Friday, December 24, 2010

To Look and See

What is a miracle? To look at the familiar, and see the unexpected.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

The Sins of the Rich

"I became very rich. It used to worry me, and I thought it wrong to have so many beautiful things when others had nothing. Now I realize that it is possible for the rich to sin by coveting the privileges of the poor. The poor have always been the favourites of God and His saints, but I believe that it is one of the special achievements of Grace to sanctify the whole of life, riches included. Wealth in pagan Rome was necessarily something cruel; it's not any more."

Saturday, December 11, 2010

American Women

"American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers."

Monday, December 6, 2010

The Grinding Opposition of Moral Entities

"...by definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange -- meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with the good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities. This is what the television news is all about. Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create."

Senseless Violence

"Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive. Its dynamism has to find an outlet in smashing telephone kiosks, derailing trains, stealing cars and smashing them and, of course, in the much more satisfactory activity of destroying human beings."

Novel, Fable, and Allegory

"There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters...When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory."

Thursday, December 2, 2010

A Democracy of the Intellect

The aristocracy of the intellect is a belief that can only destroy the civilisation that we know. If we are anything, we must be a democracy of the intellect. We must not perish by the distance between people and government, between people and power, by which Babylon and Egypt and Rome failed. And that distance can only be conflated, can only be closed, if knowledge sits in the homes and heads of people with no ambition to control others, and not up in the isolated seats of power.

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

The Most Difficult Subjects

"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."

Friday, November 12, 2010

Unbending the Curve

"Yes, to integrate the grandiose cosmic equation. Yes, to unbend the wild, primitive curve and straighten it to a tangent -- an asymptote -- a straight line. For the line of the One State is the straight line. The great, divine, exact, wise straight line -- the wisest of all lines."

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Theodore Meets the Milky Way


Theodore, beloved of God and a contented man,
Was reading his slender volume of visible light

When, like a dreamer startled from his dream,
He was struck by some unsettling thoughts

"There is more here, much more than I can understand
Things that I cannot even imagine perhaps

More than the storms of distant atmospheres
The bits of failed planets that circle the sun
The dormant seeds of heaven
The spectral lights of ancient gods
Things within and beyond my little bag of metaphors.

Even my equations that reveal so much without words
They confirm my suspicions:
The opposite of ignorance is not knowledge, but humility.
Awake, the empty spaces of creation arrange themselves."

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Boat Slips

Across the transoms
The quiet voices of men
At work on things they love.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Dedicated to Unhappiness

"There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness. Had we been placed on earth by a malign creator for the exclusive purpose of suffering, we would have good reason to congratulate ourselves on our enthusiastic response to the task. Reasons to be inconsolable abound: the frailty of our bodies, the fickleness of love, the insincerities of social life, the compromises of friendship, the deadening effects of habit. In the face of such persistent ills, we might naturally expect that no event would be awaited with greater anticipation than the moment of our own extinction."

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Misgivings

"I wouldn't want to live without strong misgivings."

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Misleading Notes to Myself

One life is fragile. Life itself is not. Life continues deep within the earth and inbetween the stars.

***

Thomas Pynchon: a seriously talented writer determined not to take his talent too seriously for too long.

***

Pynchon's Inherent Vice: Shaggy grows up, ditches Scooby-Doo and the gang, goes public with his drug use, changes his name to Sportello, and becomes a private detective in L.A.

***

Every respiration is a part of the same process that moves the planets and illuminates the stars. Being is creation.

***

God is one of the ways we attempt to understand what is beyond our understanding.

Saturday, July 3, 2010

Evil

"There is indeed a force devoted to enticing us into various pleasures that are (or once were) in our genetic interests but do not bring long-term happiness to us and may bring great suffering to others. You could call that force the ghost of natural selection. More concretely, you could call it our genes (some of our genes, at least). If it will help to actually use the word evil, there's no reason not to."

Intolerance and Bigotry

"There may have been a time when it was commonly in the interests of political leaders to stoke their people's intolerance and bigotry to the point of international strife. This time is passing."

Friday, July 2, 2010

Idolatry

"In some respects, Deuteronomy reads like a modern document. Had it been implemented, the reformers' program would have included the establishment of a secular sphere and an independent judiciary separate from the cult; a constitutional monarchy, which made the king subject to the Torah like any other citizen; and a centralized state with a single, national shrine. The reformers also rationalized Israelite theology to rid it of superstitious mythology. You could not manipulate God by sacrifice, and God certainly did not live in his temple, which instead of being a scared "center, as of old, was merely a house of prayer.

