a shandean commonplace book

Bang your tambourine!  kiss my ass, don’t mind if they say it’s vicious—they don’t know what music should do to you.   Now, while the drums are whacking away and your blond eyes stammer like two kinds of topaz knocking together, we’ll wear out all the instruments they usually beg with—the hand-organ and ocarina and dirtied trumpet—and brighten them up!  In the midst of these mad cholers where love becomes all that’s serious we’ll cling like hunks of voluptuous driftwood, our heart for a sail, the sea will sigh with relief and end its moan to clap us as happy kids! savages ripe from the trees. Frank O’Hara

Make books your companions. Let your bookshelves be your gardens. Judah Ibn Tibbon

So it was with the suitcase left in front of the hotel — cinched, broken-locked, papered with world ports, carrying what mattered until then, when turning your back to cup a match it was taken, and the thief, expecting valuables instead found books written between wars, gold attic-light, mechanical birds singing and the chronicle of your country’s final hours. What, by means of notes, you hoped to become: a noun on paper, paper dark with nouns: swallows darting through a basilica, your hands up in smoke, a cloud about to open over the city, pillows breathing shallowly where you had lain, a ghost in a hospital gown, and here your voice, principled, tender, soughing through a fence woven with pine boughs: Writing is older than glass but younger than music, older than clocks or porcelain but younger than rope . Dear one, who even in speaking is silent, for years I have searched, usually while asleep, when I have found the suitcase open, collecting ...

Power is only important as an instrument for service to the powerless. Lech Walesa

is different from the poem that is not written, or the many that are never finished—those boats lost in the fog, adrift in the windless latitudes, the charts useless, the water gone. In the poem that cannot be written there is no danger, no ponderous cargo of meaning, no meaning at all.  And this is its splendor, this is how it becomes an emblem, not of failure or loss, but of the impossible. So the wind rises.  The tattered sails billow, and the air grows sweeter. A green island appears. Everyone is saved. Lawrence Raab

Anything I've ever tried to keep by force I've lost. Marie Howe

Consider this: a moth flies into a man's ear one ordinary evening of unnoticed pleasures. When the moth beats its wings, all the winds of earth gather in his ear, roar like nothing he has ever heard. He shakes and shakes his head, has his wife dig deep into his ear with a Q-tip, but the roar will not cease. It seems as if all the doors and windows of his house have blown away at once— the strange play of circumstances over which he never had control, but which he could ignore until the evening disappeared as if he had never lived it. His body no longer seems his own; he screams in pain to drown out the wind inside his ear, and curses God, who, hours ago, was a benign generalization in a world going along well enough. On the way to the hospital, his wife stops the car, tells her husband to get out, to sit in the grass. There are no car lights, no streetlights, no moon. She takes a flashlight from the glove compartment and holds it bes...

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization. Samuel Johnson

Happily happiness doesn't know justice It comes when it wants and it wants unjustly Time for you to withdraw into the rustle of black silk attire rather than to dress up in smiles But is it your fault that like rain it caught you on the road by surprise that you didn't have time to cover your silver head And now you stand like a lonely tree open to all the winds and birds And now you shine like a lake and whether you want to or not you reflect the sky Anna Kamienska / tr. Grazyna Drabik and David Curzon

Dissent is the mark of freedom. Jacob Bronowski

We walk under the wires and the birds resettle. We know where we’re going but have not made up our mind which way we will take to get there. If we pass by the palmist’s she can read our wayward lines. We may drop things along the way that substantiate our having been here. We will not be able to transmit any of these feelings verbatim. By the time we reach the restaurant one of us is angry. Here a door gives in to a courtyard overlooking a ruined pool. We suspect someone has followed one or the other of us. We touch the spot on our shirt where the ink has seeped. The lonely outline of the host is discerned near an unlit sconce. As guests we are authorized not to notice. We drop some cash on the tablecloth. We lack verisimilitude but we press on with intense resolve. At the border, under a rim of rock, the footbridge. Salt cedars have grown over the path. The water table is down. And we cannot see who is coming, the pollos and their pollero, the mi...

