Sunday, May 31, 2009

This is Funny

"This is funny, you just haven't gotten it yet."

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Charging Up

"Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration."

Friday, May 29, 2009

Necessary Naivete

"Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naivete, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do."

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Perseverance

"Perseverance is a great substitute for talent."

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Part of Life's Routine

"One day I was particularly gloomy, and Jim asked me what the matter was. I told him my high school girlfriend (for all of two weeks) had broken up with me. He said, "Oh, that'll happen a lot." The knowledge that this horrid grief was simply a part of life's routine cheered me up almost instantly."

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

The Thinking Man's Religion




Art becomes the thinking man's religion; artists, his prophets; and professors, his high priests.

Monday, May 25, 2009

Where the Shadows Fall

It is impossible to say that you know a place until you know where the shadows fall.

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Against Cosmic Odds

When we are young, we believe life is something that can be torn from us only by a force of cosmic injustice. But as we age, we come to understand that one life is not nature's default. Life itself may be, but one life is not. One life is something held together for a little while, against cosmic odds.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Formula for Greatness

"My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it.

Friday, May 22, 2009

What is Necessary in Things

"I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer."

Thursday, May 21, 2009

That Horrid Draught

"Anna Sergyevna was a rather strange creature. Having no prejudices of any kind, having no strong convictions even, she never gave way or went out of her way for anything. She had seen many things very clearly; she had been interested in many things, but nothing had completely satisfied her; indeed, she hardly desired complete satisfaction. Her intellect was at the same time inquiring and indifferent; her doubts were never soothed to forgetfulness, and they never grew strong enough to distract her. Had she not been rich and independent, she would perhaps have thrown herself into the struggle, and have known passion. But life was easy for her, though she was bored at times, and she went on passing day after day with deliberation, never in a hurry, placid, and only rarely disturbed. Dreams sometimes danced in rainbow colours before her eyes even, but she breathed more freely when they died away, and did not regret them. Her imagination indeed overstepped the limits of what is reckoned permissible by conventional morality; but even then her blood flowed as quietly as ever in her fascinatingly graceful, tranquil body. Sometimes coming out of her fragrant bath all warm and enervated, she would fall to musing on the nothingness of life, the sorrow, the labour, the malice of it.… Her soul would be filled with sudden daring, and would flow with generous ardour, but a draught would blow from a half-closed window, and Anna Sergyevna would shrink into herself, and feel plaintive and almost angry, and there was only one thing she cared for at that instant—to get away from that horrid draught."

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Loyalty and Love

Here are the final words of George Orwell's chilling novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the character Winston Smith is finally reconciled with Big Brother, at the very moment of Smith's execution.

"He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."

Big Brother appears when a leader asks us for loyalty and love more than independence; it continues until it has convinced us to participate in our own destruction; it ends only when we dare to disagree with what we know is wrong, refuse to love what is unlovable, and insist on our right to be left alone.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Through the Fire

Anna Sergyevna went very rarely to the town, generally only on business, and even then she did not stay long. She was not liked in the province; there had been a fearful outcry at her marriage with Odintsov, all sorts of fictions were told about her; it was asserted that she had helped her father in his cardsharping tricks, and even that she had gone abroad for excellent reasons, that it had been necessary to conceal the lamentable consequences … ‘You understand?’ the indignant gossips would wind up. ‘She has gone through the fire,’ was said of her; to which a noted provincial wit usually added: ‘And through all the other elements?’

Monday, May 18, 2009

The Courage to Believe in Nothing

"I shall be very curious to see the man who has the courage to believe in nothing."

Sunday, May 17, 2009

A Humble Faith

Why should reason be offended at a humble faith, especially when reason more than anything else allows us to comprehend how little one man can understand; or when faith dares to call that vast ignorance God?

Saturday, May 16, 2009

The Evidence of a Father

I grew up surrounded by the evidence of a father who died before I could remember him. Visits to his grave, photographs of him, his paintings, his brushes, his tubes of paint, his drawing tools, his books, the table he built and meticulously decorated, the sofa he made from the front seat of a Chevy, the lamp he made, and always the stories about him from my mother, my aunts, and my uncles. He was dead, but something about him was in every room and the very structure of that house, as real as the walls and doors. Death leaves an absence, but it transforms what remains.

Friday, May 15, 2009

Not a Temple

"The only good point in a Russian is his having the lowest possible opinion of himself. What does matter is that two and two make four, and the rest is all foolery."

"And is nature foolery?" said Arkady, looking pensively at the bright-coloured fields in the distance, in the beautiful soft light of the sun, which was not yet high up in the sky.

"Nature, too, is foolery in the sense you understand it. Nature’s not a temple, but a workshop, and man’s the workman in it."

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Regrets Akin to Hopes

"Nikolai Petrovitch had lost his wife, Pavel Petrovitch had lost his memories; after the death of the princess he tried not to think of her. But to Nikolai, there remained the sense of a well-spent life, his son was growing up under his eyes; Pavel, on the contrary, a solitary bachelor, was entering upon that indefinite twilight period of regrets that are akin to hopes, and hopes that are akin to regrets, when youth is over, while old age has not yet come.

This time was harder for Pavel Petrovitch than for another man; in losing his past, he lost everything."