But a rational, secular ideology is not necessarily any more tolerant than a mythical one. The Deuteronomists' reform revealed the greatest danger of idolatry. In making their national God, now the only symbol of the divine, endorse the national will, they had crafted a god in their own image. In the past, Marduk's power had always been challenged by Tiamat's, Baal's by Mot's. For J and E, the divine was so ambiguous that it was impossible to imagine that Yahweh was infallibly on your side or to predict what he would do next. But the Deuteronomists had no doubt that they knew exactly what Yahweh desired and felt it a sacred duty to destroy anything that seemed to oppose his/their interests. When something inherently finite -- an image, an ideology, or a polity -- is invested with ultimate value, its devotees feel obliged to eliminate any rival claimant, because there can be only one absolute. The type of destruction described by the Deuteronomists is an infallible indication that a sacred symbol has become idolatrous."

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Everything About Literature

“Everyone agreed that Clevinger was certain to go far in the academic world. In short, Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains, and everyone knew it except those who soon found it out. . . .It was impossible to go to a movie with him without getting involved afterward in a discussion on empathy, Aristotle, universals, messages and the obligations of the cinema as an art form in a materialistic society. Girls he took to the theater had to wait until the first intermission to find out from him whether or not they were seeing a good or a bad play, and then found out at once. He was a militant idealist who crusaded against racial bigotry by growing faint in its presence. He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.”

Monday, June 28, 2010

High Treason of the Full Moon

(contra Richard Dawkins in a variation on a popular tune)

How can I tell you how I feel when I don't know?
Words have no meaning in a language from so long ago.

Are you the uncreated guide
Or songs of children who have died?
Is it love or is it pride
That needs an art it knows has lied?

Tonight, I dare define
Your face as one divine
The moon is something more than just its glow.

Save us both some time
Just give me a sign
Give me something more than just a show.

Now that an age draws to an end you cannot leave me.
I was not made to believe in something I can’t see.

You must have a face
We cannot embrace
A cosmic plan of transcendental grace.

Thus we apprehend
The universal trend
The larger purpose in what we intend.

Just as the moon directs the tide
There is a light that is our guide
And what the stars cannot provide
Is left for mortals to decide.

Here is the proof that I propose:
Before the moon from earth arose
It held a secret to disclose
Stranger than we can suppose.

Truth Fades Like Beauty

No timeless treasure wrought bright and cold
Truth fades like beauty, more leaf than gold.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Darash


דָּרַשׁ


"Jewish exegesis would be called midrash, which derives from the verb darash, "to search," "investigate," "to go in pursuit of something" as yet undiscovered."

And They Laugh

"I have a friend who has a test for the best science questions. You're sitting around at the observatory, ready to start your observing, and you tell the other scientists what you're doing, and they laugh, and that's how you know you have a great program, because it's not something that everybody else is doing."

Anne Kinney, director of the Astronomy and Physics Division in the Office of Space Science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C, in the television series, The Planets, episode "Our Destiny."

Monday, June 21, 2010

The Advantages of Ambiguity

Ambiguity is underrated. It is often more valuable than precision. Nature is an economizer, adapting existing structures in novel ways. Very precise adaptations with no other uses are a sure-fire path to extinction in a world of perpetual change. Language that is too precise, that never changes spelling, meaning, or pronunciation, has all the excitement of a life insurance contract or a will.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

To Go One's Own Way

αίρεσης

"In a pattern that would be repeated in later secular states, inquisitors sought out dissidents and forced them to abjure their "heresy," a word deriving from the Greek airesis, "to go one's own way."

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Look to the End

"Look to the end, no matter what it is you are considering. Often enough God gives a man a glimpse of happiness, and then utterly ruins him."

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Everything is Water

"Everything is water and the world is full of gods."

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

First Origin of This Creation

"He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it, Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not."

The Rig Veda/Mandala 1/Hymn 121

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Saints and Devils

"The scientist is our contemporary saint, when he is not our contemporary devil. Not that there is much difference between the two when we observe how we use saints and devils."

