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surf and thunder, pears and doves
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| Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:
Such a Way, as gives us breath:
Such a Truth, as ends all strife:
Such a Life, as killeth death.
Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength:
Such a Light, as shows a feast:
Such a Feast, as mends in length:
Such a Strength, as makes his guest.
Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart:
Such a Joy, as none can move:
Such a Love, as none can part:
Such a Heart, as joyes in love. | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment   |
| He who has never loved, let him love!
He who has loved, let him love! | | comments: Leave a comment |
| The poet understands the incomprehensible.
Things that hate each other he calls friends.
He walks calmly in the night because he knows
that all paths are impossible. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| I have not read much of her work: a sentence here, a paragraph there, a glance over a table of contents. But what I have read I carry with me: sharp and prismatic, like miraculous unmelting crystals of ice.
Words so condensed, so supersaturated, that they break the threshhold of prose and effloresce with all the transparent brilliance of lyric.
Most recently:
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From a table of contents:
( Read more... ) | | comments: Leave a comment |
| 1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions.
She wedded, story tells
Kronos' son, Poseidon,
And bore the violet-haired girl, Evadna.
She hid her maiden travail in her dress,
And in the month of birth she sent servants
And told them to give the child to Eilatidas' keeping -
He ruled at Phaisana
Over the men of Arkadia
And had Alpheos for home;
There Apollo cared for her, and first
She touched the delights of Aphrodita.
All that time she hid her child by the god,
But kept not her secret from Aipytos.
from Pindar The Odes
(I overlooked I, Claudius, which was technically nearer. But it's presently serving as a mousepad so I consider its status as a book temporarily suspended.) | | comments: 11 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Our local cheap supermarket is going out of business and looks more like Siberia every time we go in. It's interesting to see what is left on the shelves: solid walls of SPAM, yellow mustard, canned green beans of every brand and, in what used to be the dollar aisle, an unexplicable mountain of men's white socks. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Not all infinite sets contain exactly the same elements. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | The spiritual level does not contradict, but exists in paradox with the literal. There's a definite tension between them. Once I thought the spiritual hatched from the literal, leaving it an empty shell. But can the spiritual truth emerge from the egg without breaking it, even somehow keeping it full? The lantern is large with the light that spreads far beyond its globe. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Here is a link to an online collection of John Paul the Second's writings and speeches concerning women. I encourage everyone to take a look!
John Paul the Second's "Talk for Female Students" and "Talk for Male Students" are also powerful documents; I can't find online versions but when I have time I will try to provide both texts here.
From "A Talk for Female Students": It may sound paradoxical, but this [inner] independence simultaneously makes a woman free of love and open to it. It makes her free of love with a small l - love as necessity, restriction, mere occasion, or eroticism - and opens her to the Love which is the fruit of conscious choice and in which she can find her own life and vocation.
The two talks end on a similar note and we hear in these closing words the Christian humanism that inspired the whole of John Paul the Second's world-changing papacy:
To the men: You may imagine that this [following Christ] means not following yourself, but that is in fact just what it does mean. This is most important for us, since each of us wants above all to follow himself. Following Christ also means following yourself. Christ does not tear you away from yourselves. He does not diminish or nullify the personhood of any of us. He enriches us if we truly desire to join him and shoulder the responsibility we have in common with all humanity: 'Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.' The Kingdom of God is something which involves everybody, and this is why every man who seeks the Kingdom of God finds himself.
To the women: Yesterday we said that choosing God means choosing oneself, one's own self. Choosing Christ means choosing oneself. So how better can you choose yourselves anew with your female, feminine individuality and your own selfhood, than with Christ? This is all that is involved. And how are you to do this? You will certainly be guided in this understanding by the interior light and the grace which always helps us, the 'grace of state.' If you seek you will find.
In any case, in the path of love which life entails, always remember that above every love there is one Love. One Love. Love without constraint or hesistation. It is the love with which Christ loves each one of you. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Hee, hee. The comments on my ice cream post were awesome. Like polling the Peanuts characters. Thanks everyone. | | |
| | Subject: | Homer | | Time: | 05:08 pm |
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| I'm reading the Iliad again. Helen and Achilles, I thought today, and later heard Dr. Cowan confirm it, are the two centers of the Iliad, not merely characters but mysteries. The Iliad has never really been my poem, but I weave my dreams around the Odyssey. Today though I begin to see how the two participate in the same whole, like an Old and New Testament, each illumining the other. The Odyssey is also about the Trojan War, portrayed less directly: the war in retrospect, as we see it figured on the loom and on the harp, the surrounding world that feels the conflict's reverberations, the perspective of the non-participants. We only see the events of the Iliad fully in the context of the Odyssey, and the earth-sea of Greece.
It's good to go back to these founding poems at the very end of my formal education, and to know the place for the first time. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| I sat at Marc and Lara's dining room table, and my eyes ravished up everything in sight. Hundreds of household objects, resonating of other times. I remember a glass jug with a round ear-shaped handle close to its mouth, a wooden cutting board (the crowded kitchen reminding me of Vermeer or the kitchen in great-grandmother's summer house). A wooden rack set up in front of the glass door holding overflowing pots of herbs. Red and orange painted walls, the holy chalk marks brightly white above the door. Black archaic sconces. Icons. Picture frames and dishes lined up around the room on a shelf near the ceiling, old pictures in the frames. Patterned curtains in the doorways. An easel with a religious diptych more than half-finished, a wooden artist's palette hanging near. Books in dark wood shelves lining an entire wall: books in Russian, on marriage, on the History of Witchcraft. The Poetic Edda and some notes on the coffee table. On the dining room table: a box of fine pens and a sheet of scroll-edged Florentine stationery on which Lara had been penning various Latin prayers. A picure of the Pope blessing them as newly-weds. I gazed - and gazed.
This was the window I'd passed a year ago and thought I was looking into a magic crystal.
It should have looked cluttered with all those things but no--it was like the plenum, the copia of a gloriously jumbled still life. Lara was wearing a flowy linen pants suit and embroidered slippers, curled up at the toes. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Today we pray that unborn babies and pregnant women in this country will once again be legally protected from the horror of abortion. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| | The example of Joan of Arc shows that war can be beautiful when women fight. Well, it's always ugly. But her army waged war as beautifully as it has ever been waged. (Granted it was an extraordinary situation; grace never works exactly the same way twice.) She made the French army more than army ever was (unless in the Old Testament times). She held it to amazing standards of purity. Her soldiers went to Confession before each battle. There was no swearing among the troops. And Saint Joan herself hated bloodshed. She wept over her enemies. (The only way to take a human life, if you must take it, is with tears.) She's one of my favorite saints. She was utterly feminine - and an inspired military general. Her femininity didn't impede her warcraft - in fact, it was part of her effectiveness - and her being a general didn't destroy her femininity, but made it all the more radiant. I love her. Everything I want to say, she lived. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| . . .that there still exists a species more fantastic than professors.
Musical instrument makers. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| It is of absolute necessity for our peace
that we surrender ourselves wholly to God.
Most people want to do this,
but they do not because they are afraid...
these anxieties can be put to rest
by a little thought about God's approach to us,
His way with human beings....
How small and gentle His coming was!
He came as an infant.
The night in which He came was noisy and crowded;
it is unlikely that,
in the traffic of the travelers to Bethlehem,
the tiny wail of the newly born could be heard....
Knowing that God supplies all our necessities,
and that one of our necessities
is that we surrender to Him,
we should not be surprised
that He comes to us as an infant;
for surrender to an infant, any infant, is easy.
Caryll Houselander | | comments: Leave a comment |
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surf and thunder, pears and doves
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