More is required today of one wise man than was required in ancient times of seven; and more is required to deal with one individual in these times than was required to deal with an entire nation in times past.
Add comment November 15th, 2007
“I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?” (letter to Thomas Moore, July 5, 1821)
Add comment October 28th, 2007
How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.
Add comment September 2nd, 2007
Seventh-century Chinese Chan Bhuddist master Hongren advised: “Work, work!…Work! Don’t waste a moment…Calm yourself, quiet yourself, master your senses. Work, work! Just dress in old clothes, eat simple food…feign ignorance, appear inarticulate. This is most economical with energy, yet effective.”
“All that is really worthwhile is action,” Teilhard wrote. “Personal success or personal satisfaction are not worth another thought.”
1 comment July 30th, 2007
The writer studies literature, not the world. He lives in the world; he cannot miss it. If he has ever bought a hamburger, or taken a commercial airplane flight, he spares his readers a report of his experience. He is careful what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.
The writer knows his field––what has been done, what could be done, the limits––the way a tennis player knows the court. And like that expert, he, too, plays the edges. That is where the exhilaration is. He hits it up the line. In writing, he can push the edges. Beyond this limit, here, the reader must recoil. Reason balks, poetry snaps; some madness enters, or strain. Now, courageously and carefully can he enlarge it, can he nudge the bounds? And enclose what wild power?
Add comment July 25th, 2007
I think contemporary fiction is divided between those who are still writing performatively and those who are not. Writing for voice, in which you imagine a performance in the auditory sense going on, is traditional and old-fashioned and dying. The new mode is not performative and not auditory. It’s destined for the printed page and you are really supposed to read it the way they teach you in speed-reading. You are supposed to crisscross the page with your eye, getting references and gists; you are supposed to see if lowing on the page, and not sound it in the head. If you do sound it, it is so bad you can hardly proceed. It can’t all have been written by Dreiser, but it sounds like it. Gravity’s Rainbow was written for print, J.R. was written by the mouth for the ear. By the mouth for the ear; that’s the way I’d like to write. I can still admire the other– the way I admire surgeons, bronc busters, and tight ends. As writing, it is that foreign to me.
Add comment July 25th, 2007
But something has gone wrong. I know what the path to old age is supposed to be: You’re young, you marry, you work, you retire, you become small, cute, and certain, and you die. But, here I am hanging out with 80 year olds who don’t feel all that old to me. And here I am, hanging out on the Internet where no one knows you’re an old dog, and where the pace on the treadmill has been turned up from cane-assisted to massively multiplayer intellectual marathon. The simple journey we’re supposed to take, one of ascent and descent, has been disrupted. Only the end remains fixed.
The truth is that I don’t feel myself on a path. The truth is that I don’t know how old I am.
[source]
Add comment July 8th, 2007
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.
Add comment June 3rd, 2007
Unfortunately, there are some who think that the way to save freedom in this country is to adopt the techniques of tyranny.
Add comment April 6th, 2007
I loathe the expression ‘What makes him tick’ … A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.
Add comment March 9th, 2007
“To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose: and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness;—it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man’s vanity. He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is—so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys—this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much:—surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed. Nor will he complain at the summons which calls a defeated soldier from the field: defeated, ay, if he were Paul or Marcus Aurelius!—but if there is still one inch of fight in his old spirit, undishonoured. The faith which sustained him in his life-long blindness and life-long disappointment will scarce even be required in this last formality of laying down his arms. Give him a march with his old bones; there, out of the glorious sun-coloured earth, out of the day and the dust and the ecstasy—there goes another Faithful Failure!”
Add comment January 12th, 2007
“We may lay in a stock of pleasures, as we would lay in a stock of wine; but if we defer tasting them too long, we shall find that both are soured by age.”
Add comment January 12th, 2007
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
Add comment January 12th, 2007
“Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.”
Add comment January 12th, 2007
“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit… the arbitrariness of the constraint only serves to obtain precision of execution.”
Add comment May 9th, 2006
“We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”
Add comment April 28th, 2006
“Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of the soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities. “
Add comment April 28th, 2006
“Words, processed, become images; images, processed, become words. A neat, essential balance, whose fulcrum is the versatile eye.”
Add comment April 28th, 2006
“When I use a word,†Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.â€
“The question is,†said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.â€
“The question is,†said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.â€
Add comment October 17th, 2005
If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
Add comment October 16th, 2005