Truth and fiction

"How is it," a Bishop of London once asked a famous actor,
    "that we preachers usually make little impression
        with the lofty and true subjects which we proclaim,
            whereas you actors move people on the stage so much with your fictions?"

The actor replied, "It is because we speak of fictitious things as though they were true,
        whereas the clergy talk about true things as though they were fictitious."

                                        Karl-Josef Kuschel, Laughter: A Theological Reflection 

 

 

 

 

 

Choose

We must believe in free will — 

                            we have no choice.

   Isaac Bashevis Singer, Isaac Singer’s Promised City

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: VII

I know I am getting old and I say so,
but I don't think of myself as an old man.
I think of myself as a young man
with unforeseen debilities. Time is neither
young nor old, but simply new, always
counting, the only apocalypse. And the clouds
—no mere measure or geometry, no cubism,
can account for clouds or, satisfactorily, for bodies.
There is no science for this, or art either.
Even the old body is new—who has known it
before?—and no sooner new than gone, to be
replaced by a body yet older and again new.
The clouds are rarely absent from our sky
over this humid valley, and there is a sycamore
that I watch as, growing on the riverbank,
it forecloses the horizon, like the years
of an old man. And you, who are as old
almost as I am, I love as I loved you
young, except that, old, I am astonished
at such a possibility, and am duly grateful.

                     Wendell Berry

Fruits of Labor

The brave man carves out his fortune,
        and every man is the son of his own works.

                Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: These are the days when the birds come back

These are the days when birds come back,
A very few, a bird or two,
To take a backward look.

These are the days when skies put on
The old, old sophistries of June,--
A blue and gold mistake.

Oh, fraud that cannot cheat the bee,
Almost thy plausibility
Induces my belief,

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear,
And softly through the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf!

Oh, sacrament of summer days,
Oh, last communion in the haze,
Permit a child to join,

Thy sacred emblems to partake,
Thy consecrated bread to break,
Taste thine immortal wine!

                Emily Dickinson

The cosmic dance

For the world and time are the dance of emptiness.
The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast.
The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life,
the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own,
the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity, and despair.
But it does not matter much,
because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things,
or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.

                        Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Common verbs

The 10 most common verbs in English (number of occurrences in a million words of text)

  1. be
  2. have
  3. do
  4. say
  5. make
  6. go
  7. take
  8. come
  9. see
10. get

 

Steven Pinker, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language