Drifting

When I was in my teens, I invented a term to describe them. I call it 'holiday consciousness' . . . because I often experienced this sense of optimism and wide-awakeness when setting out on a journey or a holiday. It was always the feeling that the world is self-evidently complex and beautiful, and that life is so obviously good that man's boredom and defeat is an absurdity . . . And then I used to ask: Why do men forget this so easily? And the answer seemed obvious: because the human will is so flabby and weak. Instead of being self-controlled, self-driven creatures, most men are little more than leaves on a stream, they drift along hoping for the best. I once wrote that men are like grandfather clocks driven by watchsprings.

         Colin Wilson,  The Black Room

Cold comfort

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense
        rests on a secure foundation:
                our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

                        Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Light the Festive Candles

Light the first of eight tonight—
the farthest candle to the right.

Light the first and second, too,
when tomorrow's day is through.

Then light three, and then light four—
every dusk one candle more

Till all eight burn bright and high,
honoring a day gone by

When the Temple was restored,
rescued from the Syrian lord,

And an eight-day feast proclaimed—
The Festival of Lights—well named

To celebrate the joyous day
when we regained the right to pray
to our one God in our own way.

                        Alicia Lucia Fisher 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All we need is love. . .

Love alone is capable of uniting living beings
in such a way as to complete and fulfill them,
for it alone takes them and joins them
by what is deepest in themselves.
All we need is to imagine our ability to love
developing until it embraces the totality of men and the earth.

        Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man 

 

 

 

 

One definition

Our word "idiot" comes from the Greek name
        for the man who took no share in public matters.

                Edith Hamilton,The Greek Way to Western Civilization

 

 

 

 

Waiting

 It is said to await certainty is to await eternity.

        Jonas Salk, Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine 

 

 

 

 

 

To be a voice, to be responsible

There is immense silent agony in the world, and the task of man is to be a voice for the plundered poor, to prevent the desecration of the soul and the violation of our dream of honesty.

The more deeply immersed I became in the thinking of the prophets, the more powerfully it became clear to me what the lives of the Prophets sought to convey: that morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.

Abraham Joshua Heschel,  The Reasons for My Involvement in the Peace Movement