January 2009
11 posts
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where...”
– John Muir
“Poets don’t draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again,...”
– Jean Cocteau
Wilhelm Richard Wagner on Love
“There are no bounds to the longing, the desire, the bliss, and the anguish of love. The world, power, fame, glory, honor, chivalry, loyalty, friendship…all are swept away. Only one thing is left alive…yearning, yearning, insatiable desire….”
"A Confession" by Czeslaw Milosz
My Lord, I loved strawberry jam
And the dark sweetness of a woman’s body.
Also well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,
Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.
So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit
Have visited such a man? Many others
Were justly called, and trustworthy.
Who would have trusted me? For they saw
How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,
And glance greedily at the...
“Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like volcanoes and then subsides.”
– Louis de Bernières
Birches by Robert Frost
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and...
“Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can...”
– Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er...”
– Lord Byron, Manfred
“All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them.”
– Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
From "The Complete Works of Auden" Vol. III, Prose
As a spirit, a conscious person endowed with free will, every man has, through faith and grace, a unite “existential” relation to God, and few since St. Augustine describe this relation more profoundly than Kierkegaard. But every man has a second relation to God which is neight unique or existential: as a creature composed of matter, as a biological organism, every man, in common with...
“To care for one’s neighbor is to recognize the worth of the neighbor and...”
– Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice and Love