I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be “happy.”
I think the purpose of life is to be useful,
to be responsible, to be honorable, to be compassionate.
It is, above all, to matter: to count, to stand for something,
to have made some difference that you lived at all.
Leo C. Rosten, The Myths by Which We Live
The essential challenge is to transform the isolation and self-interest
within our communities into connectedness and caring for the whole.
Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging
Throughout the modern world,
equality is generally prescribed,
yet inequality is generally practiced.
James Fishkin, Justice, Equal Opportunity, and the Family
God's love for us is not the reason for which we should love him.
God's love for us is the reason for us to love ourselves.
Simone Weil, Love
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