Saturday, May 1, 2010

If I Was Made for Art

S' io nacqui a quella nè sordo nè cieco,
Proporzionato a chi 'l cor m' arde e fura,
Colpa è di chi m' ha destinato al foco

If I was made for art, from childhood given
A prey for burning beauty to devour,
I blame the mistress I was born to serve.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Misleading Notes to Myself

Markets are like wives: they tell you what you need to know, but you don't always like what you hear.

***

There are many fine and worthwhile things beyond the comprehension of individually articulated reason. Beyond the mind of any one man there are the minds of all.

***

Creativity does not begin with logically solving a problem; it begins with an inspired solution.

***

Life has two parts. The first is finding what you love and learning how to love it. The second is learning how to let it go.

***

Who does not hope for a life after death? Only those who believe that love is never misunderstood in this one.

***

Entrepreneurs are the deviants hiding in the closets at business schools.

***

Rast's Law: Every successful business eventually turns into the department of motor vehicles. Then it dies the death that it deserves.

***

When one animal meets another, it has one of only four instinctive reactions: kill it, cooperate with it, ignore it, or flee it. Consider it a measure of human progress that we are at least more likely to oppose those we meet than we are to kill them.

***

Much to the dismay of all sorcerers and an uncomfortably large number of scientists, human invention is not formulaic.

***

One life always depends upon the lives of others. You may obtain what you need from others by force, fraud, aid, or trade, but if you successfully use force or fraud, you will create the social condition where you must constantly seek a more clever fraud or a more effective force when you aim to improve your standard of living. In other words, you will enter into an arms race of force and fraud with other self-serving bullies and liars, a pact of social suicide.

***

Art is religion without divinity. Religion is art with the divine. Why do people go to museums? For the same reasons people used to go to church.

***

Three things you should acquire in an education, regardless of major:
1. The ability to think logically.
2. The ability to present your ideas well, in writing and orally.
3. The ability to calculate.

****

Even our most beautiful words are poor clothes for God. We are like dogs barking at the moon, inspired by what we see and very proud of the sounds we make.

****

Although we would not choose it, it is our struggle that makes us most fully what we are.

****

We make a serious mistake when we try to turn one kind of knowledge into another. Prices are like words: they are not scientific constants and cannot be managed as you would manage temperature, melting points, or atomic weights.

****

Accounting is more language than math. Contrary to what many people expect of accounting, it does not offer us a world of unchanging facts. It offers us a reliable but only temporary and largely metaphorical way of describing reality.

Friday, April 2, 2010

You Belong on Bull Street

One man has many beginnings
One of mine is here
My parents married at the manse of Centennial ARP.

They were not doctrinaire
They were in love.

Love does not worry about the institutes of the Christian religion
Love reconciles all contradictions
At least until the lovers learn
That love is the greatest contradiction of them all.

Reasonable people aren’t supposed to contradict themselves.
Good luck with that.

At one end of Bull Street
There stands a public university
At the other, a lunatic asylum
And sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference
Or know which way love comes from
Or know which way it might go.

Monday, February 15, 2010

The Root of Knowledge

"There are many gifts that are unique in man; but at the centre of them all, the root from which all knowledge grows, lies the ability to draw conclusions from what we see."

Sunday, February 14, 2010

A Comet is an Ancient Fear


This long-haired star ruined men and nations;
Drove women mad; deformed children;
Filled all the world with perturbations.

It was the thick smoke of human sin
Burnt before the face of God;
Or the flash of the Devil's grin.

When Halley said this dirty clod
Of ice would always reappear
On its astral promenade,

The comet's nature wasn't clear.
Even science, blessed with observation,
Found poison in the comet's rear.

A comet is an ancient fear,
A remnant of creation,
Trapped by the presence of a star
In eccentric isolation.

Second Place in the Financial Times "Sky Paths" literary competition, 1986

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Rats, Mules, Cats, Dogs, and Horses

"You were born too late to be acquainted with mules and so comprehend the startling, the even shocking, import of this statement. A mule which will gallop for a half-mile in the single direction elected by its rider even one time becomes a neighborhood legend; one that will do it consistently time after time is an incredible phenomenon. Because, unlike a horse, a mule is far too intelligent to break its heart for glory running round the rim of a mile-long saucer. In fact, I rate mules second only to rats in intelligence, the mule followed in order by cats, dogs, and horses last -- assuming of course that you accept my definition of intelligence: which is the ability to cope with environment: which means to accept environment yet still retain at least something of personal liberty.

