LEISURE
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
--William H. Davies
VISION
I love all things that pass: their briefness is
Music that fades on transient silences.
Winds, brids, and glittering leaves that flare and fall--
They fling delight across the world; they call
To rhythmic-flashing limbs that rove and race
A moment in the dawn for Youth's lit face;
A moment's passion, closing in on the cry--
"Oh Beauty, born of lovely things that die!"
In the space which lies there
Between four lines
A square where white plays
The hand which held your cheek
Moon
A face which lights up
The profile of another
But your eyes
I am the lamp guiding myself
Finger on damp eyelid
In the midst
The tears flow in this space
Between four lines
Mirror
--Pierre Reverdy
THE SMALL CABIN
The house we built gradually
from the ground up when we were young
(three rooms, the walls
raw trees) burned down
last year they said
I didn't see it, and so
the house is still there in me
among branches as always I stand
inside it looking out
at the rain moving across the lake
but when I go back
to the empty place in the forest
the house will blaze and crumple
suddenly in my mind
collapsing like a cardboard carton
thrown on a bonfire, summers
crackling, my earlier
selves outlined in flame.
Left in my head will be
the blackened earth: the truth
Where did the house go?
Where do the words go
when we have said them?
--Margaret Atwood
Hi friends! This is an embedded chat where you can post new book recommendations :) I would love to hear what everyone is reading/loving!
"You have to be somebody before you can share yourself." --Jeffrey Rosen
"Information is alienated experience. Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information." --Jaron Lanier
“There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life, which is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental hive life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him” (670). War and Peace
“Among the innumerable categories applicable to the phenomena of human life one may discriminate between those in which substance prevails and those in which form prevails” (788). War and Peace
“They could not believe it because they alone knew what their life meant to them, and so they neither understood nor believed that it could be taken from them” (1070). War and Peace
“He did not, and could not, understand the meaning of words apart from their context. Every word and action of his was the manifestation of an activity unknown to him, which was his life. But his life, as he regarded it, had no meaning as a separate thing. It had meaning only as a part of a whole of which he was always conscious. His words and actions flowed from him as evenly, inevitably, and spontaneously as fragrance exhales from a flower. He could not understand the value or significance of any word or deed taken separately” (1078-9). War and Peace
“Where there is great love there are always miracles… one might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what there is always about us” (50). Death Comes for the Archbishop
“…here there was always activity overhead, clouds forming and moving all day long. Whether they were dark and full of violence, or soft and white with luxurious idleness, they powerfully affected the world beneath them. The desert, the mountains and mesas, were continually re-formed and re-colored by the cloud shadows. The whole country seemed fluid to the eye under this constant change of accent, this ever-varying distribution of light” (95-6). Death Comes for the Archbishop
“The Acomas, who must share the universal human yearning for something permanent, enduring, without shadow of change,—they had their idea in substance. They actually lived upon their Rock; were born upon it and died upon it. There was an element of exaggeration in anything so simple!” (98). Death Comes for the Archbishop
“He was soon to have done with the calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former stars of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible” (288). Death Comes for the Archbishop