Dear Reader,
Have you ever heard or read a great quotation or passage in
a book or newspaper that you don’t want to let go of? Or
maybe your semi-dreaming brain drains itself of unconscious
data, its list of images, excited by emotion, exhaustion or
a long day. It’s best to have a handy, grabbable blank
book to drop in these jewels of language and inspiration. Mine
is a chubby (inch and a half thick) little six by four-and-a-half-inch
red velveteen-covered beauty. I hardly ever need to say, “I
should have written that down.”
This month, I offer a random list from my treasure chest of
words:
-
A line from Thomas Hardy’s poem, “The
Ruined Maid” – “O didn’t you know I’d
been ruined?”
-
Infamous reprobate W.C. Fields when asked,
“Is that you reading the Bible?” Said he, “Looking
for loopholes.”
-
Poetry doesn’t come from nowhere and
when it does, it sounds like it.
-
Elizabth Bishop, “The Bight” …/All
the untidy activity continues/ awful but cheerful./
Enduring pain is the necessary element of purification into
humility and grace. We have to empty ourselves to be renewed.
-
“King Lear” – Edgar to Gloucester
“What, in ill thought again? Men must endure their going
hence even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all. Come on.”
And Edgar’s gentle invitation: “Here, father, take
the shadow of this tree/ For your good host.”
-
Challenge of professional writers: How to
give shape to days in which nothing much happens.
-
Maurice Sendak: “My big concern is me
and what do I do now until the time of my death. That is valid.
That is useful. That is beautiful. That is creative. And also,
I want to be free again…I want to see me to the end working,
living for myself. ‘Ripeness is all.’ Now, interpreting
what ripeness is is our own individual problem…So what
is the point of it all? Not leaving legacies. But being ripe.
Being ripe.”
-
W.B. Yeats: Spilt Milk – “/We that
have done and thought,/ That have thought and done,/ Must
ramble and thin out/ Like milk spilt on a stone.”
-
How can we enhance squib jigging?
-
My friend asked Google “What does it
mean to get back your soul?’
-
Ulysses to his sailors (Dante) - /Consider
well the seed that gave you birth:/ You were not made to live
your lives as brutes,/ But to be followers of worth and knowledge./”
-
Robert Louis Stevenson’s last words.
After going to the cellar for a bottle of his favorite burgundy,
is uncorking it, when a blood vessel bursts, and he says,
“Do I look strange?” and dies.
-
Julio Torres: “If your color does not
get mentioned, please celebrate quietly to yourself so as
not to make the person next to you jealous…I believe
that Q should come later in the alphabet.”
-
Composer Erik Satie’s last words: “Ah,
the cows!”
-
George Tice, photographer: “The everydayness
of life gets in the way of the eternal. I contemplate how
this photograph will be seen in the future, when the subject
matter no longer endures. Taking a picture, is, indeed, stopping
the world.”
-
“Scintillation” - astronomers describe
the twinkling of stars – so far away, they are pinpoints
of light easily refracted by earth’s atmosphere. Planets
shine – closer and bigger, therefore no refraction and
steadier light.
-
Wyatt Mason – “…writing is
a way of rooting oneself to a world that otherwise shakes.”
-
Billy Collins: “Revision is not cleaning
up after the party, it is the party.”
-
Peter Schjeldahl – “…art, a
holiday of the spirit on the crowded calendar of life.”
Writers have a calling. Publishers have a business.
-
Martin Prechtel – “Grief is praise,
because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”
-
Joy Williams, The Visiting Privilege –
“The dead just forget you,” a character reasons,
and boy, that is a sobering, ego-crushing thing to tell someone.”
-
I.A.Richards – “Ambiguities are
the hinges of thought.
And I could go on, but there you have a sampling of what has
drawn my attention since I began the first entry in July 2001.
So much has changed since then.
