Pentimento: The Red Flower

Pentimento: The Red Flower
Excerpt:
Yes, in New York, to quote Elizabeth Bishop, “somebody loves us all.” In my new home town, no one loves nobody. Though not, as far as I know, by blood, my own little place here has been well-watered with my tears. Here, I understand nothing; I don't speak the language; I don't know which way to go. I feel as if I'm in a place without maps. The days are long and bleak. Nonetheless, as difficult, frustrating, and ego-bashing as my own small exile is, I believe quite strongly that it is necessary; as lonely and opaque as this place is to me, I believe that God wants me to be here, and I pray that I will be able to bring forth some sort of blossom out of this rocky earth. In fact, I believe that's what I have to do....

Books, Inq. — The Epilogue: The promise of narrative ...

Books, Inq. — The Epilogue: The promise of narrative ...
Excerpt:
I can only report that something did happen and it happened all of a sudden. ..

Marks in the Margin: The Lanyard

Marks in the Margin: The Lanyard

Wislawa Szymborska: Nothing Twice - YouTube

Wisława Szymborska’s funeral on a snowy day in Kraków | The Book Haven

Wisława Szymborska’s funeral on a snowy day in Kraków | The Book Haven
Excerpt:

I missed the news of Wisława Szymborska‘s funeral earlier this month, and only just found this youtube clip of the quiet, secular ceremony that nevertheless attracted more than a thousand people in a Polish winter. According to the Associated Press:

Freezing temperatures and falling snow at the Rakowicki Cemetery in the southern city of Kraków, where Szymborska lived, did not discourage the mourners, including Prime Minister Donald Tusk, writers and actors, from attending the ceremony.

An urn with Szymborska’s ashes was placed in the family tomb, where her parents and sister are buried, to a recording of Ella Fitzgerald, Szymborska’s favorite singer, singing “Black Coffee.” The poet was a heavy smoker and a lover of black coffee.

“In her poems, she left us her ability to notice the ordinary, the tiniest particles of beauty and of the joy of the world,” President Bronisław Komorowski said.

Krakowian by choice

Adam Zagajewski, a good friend of hers, tried repeatedly to introduce me to the reclusive poet---.......

Anecdotal Evidence: `Maybe I've Seen Things You'll Never See''

Anecdotal Evidence: `Maybe I've Seen Things You'll Never See''
Excerpt:
Deborah Warren does in “Dialogue with Myself” (Zero Meridian, 2004):
“I spend a lot of time in haunts not only

off the beaten track – they don’t exist:

Chez Swann, in Casterbridge, at Troy, at nowhere –

“Get a life! you say. God! What you’ve missed!

Hey, yeah – let’s spend the even in a chair.
Let’s live it up with dim protagonists.
Let’s dally on the sofa with Voltaire.
It’s kind of scary (not to mention lonely)
when your entire social life consists
of ghosts and venues like a blasted heath.
Besides – I have to tell you – it’s escapist.
Life? Your life’s a kind of living death,

“you say. So do your living. As for me,
maybe I’ve seen some things you’ll never see.”

Running 'Cause I Can't Fly: "Have Patience..."

Running 'Cause I Can't Fly: "Have Patience..."
Excerpt:
"Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. The point is: to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps, then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." - Rainer Maria Rilke
==============
[True. At one of the most devastating moments of my life 40 years ago this quote was given to me in a card. It is only now that I am able to 'begin' living into the answer.]

Anecdotal Evidence: `The Knot Is a Patterned Integrity'

Anecdotal Evidence: `The Knot Is a Patterned Integrity'

REDNECK REFLECTIONS: Aktion T-4

REDNECK REFLECTIONS: Aktion T-4
Excerpt:
Aktion T-4 as a program to murder the mentally ill, the developmentally disabled and the crippled in Nazi Germany. It was accounted a crime against humanity, and there were prosecutions over it in the post war era. Blessed Clemens Von Galen came to prominence by his outspoken opposition to it, which created enough of a problem that the program was suspended for a over year.

Too bad the Nazi's seem to have won the war, after all.

LES FEMMES - THE TRUTH: Sometimes Poetry Helps the Healing

LES FEMMES - THE TRUTH: Sometimes Poetry Helps the Healing
Excerpt:
I love William Blake. Some say he was crazy, but isn't that what they always say about visionaries?

There have been four deaths in our family in the past few months. One had lived a very long life, one was middle aged, one was about my husband's age (young senior), and one lived a life much too short. It seems so out of the order of things for parents to bury their children.

