a shandean commonplace book

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself. Montaigne

Lord, I discovered when I discovered love That day a continent within the mind, Unstable on the sea, boundaries unlined Which now I slowly take the measure of. The coast’s determined; the mountains do not move; Natural harbors and clear springs I find, Shade trees and fruit trees, everything of its kind— Even for an empire more resources than enough. My favorite flowers, besides, some of eadh, Yes, and wild animals who stand and stare; Rivers that run beyond my present reach The other way, and clouds that glitter in the air. Love’s flag quickly I planted on the beach While I explored, but the one I love is not there. Elizabeth Bishop

The rusting, decomposing hulk of the United States is moored across Columbus Boulevard from Ikea, rearing weirdly over the old municipal pier on the mostly derelict docks in Philadelphia. I’d forgotten how immense it is: I can’t imagine which of the hundreds of portholes looked in on the four-man cabin five flights down I shared that first time I ran away to France. We were told we were the fastest thing afloat, and we surely were; even from the tiny deck where passengers from tourist were allowed our wake boiled ever vaster out behind. That such a monster could be lifted by mere waves and in the storm that hit us halfway across tossed left and right until we vomited seemed a violation of some natural law. At Le Havre we were out of scale with everything; when a swarm of tiny tugs nudged like piglets at the teat the towering mass of us in place, all the continent of Europe looked small. Now, behind its ravelling chain-link fence, the ship’s a somnolent carcass, cables lashed like lilli

O brothers, love is an instructress, but one must know how to acquire her, for she is acquired with effort, purchased dearly, by long labour and over a long season, for it is not simply for a casual moment that one must love, but for the whole of the appointed season. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

8.  My father died on July 21st, 2001, and on September 11, 2001, eleven boys in four airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and into a field in Pennsylvania, killing themselves and thousands of people. This has something to do with my father, with oil, with me. My government and with you. Since my father’s death, I’ve slowly begun waking to my childhood. It’s mostly full of other people’s words, as is time in general, the specific a rare event, relying as it does upon an individual member being awake. I’m waking to my childhood in my own child’s life, the driving he loves on video games, a version of the driving I loved, asleep in the backseat. May all his crashing be virtual. In remembering is re-membering. Heart and mind, body and soul, time and space, father and daughter, we are separate; we are attached. The mind knows this when the heart pulses freely, dependent on its own muscle. The soul itself is a muscle, both housed and independent of its own body.

It is a strange, perplexing Enigma, this life, yet it takes us a long time to find out that we cannot understand it. Eliza Fenwick

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. James Baldwin

Suppose Oedipus never discovers his ignorance And remains king to the end, Proud as he walks the streets of Thebes To think of himself as his city’s savior, The fortunate husband of Queen Jocasta. The blessed fatehr of two dutiful daughters. Would we call him happy, a man so unknowing? If we did, we’d have to admit that happiness Isn’t all we ask for. We want some truth as well, Whatever that means. We want our notions, However beautiful and coherent, Linked to something beyond themselves. First, I want to dream I am in your thoughts. Then I want that dream to be a picture Faithful in flesh and spirit to what is the case. First I imagine your heart as a city like Thebes With me as the park you prefer to visit. Then with my open eyes I want to see you Resting again and again on one of the benches, Gathering strengt for the messenger Who may be nearing the outskirts now Wondering if you’ll know how to take the news. Carl Dennis

I followed once a fleet and mighty serpent Into a cavern in a mountain's side; And, wading many lakes, descending gulphs, At last I reached the ruins of a city, Built not like ours but of another world, As if the aged earth had loved in youth The mightiest city of a perished planet, And kept the image of it in her heart, So dreamlike, shadowy, and spectral was it. Nought seemed alive there, and the very dead Were of another world the skeletons. The mammoth, ribbed like to an arched cathedral, Lay there, and ruins of great creatures else More like a shipwrecked fleet, too great they seemed For all the life that is to animate: And vegetable rocks, tall sculptured palms, Pines grown, not hewn, in stone; and giant ferns, Whose earthquake shaken leaves bore graves for nests. Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) Death's Jest Book , III, I

One reads in order to ask questions. Franz Kafka

Having reddened the plum blossoms the sunset attacks oaks and pines. Yosa Buson (1716-1783) translated by Robert Hass

Biology gives you a brain.  Life turns it into a mind. Jeffrey Eugenides

Everything needs it: bone, muscles, and even, while it calls the earth its home, the soul. So the merciful, noisy machine stands in our house working away in its lung-like voice. I hear it as I kneel before the fire, stirring with a  stick of iron, letting the logs lie more loosely. You, in the upstairs room, are in your usual position, leaning on your right shoulder which aches all day. You are breathing patiently; it is a beautiful sound. It is  your life, which is so close to my own that I would not know where to drop the knife of  separation. And what does this have to do with love, except everything? Now the fire rises and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red roses of flame. Then it settles to quietude, or maybe gratitude, as it feeds as we all do, as we must, upon the invisible gift: our purest, sweet necessity: the air. Mary Oliver

Such is the effect of KNOWLEDGE upon the brain—a zinging clarity that does not quickly fade, but will last all the way till dinner, and then by bedtime will turn into awful, crushing dread. John Hodgman

