"The real trick to life is not to be in the know, but to be in the mystery."
-Fred Alan Wolf
10 December 2012
Relation.
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities. - T.S. Eliot, from "Tradition and the Individual Talent" Thank you, Deven and David.
"The strength of a man’s virtue should not be measured by his special exertions but by his habitual acts.” Blaise Pascal
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REMEMBER EVERYONE DEPLOYED
JIM HARRISON
"Barring love I'll take my life in large doses alone--rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs."
TAO TE CHING, Lao Tzu
WINSLOW HOMER
The Lone Boat, North Woods Club, Adirondacks, 1892
GARY SNYDER
"There are those who love to get dirty and fix things. They drink coffee at dawn, beer after work. And those who stay clean, just appreciate things. At breakfast they have milk and juice at night. There are those who do both, they drink tea.”
IMMANUEL KANT
"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! Sapere aude. 'Have the courage to use your own understanding,' is therefore the motto of the enlightenment."
THOMAS HUXLEY
"Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing."
William Blake
"Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained."
HERMANN HESSE
"Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours."
IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE
"You see George, you've really had a wonderful life. Don't you see what a mistake it would be to just throw it away?"
Festina Lente
Spitzweg, The Bookworm, 1850
"Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.” Fernando Pessoa
WALT WHITMAN
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)."
H.L. MENCKEN
"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. But this business, alas, is fatal to the placid moods and fine other-worldliness of the poet."
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
"I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea."
DUDLEY
"We all come from our own little planets. That's why we're all different. That's what makes life interesting."
HERMAN MELVILLE
"We're just dancing in the rain ..."
LEO TOLSTOY
"If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you."
HAROLD BLOOM
"It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary."
I'm reading ...
Unlikely General: "Mad" Anthony Wayne and the Battle for America
CURRENT MOON
ARTHUR RIMBAUD
"I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; Garlands from window to window; Golden chains from star to star ... And I dance."
RUMI
"When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."
JIM HARRISON
¨The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.¨
van Eyck, Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban
"The Poet is the Priest of The Invisible." Wallace Stevens
Atget, Notre-Dame de Paris, 1923
Technique.
"Technique is the proof of your seriousness." Wallace Stevens
TIGHT LINES!
W.B. Yeats
THE CAPTAIN
NICHOLAS HAWKSMOOR
"Whatever is goode in its kinde ought to be preserv'd in respect for antiquity, as well as our present advantage, for destruction can be profitable to none but such as live by it."
THOMAS PAINE
"Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess."
WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.
"The best defense against a usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry."
PHILIP PULLMAN
"We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence."
TRUE-BORN
THOMAS MERTON
C.S. LEWIS
“We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with him. He walks everywhere incognito.” (Thank you, Mr. Wade)
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