I was looking for something to make sense, if that's possible, of the death of the young. When I read Blake's poem, it made me think of Aslan in C.S. Lewis' Narnia stories. The little girl appears to be in danger, but, in the end, there is no fear and her parents find her asleep and safe in the lion's palace.

O Lord, let it be so for all those who grieve for lives cut short. Their number is legion....
[Please, too, pray hard too for those parents whose children are lost to drugs and/or in prison. They bear a sword through their hearts, minds and souls daily. I understand Weil's l'malheur.]

Scaramouche!: On "Land Day" (March 30th) All the Little Zion-Loathers Gather to Try to Divest the Jews of Their Land (Because, Allah Knows, They've So Much of It)

Scaramouche!: On "Land Day" (March 30th) All the Little Zion-Loathers Gather to Try to Divest the Jews of Their Land (Because, Allah Knows, They've So Much of It)

The Mystic’s Happy Thought of the Day – Reparation

The Mystic’s Happy Thought of the Day – Reparation
Excerpt:
Working in a corporation is a purgatorial experience. You have be at high state of alertness, and you have to know when to hit the floor when the goons apply the bludgeon. The working title of my memoir is The Corporate Ladder of Divine Ascent. I offer up my days in reparation for my sins...

The hermeneutic of continuity: The magnificence of God's creation

The hermeneutic of continuity: The magnificence of God's creation
Excerpt:
It is a helpful illustration of the magnificence of God's creation.

O Lord our Lord, how admirable is thy name in the whole earth! For thy magnificence is elevated above the heavens. (Ps 8.2)

[This brings to mind physicist Lisa Randall's discussion of 'scale' in observing....]

We Are One: My Buddy Anger part 2

We Are One: My Buddy Anger part 2

You've GOTTA read this!: Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began - Art Spiegelman

You've GOTTA read this!: Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began - Art Spiegelman

You've GOTTA read this!: Maus I: My Father Bleeds History - Art Spiegelman

You've GOTTA read this!: Maus I: My Father Bleeds History - Art Spiegelman

Books, Inq. — The Epilogue: Thought for the day ...

Books, Inq. — The Epilogue: Thought for the day ...
The world is a beautiful book, but of little use to him who cannot read it. *- Carlo Goldoni*, born on this date in 1707

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: Refusing at Fifty-Two to Write Sonnets

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: Refusing at Fifty-Two to Write Sonnets
Excerpt:
...
Humanity’s advances notwithstanding
In health-care, self-help, or new-age regimens —
What with his habits and family history,
The end he thought is nearer than you think.

The future, thereby bound to its contingencies,
The present moment opens like a gift:...Thomas Lynch

The Book Haven | Roberto Benigni: all Dante, all the time

The Book Haven | Cynthia Haven's blog for the written word
“TuttoDante.” The New York Times described it this way:

Roberto Benigni leapt up with a riff on the 26th Canto of Dante’s “Inferno,” in which fraudulent advisers are engulfed by flames that scorch them. “It’s like landing in Los Angeles or Manhattan, full of little lights like a skyscraper,” he exclaimed in his frenetically choppy English. “Dante describes the lights like fireflies, like a farmer who sees billions of fireflies. And every single firefly is hiding a fraud — people like Madoff. Very cunning, very shrewd. These people are hiding inside the flame because they are hiding in life. The Florentines, you know, they invented finances.”

Later, Benigni said in his Manhattan hotel, “We need to have the nerve to understand why a man with a big nose 700 years ago had the heroic shamelessness to write. Really this is the most daring, bold poetry ever...

Anecdotal Evidence: `Some Books Are Lived'

Anecdotal Evidence: `Some Books Are Lived'

...the everyday phenomenal world is messy

Western Sword Fern

“In order to get a fern leaf to be symmetrical, I would have to torture and kill it—cut it and press it between planes of glass. I cannot see the fern leaves without the light that filters through the mango tree above them, a cacophony of chaos in itself—a tangle of branches and leaves, though not without order. The light that reaches the ferns dapples them randomly, illuminating some parts and leaving others lost in mysterious shadow. If the light doesn’t reach them, they die. In order to paint a living fern, then, I need to paint random spots of light revealing parts of fractal forms twisted out of symmetry, simultaneously conveying their irregularity and imperfection while recognizing their fractal regularity.

More often than not, the everyday phenomenal world is messy.