All day I've listened to the industry of a single woodpecker, worrying the catalpa tree just outside my window. Hard at his task, his body is a hinge, a door knocker to the cluttered house of memory in which I can almost see my mother's face. She is there, again, beyond the tree, its slender pods and heart-shaped leaves, hanging wet sheets on the line -- each one a thin white screen between us. So insistent is this woodpecker, I'm sure he must be looking for something else -- not simply the beetles and grubs inside, but some other gift the tree might hold. All day he's been at work, tireless, making the green hearts flutter. Natasha Trethewey

They have a right to censure, that have a heart to help: The rest is cruelty, not justice. William Penn

In his sea-lit distance, the pitcher winding like a clock about to chime comes down with the ball, hit  sharply under the artificial banks of arc lights, bounds like a vanishing string over the green to the shortstop magically scoops to his right whirling above his invisible shadows in the dust redirects  its flight to the running poised second baseman pirouettes leaping, above the slide, to through from mid-air, across the colored tightened interval, to the leaning- out first baseman ends the dance drawing it disappearing into his long brown glove stretches. What is too swift for deception is final, lost, among the loosened figures jogging off the field (the pitcher walks), casual in the space where the poem has happened. Robert Wallace

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking. Sir Joshua Reynolds

There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert.  Whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.  Our business is to continue to fail in good spirits. Robert Louis Stevenson

The age requires this task: create a different image; re-animate the mask. Shatter the icons of slavery and fear. Replace the leer of the minstrel’s burnt-cork face with a proud, serene and classic bronze of Benin. Dudley Randall

I sat all morning in the college sick-bay Counting bells knelling classes to a close. At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home. In the porch I met my father crying -- He had always taken funerals in his stride -- And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow. The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram When I came in, and I was embarrassed  By old men standing up to shake my hand  And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble," Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest, Away at school, as my mother held my hand In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs. At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses. Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him For the first time in six weeks. Paler now, Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,  He lay in the four foot box as in his cot. No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear. A four foot box, a foot for every year.  Seamus Heaney

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything. Steven Wright

     “the withness of the body” The heavy bear who goes with me,  A manifold honey to smear his face,  Clumsy and lumbering here and there,  The central ton of every place,  The hungry beating brutish one  In love with candy, anger, and sleep,  Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,  Climbs the building, kicks the football,  Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city. Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,  That heavy bear who sleeps with me,  Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,  A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,  Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope  Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.  —The strutting show-off is terrified,  Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,  Trembles to think that his quivering meat  Must finally wince to nothing at all. That inescapable animal walks with me, Has followed me since the black womb held,  Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,  A caricature, a swollen shadow, A stupid clown of the spirit’s

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air,  usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,  when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,  reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more  than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:  this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro  beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world  where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,  this man, superb in love and logic, this man  shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,  not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone, but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives  fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing. Robert Hayden

Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity. Lord Acton

I could not tell I had jumped off that bus, that bus in motion, with my child in my arms, because I did not know it. I believed my own story: I had fallen, or the bus had started up when I had one foot in the air.  I would not remember the tightening of my jaw, the rage that I'd missed by stop, the leap into the air, the clear child gazing about her in the air as I plunged to one knee on the street, scraped it, twisted it, the bus skidding to a stop, the driver jumping out, my daughter laughing Do it again. I have never done it again. I have been very careful.  I have kept an eye on that nice young mother who suddenly threw herself off the moving vehicle onto the stopped street, her life in her hands, her life's life in her hands. Sharon Olds

Never doubt  that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. Margaret Mead

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. Thomas Mann

The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters,  these by themselves delight, even without  a meaning, in a foreign language, in  Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve  all day across the lake, scoring their white  records in ice. Being intelligible,  these winding ways with their audacities  and delicate hesitations, they become  miraculous, so intimately, out there  at the pen's point or brush's tip, do world  and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist  balance against great skeletons of stars exactly; the blind bat surveys his way  by echo alone. Still, the point of style  is character. The universe induces  a different tremor in every hand, from the check-forger's to that of the Emperor  Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy  the 'Slender Gold.' A nervous man  writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on.  Miraculous. It is as though the world  were a great writing. Having said so much,  let us allow there is more to the world  than writing; contin

With love all things may be redeeemed, all things may be rescued. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My brother was afraid, even as a boy, of going blind--so deeply that he would turn the dinner knives away from, looking at him, he said, as they lay on the kitchen table. He would throw a sweatshirt over those knobs that lock the car door from the inside, and once, he dismantled a chandelier in the middle of the night when everyone was sleeping. We found the pile of sharp shining crystals in the upstairs hall. So you understand, it was terrible when they clamped his one eye open and put the needle in through his cheek and up into his eye from underneath and left it there for a full minute before they drew it slowly out once a week for many weeks. He learned to, lean into it, to settle down he said, and still the eye went dead, ulcerated, breaking up green in his head, as the other eye, still blue and wide open, looked and looked at the clock. My brother promised me he wouldn't die after our father died. He shook my hand on a train going home one Christmas and gave me five years, as

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the source of all true art and science. Albert Einstein

Feeling the icy kick, the endless waves  Reaching around my life, I moved my arms And coughed, and in the end saw land.  Somebody, I suppose,  Remembering the medieval maxim, Had tossed me in,  Had wanted me to learn to swim,  Not knowing that none of us, who ever came back From that long lonely fall and frenzied rising, Ever learned anything at all  About swimming, but only  How to put off, one by one,  Dreams and pity, love and grace --  How to survive in any place.  Mary Oliver

It's particularly disquieting to suspect not only that one is a fictional character but that the fiction one's in—the fiction one is—is quite the sort one least prefers. John Barth