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Getting Ready to be Great

"Madame Kukshin, too, went abroad. She is in Heidelberg, and is now studying not natural science, but architecture, in which, according to her own account, she has discovered new laws. She still fraternises with students, especially with the young Russians studying natural science and chemistry, with whom Heidelberg is crowded, and who, astounding the naïve German professors at first by the soundness of their views of things, astound the same professors no less in the sequel by their complete inefficiency and absolute idleness. In company with two or three such young chemists, who don’t know oxygen from nitrogen, but are filled with scepticism and self-conceit, and, too, with the great Elisyevitch, Sitnikov roams about Petersburg, also getting ready to be great, and in his own conviction continues the ‘work’ of Bazarov. There is a story that some one recently gave him a beating; but he was avenged upon him; in an obscure little article, hidden in an obscure little journal, he has hinted that the man who beat him was a coward. He calls this irony. His father bullies him as before, while his wife regards him as a fool … and a literary man."

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Life Without End

"There is a small village graveyard in one of the remote corners of Russia. Like almost all our graveyards, it has a melancholy look; the ditches surrounding it have long been overgrown; grey wooden crosses have fallen askew and rotted under their once painted gables; the gravestones are all out of position, just as if someone had pushed them from below; two or three bare trees hardly provide some meager shade; the sheep wander unchecked among the tombs . . . But among them is one grave untouched by human beings and not trampled on by any animal; only the birds perch on it and sing at daybreak. An iron railing surrounds it and two young fir trees have been planted there, one at each end; Evgeny Bazarov is buried in this tomb. Often from the near-by village two frail old people come to visit it--a husband and wife. Supporting one another, they walk with heavy steps; they go up to the iron railing, fall on their knees and weep long and bitterly, and gaze intently at the silent stone under which their son lies buried; they exchange a few words, wipe away the dust from the stone or tidy up some branches of a fir tree, then start to pray again and cannot tear themselves away from that place where they seem to be nearer to their son, to their memories of him . . . Can it be that their prayers and their tears are fruitless? Can it be that love, sacred devoted love, is not all powerful? Oh, no! However passionate, sinful or rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep at us serenely with their innocent eyes; they tell us not only of eternal peace, of that great peace of "indifferent" nature; they tell us also of eternal reconciliation and of life without end."

Monday, May 11, 2009

A Man Can Understand Everything

"A man can understand everything--how the ether vibrates, and what's going on in the sun; but why someone else blows his nose differently, that he is incapable of understanding."

Sunday, May 10, 2009

The Great Dilemma

I have learned that the great dilemma in life is knowing when to exercise my will, and when to accept my fate; and that, sometimes, the two are really the same thing. From every act of will springs a forest of fateful consequences; and every fateful consequence is the raw timber of a new act of will. 

Saturday, May 9, 2009

A Life Too Dangerous

Theater allows us to experience a way of living too dangerous to actually live just yet. 

Friday, May 8, 2009

Other People's Lives

We love obituaries. Other people become so much more interesting once they're dead. 

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Couplet

Like fire upon the polar shelf
Creation must consume itself. 

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

The Lucky Ones

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they're never going to be born."

The Root of All Evil (Part 2). The quote occurs around 46:50.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Madame le Professeur

Sing oh goddess, of misery and pain,
In windowless rooms of no forgiveness
Bunkers of the lost in a losing war,
Bring forth her stories lost with urgent need
Power denied the able in the world
With words that are not and can never be
Her words, the maternal voice unconstrained
Abandoned hymns to her name undefiled
Behind the slave-name made by her father
Whose nature had to own the things he saw,
How she had to make a world of her own
Of feminine light and masculine shade,
She who would rather be a witch than wife
Who traded uncanny knowledge for gold
Who rose up to challenge facts and phrases
The brutal instruments of her abuse
A contest to control her mind and will
To trade her body and cripple her with
Fear, until there was nothing left to trade,
How she would prefer things be different
But can’t let heal the bloody scabs of wrongs
The injustice of her place outside time
An actor in another’s play, a plot
Concealed but drawn deliberately vast
Appearing, deceptively, as kindness
As respect, as worship, even as love
A trick to make her think she is happy;
Courtesy is a wall to keep her out,
The trap of romance designed to get her
To ignore a long list of cruelties
A horror penetrating her long dream
The irrefutable proof of her worst fears
Her womb bruised by crimes of the wombless.

Monday, May 4, 2009

Tales of Immeasurable Consolation

What does religion offer us? Not facts, but tales of immeasurable consolation.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Ah, Women

"Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent."

Saturday, May 2, 2009

Not the Past Itself

As a child, I was drawn to places and things abandoned by adults. I did not seek these for what they were. I sought them for what I imagined them to be. Perhaps all children live this way, even some adults, especially those who want to relive old happiness or settle old scores. For it is not the past itself that we seek, but what we imagine about it.

Friday, May 1, 2009

We Live Here

We live here. Only here, and nowhere else. But where we are is connected to a past that we continuously re-imagine, and a future that is filled with surprises. It turns out that "here" is more than one place at once. Perhaps that is the meaning of eternal life. It is too vast for any single life, and any single life is too small to contain more than just a few bits of it.