My atelier training has given me a deep distrust of simplifying phenomena into abstract formulae. Much beauty is lost in the reduction…while rejecting most conventional systems of proportion, doesn’t object to starting out with a lightly sketched, erasable, oblong sphere for a head, and irregular cylinders for limbs, but it quickly acknowledges irregularity, asymmetry, subtlety and surprising departures from predictability…

Conclusion

… Goethe had a keen understanding of antiquity and the essential unity of knowledge—a point where art, science and philosophy converge. He clearly recoiled in horror against the idea of a science that excluded the human observer, understanding the appalling consequences. With genius, brashness, and a sense of humor, he claimed scientific valid­ity for the artistic method. It is a story of heroism perhaps unparalleled in history. The evidence suggests that the story may be true:

One element of atelier practice that helps students to see the vibrant qualities of color, is the idea that one must look for the most intense colors in nature next to the boundary between light and shadow. Shadows themselves, and fully lit areas of objects, generally contain colors less intense than the colors found in half-tone, right on the shadow edge.

…..

Since the artist’s study of nature did predict some of Goethe’s find­ings, in finding color on the border between light and shadow, for example, it is not unrealistic to expect the evolving tradition to keep generating useful ideas. The artist’s tradition is a phenomenological study of light, shadow and color, as well as a study of patterns, structures and meanings in the visual world—built upon hundreds of years of intersubjective corroboration—so it ought to be useful to physicists interested in a phenomenological ap­proach to nature.

The stakes are high. If conventional science tells us that a sunset is about particles and wavelengths, as if human experience of color does not exist, it may lead to still more technologies that further devalue and erode human sensual experience. As a teacher and an artist, I understand that people are losing their ability to see. We are losing our very humanity, our most basic instrument of knowledge. Why? We are too busy to slow down and look… The seeds of violence and alienation are contained in the method. Only a science of wholeness can put the pieces back together…I am uncomfortable with the idea of a world without human eyes to appreciate a sunset. I hope that the process of continually training my eye, and training the eyes of others, will awaken organs that will help to heal the sad tragic rift between nature and culture, subject and object, spirit and matter.

 The Artist’s Study of Nature and its Relationship to Goethean Science

Daan Hoekstra

Atelier Sonorense pp. 339-345

Marks in the Margin: The Courage to Care II

Marks in the Margin: The Courage to Care II
Excerpt:
What compelled them to disregard danger and torture—even death—and choose humanity? What moved them to put their lives in jeopardy for the sake of saving one Jewish child, one Jewish mother?

Always there is the question of why, why did the rescuers act the way they did, and why were there so few. As they recounted their experiences, the majority struggled to understand what they did given the enormous risks they were taking. Here is how some of them answered:

Odette Myers (France)
The rescuers usually say, “It was nothing. Why all the fuss? It was the natural thing.”
She speculates that because the rescuers were not so formally educated, they had to do their own thinking and that led them to respond quickly without deliberating about ethical principles.

Max Rothschild (Netherlands)
“…why did I do it? And I don’t let anybody step on anybody else’s toes. I have no philosophy. I don’t belong to a church. But when I see injustice done, I do something about it.”
.............

First Known When Lost: A Single Leaf (Revisited): Dorothy Wordsworth And Samuel Taylor Coleridge

First Known When Lost: A Single Leaf (Revisited): Dorothy Wordsworth And Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Excerpt:
One only leaf upon the top of a tree...
I have since discovered that her brother and Coleridge relied upon Dorothy Wordsworth's observations of nature on more than one occasion, putting them to use in their poetry. But it is best to go to the source...

Craftsman: Thought for the Day

But, when the work was finished, the Craftsman kept wishing that there were someone to ponder the plan of so great a work, to love its beauty, and to wonder at its vastness.

- Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, born on this date in 1463

h/t Books, Inq.

A Common Reader: Leading in to Torquemada: Fortunata and Jacinta

A Common Reader: Leading in to Torquemada: Fortunata and Jacinta
Excerpt:
...In that novel, the reader is introduced to Francisco Torquemada, namesake of Ferdinand and Isabella’s inquisitor general.

Dr. Rhian Davies, Director of the Pérez Galdós Editions Project, has provided a summary page of the Torquemada novels:

In 1889 Galdós wrote Torquemada en la hoguera for the important cultural review La España Moderna. The novel is centered on the Madrid moneylender Francisco Torquemada, who had previously appeared in other Galdós novels, notably La de Bringas (1884) and Fortunata y Jacinta (1886-87). Like his namesake, the Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada, Francisco de Torquemada, otherwise known as 'el Peor' [‘the Worse’], is renowned for his cruelty towards his fellow men....

...[Torquemada proceeds to give Doña Lupe a lesson in the art of lending.]