The rat of course I rate first. he lives in your house without helping you to buy it or build it or repair it or keep the taxes paid; he eats what you eat without helping you raise it or buy it or even hand it into the house; you cannot get rid of him; were he not a cannibal, he would long since have inherited the earth. The cat is third, with some of the same qualities but a weaker, punier creature; he neither toils nor spins, he is a parasite on you but he does not love you; he would die, cease to exist, vanish from the earth (I mean, in his so-called domestic form) but so far he has not had to. (There is the fable, Chinese I think, literary I am sure: of a period on earth when the dominant creatures were cats: who after ages of trying to cope with the anguishes of mortality -- famine, plague, war, injustice, folly, greed -- in a word, civilised government -- convened a congress of the wisest cat philosophers to see if anything could be done: who after long deliberation agreed that the dilemma, the problems themselves were insoluble and the only practical solution was to give it up, relinquish, abdicate, by selecting from among the lesser creatures a species, race optimistic enough to believe that the mortal predicament could be solved and ignorant enough never to learn better. Which is why the cat lives with you, is completely dependent on you for food and shelter but lifts no paw for you and loves you not; in a word, why your cat looks at you the way it does.)

The dog I rate fourth. He is courageous, faithful, monogamous in his devotion; he is your parasite, too: his failure (as compared to the cat) is that he will work for you -- I mean, willingly, gladly, ape any trick, no matter how silly, just to please you, for a pat on the head; as sound and first-rate a parasite as any, his failure is that he is a sycophant, believing that he has to show gratitude also; he will debase and violate his own dignity for your amusement: he fawns in return for a kick, he will give his life for you in battle and grieve himself to starvation over your bones. The horse I rate last. A creature capable of but one idea at a time, his strongest quality is timidity and fear. He can be tricked and cajoled by a child into breaking his limbs or his heart too in running too far too fast or jumping tings too wide or hard or high: he will eat himself to death if not guarded like a baby; if he had only one gram of the intelligence of the most backward rat, he would be the rider.

The mule I rate second. But second only because you can make him work for you. But that too only within his own rigid self-set regulations. He will not permit himself to eat too much. He will draw a wagon or a plow, but he will not run a race. he will not try to jump anything he does not indubitably know beforehand he can jump; he will not enter any place unless he knows of his own knowledge what is on the other side; he will work for you patiently for ten years for the chance to kick you once. In a word, free of the obligations of ancestry and the responsibilities of posterity, he has conquered not only life but death too and hence is immortal; were he to vanish from the earth today, the same chanceful biological combination which produced him yesterday would produce him a thousand years hence, unaltered, unchanged, incorrigible still within the limitations which he himself had proved and tested; still free, still coping."

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Man Alone

"Man is not the most majestic of the creatures. Long before the mammals even, the dinosaurs were far more splendid. But he has what no other animal possesses, a jig-saw of faculties which alone, over three thousand million years of life, make him creative. Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created."

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

The Hard Facts of Life

"I'm sure you have often noticed how ignorant people beyond thirty or forty are. I don't mean forgetful. That's specious and easy, too easy to say Oh papa (or grandpa) or mama (or gradma), they're just old; they have forgotten. Because there are some things, some of the hard facts of life, that you don't forget, no matter how old you are. There is a ditch, a chasm; as a boy you crossed it on a footlog. You come creeping and doddering back at thirty-five or forty and the footlog is gone; you may not even remember the footlog but at least you don't step out onto that empty gravity that footlog once spanned."

Monday, February 8, 2010

Nothing is Ever Lost

"Nothing is ever forgotten. Nothing is ever lost. It's too valuable."

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Sandhills

The wind that makes a dune
will take the dune away.

A mountain range of sand
can't will the sand to stay.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Se Débrouiller

And yet the PLONGEURS, low as they are, also have a kind of pride. It is the pride of the drudge--the man who is equal to no matter what quantity of work. At that level, the mere power to go on working like an ox is about the only virtue attainable. DEBROUILLARD is what every PLONGEUR wants to be called. A DEBROUILLARD is a man who, even when he is told to do the impossible, will SE DEBROUILLER--get it done somehow. One of the kitchen PLONGEURS at the Hotel X, a German, was well known as a DEBROUILLARD. One night an English lord came to the hotel, and the waiters were in despair, for the lord had asked for peaches, and there were none in stock; it was late at night, and the shops would be shut. 'Leave it to me,' said the German. He went out, and in ten minutes he was back with four peaches. He had gone into a neighbouring restaurant and stolen them. That is what is meant by a DEBROUILLARD. The English lord paid for the peaches at twenty francs each.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

The Wind that Makes a Dune

The wind that makes a dune will blow the dune away.

