

A test

Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished:
        If you're alive, it isn't.

    Richard Bach, Illusions:The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

 

 

 

 

Is that clear?

I try not to speak more clearly than I think.

        Niels Bohr, The Making of the Atomic Bomb

 

 

 

 

 

Who's speaking?

If God should really speak to man,
man could still never know that it was God speaking.

    Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties

 

 

 

Poem: The Poem Wants a Drink

In the workshop, students analyze
what each poem wants, what each one
strives to be. Well, this poem is
a layabout with limited ambitions. It wants
a drink.

This poem doesn't give a damn
for rhyme or reason. It only sings
off-key. It has no rhythm
in the jukebox of its soul.
It grew up without symbols.
It doesn't know from assonance.
Give it mambo lessons, and it
still won't learn to dance. It has
not one stanza with a lyric pedigree.
It's late, and getting later, and this poem
wants a drink.

Call it gray and tired. Even call it
a cliche. This poem's lived long enough
to know exactly what it means
to say: Don't be stingy
with the whiskey, baby.
.....Yes, the night
has been a cruel one, and this poem
could use a drink. 

             Karen Glenn  

Long life!

I grabbed a pile of dust, and holding it up,
foolishly asked for as many birthdays as the grains of dust,
I forgot to ask that they be years of youth.

        Ovid, Metamorphoses 

 

 

 

 

 

Stop interrupting

Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.

        Napoleon Bonaparte, The Military Quotation Book

 

 

 

 

Taking our measure

The measure of a country’s greatness
is its ability to retain compassion in times of crisis.

        Thurgood Marshall, Furman vs. Georgia ruling 1972

 

 

 

 

Determining reality

The structure of language determines not only thought, but reality itself.

        Ruth Nanda Anshen, Biography of an Idea

 

 

 

 

Rock on

Pop music tells you everything is okay,
while rock music tells you that it’s not okay,
but you can change it.

    Bono, 54th National Prayer Breakfast speech

 

 

 

 

More than the sum of the parts

It is too little to call Man a little world;
except God, man is a diminutive to nothing.
Man consists of more pieces, more parts,
than the world doth, nay, that the world is.

        John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

 

 

 

 

Poem: The Poet

She is working now, in a room
not unlike this one,
the one where I write, or you read.
Her table is covered with paper.
The light of the lamp would be
tempered by a shade, where the bulb's
single harshness might dissolve,
but it is not, she has taken it off.
Her poems? I will never know them,
though they are the ones I most need.
Even the alphabet she writes in
I cannot decipher. Her chair --
Let us imagine whether it is leather
or canvas, vinyl or wicker. Let her
have a chair, her shadeless lamp,
the table. Let one or two she loves
be in the next room. Let the door
be closed, the sleeping ones healthy.
Let her have time, and silence,
enough paper to make mistakes and go on.

         Jane Hirshfield