(Page 296) The ex-halberdier was opposed to “the materialism” of legally insured mortgages at reasonable interest rates. Risky loans with very high returns were his delight, because even though one might not collect until the night before the Last Judgment, most of the victims fell foolishly into the trap for fear of scandal, and the money doubled itself quickly. He could smell a punctilious person a mile off and knew who would rather lose his skin than get a bad name. These were the ones he dug into and glutted himself on.

The Reading Life: Notes on the passing of Mr C, blog co-editor of The Reading Life

The Reading Life: Notes on the passing of Mr C, blog co-editor of The Reading Life
Excerpt:
Yesterday was a very sad one for my family. On Valentine's Day our beloved cat, Mr C (also known as Charles or Charlie) passed away at 19.5 years, nearly 100 for us. He was strong up until the last few months of his life and he did have a great life. We took him yesterday to the ancestral home of my wife where we buried him next to his beloved brother Yoda who passed away three years ago at 16.5. Charles has been by my side for so long it is hard to imagine him not sitting next to me as I type. He was older than my oldest daughter and strongly helped me get through the worse part of my own life when my mother passed away. He will always be missed by us all. Not many cats live to 19.5 and he fought off several illnesses in the last couple of years. He had a very powerful personality and demanded constant affection and attention and he did have us trained to cater to his every need and whim...

The Reading Life: "The Night of the Ugly Ones" by Benedetti Mario-A Podcast by Miette's Bedtime Story podcast

The Reading Life: "The Night of the Ugly Ones" by Benedetti Mario-A Podcast by Miette's Bedtime Story podcast
Excerpt:
One of her new selections was "The Night of the Ugly Ones" by Mario Benedetti (1920 to 2009-Uruguay) I admit freely I have never heard of Benedetti , and unless you are from Uruguay you may not have either, so I, of course, Googled him. It turns out he is is a well known Uruguayan poet, journalist, and writer of fiction. He is evidently famous in Latin American literary circles but is little translated out of Spanish...One of the "uses" of literature is it lets us or if well done and we open ourselves to it, forces us, to see the humanity in people very other from ourselves. If this story has a moral, it is an old one, "There but for the Grace of God, go I"..

First Known When Lost: If Only

First Known When Lost: If Only
Excerpt:
...
Daydream
One day people will touch and talk perhaps easily,
And loving be natural as breathing and warm as sunlight,
And people will untie themselves, as string is unknotted,
Unfold and yawn and stretch and spread their fingers,
Unfurl, uncurl like seaweed returned to the sea,
And work will be simple and swift as a seagull flying,
And play will be casual and quiet as a seagull settling,
And the clocks will stop, and no-one will wonder or care or notice,
And people will smile without reason, even in the winter, even in the rain.
~A. S. J. Tessimond, Voices in a Giant City (1947)

We Are One: Nothingness

We Are One: Nothingness

Sanctuary for the Abused: Religion and Victimhood

Sanctuary for the Abused: Religion and Victimhood
Excerpt:

(Note on this post by my friend, the late Kathy Krajco.

Kathy, like myself, was raised Catholic. Some may think this villianizes Christianity. I don't believe it does. I feel it villanizes any religion that convinces a victim MUST stay with an abuser because of "biblical" reasons. I get email every week from Christians struggling with leaving their abuser because of pressure from their pastors, priests or fellow parishioners. Any Christian who is struggling can click here for some help. Never allow anyone to convince you to stay with someone who abuses you and makes you feel bad. No matter what your religion, I don't believe any God wants their creations to be miserable & abused. Even myself.

By the way, anyone who continues to call me a hypocrite or liar regarding leaving your abuser and my own marital situation should talk to me rather than smear me. - Barbara)

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: March 2010

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: March 2010
Excerpt:

One Step Backward Taken

Not only sands and gravels
Were once more on their travels,
But gulping muddy gallons
Great boulders off their balance
Bumped heads together dully
And started down the gully.
Whole capes caked off in slices.
I felt my standpoint shaken
In the universal crisis...

Barefoot and Pregnant: 7 Quick Takes Friday!

Barefoot and Pregnant: 7 Quick Takes Friday!
Excerpt:
Errughh. (<--------- that noise is supposed to convey exhaustion, disgust and defeat after a difficult week. How'd I do? The creation of new interjections is not an exact science, you know.)...

