April 2010
13 posts
a.d.
some days i felt an urgent responsibility to each change of light outside the sunporch windows. who would remember any of it, any of this our time, and the wind thrashing the buckeye limbs outside? somebody had to do it, somebody had to hang on to the days with teeth and fists, or the whole show had been in vain. that it was impossible never entered my reckoning. for work, for a task, i had never...
an american childhood. annie dillard.
The interior life is often stupid. Its egoism blinds it and deafens it; its imagination spins out ignorant tales, fascinated. It fancies that the western wind blows on the Self, and leaves fall at the feet of the Self for a reason, and people are watching. A mind risks real ignorance for the sometimes paltry prize of an imagination enriched. The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize...
East Coker V. The Four Seasons. T.S. Eliot
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The...
Seven Stanzas at Easter. John Updike
Make no mistake: if he rose at all It was as His body; If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit, The amino acids rekindle, The Church will fall. It was not as the flowers, Each soft spring recurrent; It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the Eleven apostles; It was as His flesh; ours. The same hinged thumbs and toes The same valved heart...
In the Evening, in the Pinewoods. m.o.
Who knows the sorrows of the heart?
God, of course, and the private self.
But who else? Anyone or anyone else?
Not the trees, in their windy independence.
Nor the roving clouds, nor, even, the dearest of friends.
Yet maybe the thrush, who sings
by himself, at the edge of the green woods,
to each of us
out of his mortal body, his own feathered limits,
of every estrangement, exile,...