The Nature of Work

The thing that would astonish anyone coming for the first time into the service quarters of a hotel would be the fearful noise and disorder during the rush hours. It is something so different from the steady work in a shop or a factory that it looks at first sight like mere bad management. But it is really quite unavoidable, and for this reason. Hotel work is not particularly hard, but by its nature it comes in rushes and cannot be economized. You cannot, for instance, grill a steak two hours before it is wanted; you have to wait till the last moment, by which time a mass of
other work has accumulated, and then do it all together, in frantic haste. The result is that at mealtimes everyone is doing two men's work, which is impossible without noise and quarrelling. Indeed the quarrels are a necessary part of the process, for the pace would never be kept up if everyone did not accuse everyone else of idling. It was for this reason that during the rush hours the whole staff raged and cursed like demons. At those times there was scarcely a verb in the hotel except FOUTRE. A girl in the bakery, aged sixteen, used oaths that would have defeated a cabman.
(Did not Hamlet say 'cursing like a scullion'? No doubt Shakespeare had watched scullions at work.) But we are not losing our heads and wasting time; we were just stimulating one another for the effort of packing four hours' work into two hours.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Never Be Sorry for a Waiter

The moral is, never be sorry for a waiter. Sometimes when you sit in a restaurant, still stuffing yourself half an hour after closing time, you feel that the tired waiter at your side must surely be despising you. But he is not. He is not thinking as he looks at you, 'What an overfed lout'; he is thinking, 'One day, when I have saved enough money, I shall be able to imitate that man.' He is ministering to a kind of pleasure he thoroughly understands and admires. And that is why waiters are seldom Socialists, have no effective trade union, and will work twelve hours a day--they
work fifteen hours, seven days a week, in many cafes. They are snobs, and they find the servile nature of their work rather congenial.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Politics

'Me? But I don't know anything about politics.'

'MERDE! Neither do they. Who DOES know anything about politics? It's easy. All you have to do is to copy it out of the English papers. Isn't there a Paris DAILY MAIL? Copy it from that.'

'But the DAILY MAIL is a Conservative paper. They loathe the Communists.'

'Well, say the opposite of what the DAILY MAIL says, then you can't be wrong.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

If You Have a Chessboard

It was a saying of his that the rules of chess are the same as the rules of love and war, and that if you can win at one you can win at the others. But he also said that if you have a chessboard you do not mind being hungry, which was certainly not true in my case.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Down and Out

"And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs--and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety."

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Naked and Sober

After they invented clothing, Adam and Eve must have invented alcohol. Being naked and sober might be a tolerable way to live in a perfect world, but in this one it is pure misery.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Roger Williams on God

"God is too large to be housed under one roof."

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

First Contact With Poverty

It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty--it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it, is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar LOWNESS of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.

You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to poverty. At a sudden stroke you have been reduced to an income of six francs a day. But of course you dare not admit it--you have got to pretend that you are living quite as usual. From the start it tangles you in a net of lies, and even with the lies you can hardly manage it. You stop sending clothes to the laundry, and the laundress catches you in the street and asks you why; you mumble something, and she, thinking you are sending the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for life. The tobacconist keeps asking why you have cut down your smoking. There are letters you want to answer, and cannot, because stamps are too expensive. And then there are your meals-- meals are the worst difficulty of all. Every day at meal-times you go out, ostensibly to a restaurant, and loaf an hour in the Luxembourg Gardens, watching the pigeons. Afterwards you smuggle your food home in your pockets. Your food is bread and margarine, or bread and wine, and even the nature of the food is governed by lies. You have to buy rye bread instead of household bread, because the rye loaves, though dearer, are round and can be smuggled in your pockets. This wastes you a franc a day. Sometimes, to keep up appearances,you have to spend sixty centimes on a drink, and go correspondingly short of food. Your linen gets filthy, and you run out of soap and razor-blades. Your hair wants cutting,and you try to cut it yourself, with such fearful results that you have to go to the barber after all, and spend the equivalent of a day's food. All day you arc telling lies, and expensive lies.