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: A List of Praises

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: A List of Praises

Marks in the Margin: The Courage to Care I

Marks in the Margin: The Courage to Care I

Information on Courage group in the Dallas area « A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Information on Courage group in the Dallas area « A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

We Are One: Fearing mistakes

We Are One: Fearing mistakes

DEATH MATCH the Fourth: Varamo vs. Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico | Insatiable Booksluts

DEATH MATCH the Fourth: Varamo vs. Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico | Insatiable Booksluts

Anecdotal Evidence: `Beauty Ever Ancient, Ever New'

Anecdotal Evidence: `Beauty Ever Ancient, Ever New'
Excerpt:
Here is Rodriguez:

“The most ancient notions of writing propose that the writer is more passive than active. The writer waits until the graces (or grace) flows through him. The writer awaits inspiration. The writing which Monday was so sluggish is suddenly free on Tuesday. How to explain it? St. Thomas Aquinas says that writing is a kind of prayer, leaving oneself open, utterly vulnerable, to inspiration or God. That feels right to me.”

You've GOTTA read this!: Not So Wordless Wednesday: Krakow #5

You've GOTTA read this!: Not So Wordless Wednesday: Krakow #5
Excerpt:

....once a bustling center of Jewish trade and activity, but became the ghetto during WWII. This area was decidedly more run-down, but was also rich in culture...
....

Oh, the Good Life...

 h/t Books, Inq. link to David Attenborough...
Explore the Good Life Quiz


What's your friendship type?


 What's your philosophy type?

Dolce Bellezza: The Passion

Dolce Bellezza: The Passion
Excerpt:
Writing a review of The Passion seems as elusive as the emotion itself. While ostensibly it's clear: Henri loves Napolean in his own way, before he meets Villanelle whom he truly loves; she in turn has had her heart stolen by another woman who is married. All this, in the setting of lovely Venice whose streets are as tangled as our characters' hearts...

And He went down into the caves of the past...

"And over our heads the hollow seas closed up." (SA, 104- 105) ~Primo Levi

Generations Appeared Again Last Night

They really did.  As we watched the ancestry series about Leopold Bianca’s murder and the family genealogical search to unravel the mystery, the synopsis of my own journey distilled before me.  This time I spoke it.  The help I was given from God has been profound---I mean, what other kind could it be?---I owe so very much to ‘go back to the beginning’ year of Jewish study of Scriptures and feasts.  After the Fall is important. And Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi and Margaret from Hungary all solidified my role as ‘witness’ which is much beyond the family ‘storyteller’.  Last night the whole process of spiritual generations unfolded.  I realized we have lost the sense of family generations which is a sin of omission---spiritual, psychological, social and emotional.  The ‘secret sins, follies and tragedies’ have gone ‘underground’ into the hidden wells of our souls and psyches.  God provided sacramental means for dealing with all the idiosyncrasies of sin and folly and crime.  These spiritual laws remain whether we are aware of them or not.  As long as we lived in the same village for generations there was a ‘communal’ means for justice and spiritual healing to unfold and one was not ‘alone’ in wrestling with these dark angels.  I have read much about justice, not only in Holocaust writings, not only in Scriptures, and not only in psychotherapy treatises.  What I do know from personal experience is that all must become common knowledge, transparent before the community, before in depth healing can occur.  Unless we belong to a ‘real’ sacramental community it is too dangerous for that to occur in our world.  All of the sacramental gifts so generously poured out by God have always been under attack by the envious enemy of souls.  When we sin there is a debt to be paid and reparations made; otherwise, we remain under the bondage of the spiritual law of love which is justice.  God in His Mercy sent us His Son to help us pay for the debts of sin but we have our own part in that redemption creation process.  It all starts with God confronting us when ‘we hide from Him.”  And we must tell the truth and face it before God can ‘clothe us.’

Paul Davis On Crime: True WWII Mission Impossible: How Two British Marines In A Canoe Outwited The Mighty Nazi German Navy

Paul Davis On Crime: True WWII Mission Impossible: How Two British Marines In A Canoe Outwited The Mighty Nazi German Navy
Excerpt:
Note: The British commandos trained in the glacial water at Holy Loch, Scotland. I was stationed at the U.S. nuclear submarine base at Holy Loch in the mid-1970s and I can verify that the water was very, very cold. The British commandos were truly tough guys.

Shock! Liberal paragon behaves like………..liberal paragon « A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Shock! Liberal paragon behaves like………..liberal paragon « A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics
Excerpt:

Why does it seem there are certain women who just can’t refuse a man of power, wealth, and/or influence? All the tales make this woman sound like she knew she was being used, that this man was perverse and nasty, and yet she lets it go on? She let him do what he wanted to do within a few minutes of meeting him. And it’s not like she’s the only one in history. Kennedy alone had dozens, maybe hundreds. What’s up with that?

And even 50 years later, she’s crying about how he treated her like a Kleenex. It’s sad to see how devastated she still is, how conflicted, how she still relishes the memory of the attention he gave her while being repulsed at how she was used. What an apropos encapsulation of so much of the culture of sexual license that has grown up in this country – not only was she being used, she was apparently prepared to abort her child if she had turned up pregnant. Killing your child, so this guy could keep abusing you and countless others?

.................

Hardy hummingbird toughs out winter - Spokesman.com - Feb. 9, 2012

Hardy hummingbird toughs out winter - Spokesman.com - Feb. 9, 2012

Books, Inq. — The Epilogue: Solitary reader ...

Books, Inq. — The Epilogue: Solitary reader ...
Excerpt:
America, as Hoffer rightly understood, was exceptional: “Only here, in America,” he wrote, “were the common folk of the Old World given a chance to show what they could do on their own, without a master to push and order them about.” It was the practicality of working people, untutored by intellectuals, that was integral to America’s success. “Scribe-dominated” societies, he argued, derived “a rare satisfaction from tearing tangible things out of the hands of practical people. .  .  . America is the only country where the masses have impressed their tastes and values on the whole of the country.”
....[and oh boy the 'masters' don't like it....]

The Book Haven | Cynthia Haven's blog for the written word

The Book Haven | Cynthia Haven's blog for the written word
Excerpt:

Then, the question all poets detest – asked, perhaps by a journalist? “Where does your poetic inspiration come from?”

Only the question wasn’t that short. Hill, apparently, became more and more intense as the question grew longer and longer and more flowery. “Verbal adumbrations!” he kept insisting. “Verbal adumbrations.”

Said the professor relaying the anecdote: “That phrase has stuck in my mind for 15 years.”

More from Paris later.

Anecdotal Evidence: `Sudden Fits of Inadvertency'

Anecdotal Evidence: `Sudden Fits of Inadvertency'
Excerpt:
These letters of two formidably bookish men are never dry, pretentious or academic. They share literary loves and hates, and much good gossip, but also their lives. The growing bond of trust and affection between Lyttleton and Hart-Davis across volumes is like a slowly growing friendship or love affair in a lushly expansive novel. Here is Lyttleton, in a passage that reminded me of my perturbed reader:

“Do you ever get things quite wrong? Because here is the perfect defense: `What is obvious is not always known, what is known is not always present. Sudden fits of inadvertency will surprise vigilance; slight avocations will seduce attention. And casual eclipses of the mind will darken learning.’ Isn’t it perfect? Johnson, of course.”

Lyttleton quotes from the “Preface” to A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), with its characteristic tone of mingled humility and audacity. Lyttleton letters are peppered with casual references to Johnson’s life and work. In the letters, such allusions are never stuffy or deployed in a show-off manner. They are the small talk of civilized men. ...

A Treatise on Poetry: IV Natura by Czeslaw Milosz : The Poetry Foundation

A Treatise on Poetry: IV Natura by Czeslaw Milosz : The Poetry Foundation

[“But poets are the worst. Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic. Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens. Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?”  ~ Wislawa Szymborska]

Excerpt:

And the rose only, a sexual symbol,

Symbol of love and superterrestrial beauty,

Will open a chasm deeper than your knowledge.

About it we find a song in a dream:

Inside the rose

Are houses of gold,

black isobars, streams of cold.

Dawn touches her finger to the edge of the Alps

And evening streams down to the bays of the sea.

If anyone dies inside the rose,

They carry him down the purple-red road

In a procession of clocks all wrapped in folds.

They light up the petals of grottoes with torches.

They bury him there where color begins,

At the source of the sighing,

Inside the rose.

Let names of months mean only what they mean.

Let the Aurora’s cannons be heard in none

Of them, or the tread of young rebels marching.

We might, at best, keep some kind of souvenir,

Preserved like a fan in a garret. Why not

Sit down at a rough country table and compose

An ode in the old manner, as in the old times

Chasing a beetle with the nib of our pen?

“Natura: Section IV" from “A Treatise on Poetry” by Czeslaw Milosz; from New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001. Copyright © 2001 by Czeslaw Milosz Royalties, Inc. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Source: New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2001)

Marks in the Margin: Wislawa Szymborska

Marks in the Margin: Wislawa Szymborska
Excerpt:
....poem by the Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska called Any Case, also sometimes titled Could Have.