You discover the extreme precariousness of your six francs a day. Mean disasters happen and rob you of food. You have spent your last eighty centimes on half a litre of milk, and are boiling it over the spirit lamp. While it boils a bug runs down your forearm; you give the bug a flick with your nail, and it falls, plop! straight into the milk. There is nothing for it but to throw the milk away and go foodless.

You go to the baker's to buy a pound of bread, and you wait while the girl cuts a pound for another customer. She is clumsy, and cuts more than a pound. 'PARDON, MONSIEUR,' she says, 'I suppose you don't mind paying two sous extra?' Bread is a franc a pound, and you have exactly a franc. When you think that you too might be asked to pay two sous extra, and would have to confess that you could not, you bolt in panic. It is hours before you dare venture into a baker's shop again.

You go to the greengrocer's to spend a franc on a kilogram of potatoes. But one of the pieces that make up the franc is a Belgian piece, and the shopman refuses it. You slink out of the shop, and can never go there again.

You have strayed into a respectable quarter, and you see a prosperous friend coming. To avoid him you dodge into the nearest cafe. Once in the cafe you must buy something, so you spend your last fifty centimes on a glass of black coffee with a dead fly in it. Once could multiply these disasters by the hundred. They are part of the process of being hard up.

You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in your belly, you go out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyere cheeses like grindstones. A snivelling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food. You plan to grab a loaf and run, swallowing it before they catch you; and you refrain, from pure funk.

You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing. For half a day at a time you lie on your bed, feeling like the JEUNE SQUELETTE in Baudelaire's poem. Only food could rouse you. You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Parable of the Talents

24 “Then he who had received the one talent came and said, ‘Lord, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you have not sown, and gathering where you have not scattered seed. 25 And I was afraid, and went and hid your talent in the ground. Look, there you have what is yours.’
26 “But his lord answered and said to him, ‘You wicked and lazy servant, you knew that I reap where I have not sown, and gather where I have not scattered seed. 27 So you ought to have deposited my money with the bankers, and at my coming I would have received back my own with interest. 28 So take the talent from him, and give it to him who has ten talents.
29 ‘For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.

Saturday, January 9, 2010

A Little Tale

"A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No -- that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times...

Would the reader care to know something about the story which I pulled out? He has been told many a time how the born- and-trained novelist works; won't he let me round and complete his knowledge by telling him how the jackleg does it?"

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Our Worst Suffering

It is only in our worst suffering that we best learn how to live.

Saturday, January 2, 2010

Poets of a Stronger Age

"--Has any one at the end of the nineteenth century any distinct notion of what poets of a stronger age understood by the word inspiration? If not, I will describe it. If one had the smallest vestige of superstition in one, it would hardly be possible to set aside completely the idea that one is the mere incarnation, mouthpiece or medium of an almighty power. The idea of revelation in the sense that something becomes suddenly visible and audible with indescribable certainty and accuracy, which profoundly convulses and upsets one--describes simply the matter of fact. One hears-- one does not seek; one takes--one does not ask who gives: a thought suddenly flashes up like lightning, it comes with necessity, unhesitatingly--I have never had any choice in the matter. There is an ecstasy such that the immense strain of it is sometimes relaxed by a flood of tears, along with which one's steps either rush or involuntarily lag, alternately. There is the feeling that one is completely out of hand, with the very distinct consciousness of an endless number of fine thrills and quiverings to the very toes;--there is a depth of happiness in which the painfullest and gloomiest do not operate as antitheses, but as conditioned, as demanded in the sense of necessary shades of colour in such an overflow of light. There is an instinct for rhythmic relations which embraces wide areas of forms (length, the need of a wide-embracing rhythm, is almost the measure of the force of an inspiration, a sort of counterpart to its pressure and tension). Everything happens quite involuntarily, as if in a tempestuous outburst of freedom, of absoluteness, of power and divinity. The involuntariness of the figures and similes is the most remarkable thing; one loses all perception of what constitutes the figure and what constitutes the simile; everything seems to present itself as the readiest, the correctest and the simplest means of expression. It actually seems, to use one of Zarathustra's own phrases, as if all things came unto one, and would fain be similes: 'Here do all things come caressingly to thy talk and flatter thee, for they want to ride upon thy back. On every simile dost thou here ride to every truth. Here fly open unto thee all being's words and word-cabinets; here all being wanteth to become words, here all becoming wanteth to learn of thee how to talk.' This is MY experience of inspiration. I do not doubt but that one would have to go back thousands of years in order to find some one who could say to me: It is mine also!--"