I discovered the poem at the end of Julie Orringer’s remarkable novel The Invisible Bridge, an epic tale of three brothers trying to survive during the Holocaust in Hungary. It is a long novel that drew me in from the first sentence and would not let me out for a full 600 pages. The following passage occurs in the novel:

…the excruciating smallness, the pinpoint upon which every life is balanced. The scale might be tipped by the tiniest of things: the lice that carried typhus, the few thimblefuls of water that remained in a canteen, the dust of breadcrumbs in a pocket.

Any Case
It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Closer. Farther away.
It happened, but not to you.
You survived because you were first.
You survived because you were last.
Because alone. Because the others.
Because on the left. Because on the right.
Because it was raining. Because it was sunny.
Because a shadow fell.
...........................

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: Cat in an Empty Apartment

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: Cat in an Empty Apartment
Excerpt:
With sadness we note that the great Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska died last week.

Szymborska received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996
....
Nothing seems different here,
but nothing is the same.
Nothing has been moved,
but there’s more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.

Footsteps on the staircase,
but they’re new ones.
.....
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared,
and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Culture Desk: Wislawa Szymborska: The Happiness of Wisdom Felt : The New Yorker

Culture Desk: Wislawa Szymborska: The Happiness of Wisdom Felt : The New Yorker
h/t Books, Inq.

The Bogwen Report Online: Tuffy's War: Part One of Six.

The Bogwen Report Online: Tuffy's War: Part One of Six.

Anecdotal Evidence: `A Transport of Cordiality'

Anecdotal Evidence: `A Transport of Cordiality'

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: The Peace of Wild Things

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: The Peace of Wild Things

Marks in the Margin: A Life of Learning

Marks in the Margin: A Life of Learning

We Are One: Counseling misconceptions

We Are One: Counseling misconceptions

A Momentary Taste of Being: What "The People" Means

A Momentary Taste of Being: What "The People" Means

Anecdotal Evidence: `The Honey of That Old Discipline'

Anecdotal Evidence: `The Honey of That Old Discipline'
Excerpt:
Love, tradition and a willingness to work hard, not ideology, sustain her and her family. Late in the novel, thinking of her children, Mary condemns “the incoherent civilization, the moral wilderness emerging from the physical wilderness.”...

Anecdotal Evidence: `In My Heart Is Locked the Singing Flame'

Anecdotal Evidence: `In My Heart Is Locked the Singing Flame'

Excerpt:

...each encounter was protracted, and each animal was aware of my presence and endured it. We reached a rare trans-species rapprochement, with some measure of trust on both sides. I spent much of an afternoon watching the woodpecker... remembered the woodpecker when I encountered a yellow warbler – surely among the most piercingly beautiful of birds -- in a poem by Leslie Monsour, “Indelibility” (The Alarming Beauty of the Sky, 2005):

“A whistle in the palm outside my window

Announced a yellow warbler perched there like

A feathered spark, a sun-flake with a pinto

Wing. I saw it flicker, burn, then spike

The air in take-off. Gone. And yet the bird

Remains. The world outside is not the same,

With shifting shadows, air and time disturbed;

But in my heart is locked the singing flame.”

=====================

Addendum: 'This reminds me...."

    "A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving...

One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.

...

I have been reading about weasels because I saw one last week. I startled a weasel who startled me, and we exchanged a long glance.

Twenty minutes from my house, through the woods by the quarry and across the highway, is Hollins Pond, a remarkable piece of shallowness, where I like to go at sunset and sit on a tree trunk... The sun had just set. I was relaxed on the tree trunk, ensconced in the lap of lichen, watching the lily pads at my feet tremble and part dreamily over the thrusting path of a carp. A yellow bird appeared to my right and flew behind me. It caught my eye; I swiveled around—and the next instant, inexplicably, I was looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me.

Weasel! I'd never seen one wild before. 

...

The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous shaggy wild rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key.

Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don't. We keep our skulls. So.

He disappeared. This was only last week, and already I don't remember what shattered the enchantment. I think I blinked, I think I retrieved my brain from the weasel's brain, and tried to memorize what I was seeing, and the weasel felt the yank of separation, the careening splash-down into real life and the urgent current of instinct. He vanished under the wild rose. I waited motionless, my mind suddenly full of data and my spirit with pleadings, but he didn't return.

Please do not tell me about "approach-avoidance conflicts." I tell you I've been in that weasel's brain for sixty seconds, and he was in mine. Brains are private places, muttering through unique and secret tapes-but the weasel and I both plugged into another tape simultaneously, for a sweet and shocking time. 

...

I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel's: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.

I missed my chance. I should have gone for the throat. I should have lunged for that streak of white under the weasel's chin and held on, held on through mud and into the wild rose, held on for a dearer life. We could live under the wild rose wild as weasels, mute and uncomprehending. I could very calmly go wild. I could live two days in the den, curled, leaning on mouse fur, sniffing bird bones, blinking, licking, breathing musk, my hair tangled in the roots of grasses. Down is a good place to go, where the mind is single...

Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?

We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience--even of silence--by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't "attack" anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop...~Annie Dillard, 'Living Like Weasels'

SHIRT OF FLAME: A NOTE FROM MY BROTHER ROSS

SHIRT OF FLAME: A NOTE FROM MY BROTHER ROSS

seraillon: Lives of the Poets: Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives

seraillon: Lives of the Poets: Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives
Excerpt:
I’ve been cordially invited to join The Savage Detectives reading challenge. I accepted of course, albeit with slight reluctance, and not just due to time constraints (I’m late, I’m sorry). I’ve been both fascinated and vaguely irritated by the previous works of Roberto Bolaño that I’ve read...

Isolated Peru tribe makes uncomfortable contact - Yahoo! News

Isolated Peru tribe makes uncomfortable contact - Yahoo! News
Excerpt:

LIMA, Peru (AP) — Peruvian authorities say they are struggling to keep outsiders away from a clan of previously isolated Amazon Indians who began appearing on the banks of a jungle river popular with environmental tourists last year.

The behavior of the small group of Mashco-Piro Indians has puzzled scientists, who say it may be related to the encroachment of loggers and by low-flying aircraft from nearby natural gas and oil exploration in the southeastern region of the country.

Clan members have been blamed for two bow-and-arrow attacks on people near the riverbank in Madre de Dios state where officials say the Indians were first seen last May.

One badly wounded a forest ranger in October. The following month, another fatally pierced the heart of a local Matsiguenka Indian, Nicolas "Shaco" Flores, who had long maintained a relationship with the Mashco-Piro.

The advocacy group Survival International released photos Tuesday showing clan members on the riverbank, describing the pictures as the "most detailed sightings of uncontacted Indians ever recorded on camera."...

Supremacy and Survival: The English Reformation: St. Henry Morse, SJ--February 1, 1645

Supremacy and Survival: The English Reformation: St. Henry Morse, SJ--February 1, 1645
Excerpt:
Philip Caraman, SJ wrote a life of today's English Catholic Martyr titled Henry Morse: Priest of the Plague. The Jesuit Curia in Rome provides this biography:

Henry Morse (1595-1645) was five times arrested for being Catholic and four times was released or escaped. His ability to get out of prison meant that he had a much longer ministry career than most Jesuits in England.

He began his studies at Cambridge then took up the study of law at Barnard's Inn, London; at the same time he became increasingly dissatisfied with the established religion and more convinced of the truth of the Catholic faith. He was received into the Catholic church at the English College at Douai, Flanders, and then returned to England to prepare to enter the seminary that autumn. Port authorities in England asked him to take the oath of allegiance acknowledging the king's supremacy in religious matters. The recent convert refused to do so and was arrested the first time. He was imprisoned four years before being set free in 1618 when the king released hundreds of religious dissenters and exiled them to France. Morse first went to Douai but the English College had too many students, so he was sent to Rome, where studied theology and was ordained in 1623.

Before Morse left Rome, he met the Jesuit superior general and...

Conrad: The Secret Agent « All Manner of Thing

Conrad: The Secret Agent « All Manner of Thing
Excerpt:
...Given that the story is about a man who tries to sow terror in London by planting a bomb, one has the nagging feeling that the book ought to have some contemporary political relevance...

Marks in the Margin: Revisiting Writing

Marks in the Margin: Revisiting Writing
Excerpt:
To express yourself needs a reason, but expressing yourself is the reason.

That was the first blog post of Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and often-jailed dissident. He wrote that sentence as he was first learning to type and had little experience of writing.

I am thoroughly in agreement with Weiwei. Writing is all about expressing yourself. When I read something or when an idea comes to mind, the first thing I want to do is write something about it. Writing clarifies and completes the notion in a way that speaking doesn’t. It is also a catalyst for other ideas and making contact with the snippets that are hidden away in the folders of my laptop..

“Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one tamped with your personality.” Robert Darton

I find my voice in writing, not speaking. It is all in the fingers, not the vocal chords. How strange. ....................

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: Hunting the Phoenix

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: Hunting the Phoenix