So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we have nothing else but words to do it with. John Locke

He is tight at first, stiff, stands there atilt tossing the green fluff tennis ball down the side alley, but soon he's limber, he's letting it fly and the black Lab lopes back each time. These are the true lovers, this dog, this man, and when the dog stops to pee, the old guy hurries him back, then hurls the ball farther away. Now his mother dodders out, she's old as the sky, wheeling her green tank with its sweet vein, breath. She tips down the path he's made for her, grass rippling but trim, soft underfoot, to survey the yard, every inch of it in fine blossom, set-stone, pruned miniature, split rails docked along the front walk, antique watering cans down-spread—up huffs the dog again with his mouthy ball— so flowers seem to spill out, red geraniums, grand blue asters, and something I have no name for, wild elsewhere in our world but here a thing to tend. To call for, and it comes. David Baker

The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them. Patrick Henry

In the book you've been reading it's the end of the season. The shades have been drawn in that house by the lake, and a woman is standing alone on the porch. She thinks, There's no sense pretending I could have been happy here. A few notes from a piano float across the water, and you wonder if that isn't more than is needed -- how the music suggests the idea of change gathering in the distance. But not for her. She'll return to her father, who drinks too much, having failed as a doctor, then as a farmer. She can see him asleep in his chair after dinner, a small fire in the grate, snow in the garden. And on the table, the bills to be paid. He'd be lost in bitterness without her, which she understands. So this is a story about accommodation, how quiet feelings come to matter and finally suffice. She watches the wind fall back across the water. And you think: But she deserves to be happy. ...

It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do a little. Sydney Smith

My friend is going through the fire on his knees, His hands, crossing the entire field of it; Once in a while he calls out, bewildered, The other side unclear, wanting to just Lie down and wait among the scattered stones. Unimaginable heat: he pants, lost in the light Of what keeps happening — think water, think water, And he manages to make out one nurse Up against the bright and it takes everything To tell her what he needs, as if he had come upon The one tree still standing, and understood She promises nothing, who in her uniform Was all that was ever asked for and who Could hold him as he has never been held. Sophie Cabot Black

When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear. Mark Twain

About the Shark, phlegmatical one, Pale sot of the Maldive sea, The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim, How alert in attendance be. From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw They have nothing of harm to dread, But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank Or before his Gorgonian head; Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth In white triple tiers of glittering gates, And there find a haven when peril’s abroad, An asylum in jaws of the Fates! They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey, Yet never partake of the treat— Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull, Pale ravener of horrible meat. Herman Melville

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. Abba Eban

Open the book of evening to the page where the moon, always the moon, appears between two clouds, moving so slowly that hours will seem to have passed before you reach the next page where the moon, now brighter, lowers a path to lead you away from what you have known into those places where what you had wished for happens, its lone syllable like a sentence poised at the edge of sense, waiting for you to say its name once more as you lift your eyes from the page and close the book, still feeling what it was like to dwell in that light, that sudden paradise of sound. Mark Strand

Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things. Samuel Johnson

The bus rolled into the Lincoln Tunnel, and I was whispering a prayer that it not be today, not today, please no shenanigans, no blasts, no terrors, just please the rocking, slightly nauseating gray ride, stop and start, chug-a in the dim fellowship of smaller cars, bumper lights flickering hello and warning. Yes, please smile upon these good people who want to enter the city and work. Because work is good, actually, and life is good, despite everything, and I don't mean to sound spoiled, but please don't think I don't know how grateful I should be for what I do have — I wonder whom I'm praying to. Maybe Honest Abe himself, craggy and splendid in his tall chair, better than God to a kid; Lincoln whose birthday I shared, in whom I took secret pride: born, thus I was, to be truthful, and love freedom. Now with a silent collective sigh steaming out into the broken winter sun, up the ramp to greet buildings, blue brick ...

Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty. George Bernard Shaw

Behind the Lord's angel, enormous and shining, The righteous man followed along the black hill. But a voice told his wife, as if anxiously pining -- It's not yet too late; you can look again still At Sodom, your home town, its towers and waters, The yard where you spun, where you sang in the square, The house where you bore your loved husband two daughters -- Your home, with its windows now empty and bare. She glanced, and in agony deathly and arrant, Her eyes couldn't look as she turned herself round; Her body, transformed, was now salt and transparent; Her legs, once so quick, now took root in the ground. This woman -- will any among us regret her? Is she not the least of our losses, Lot's wife? Yet my heart, I am certain, will never forget her, Who just for a glance had surrendered her life. Anna Akhmatova

There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and that is not learning from experience.

On the last night of our house arrest a howling wind tore through the streets, ripping down shutters, scattering roof tiles, leaving behind a river of refuse. When the sun rose over the marble gate, I could see the guards, sluggish in the morning heat, desert their posts and stagger toward the woods just out of town. “Darling,” I said, “let’s go, the guards have left, the place is a ruin.” But she was oblivious. “You go,” she said, and she pulled up the sheet to cover her eyes. I ran downstairs and called for my horse. “To the sea,” I whispered, and off we went and how quick we were, my horse and I, riding over the fresh green fields, as if to our freedom. Mark Strand

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Albert Einstein

Death is not Prime Minister or resplendent, not eternal darkness, silence, or heaven-sent. Death is an unrepresentative form of government, a dead mother and father who rule without consent, a drone in every flower, the Queen in her hive. They have a room in every house, pay not rent. Silent at dinner, they deceive, connive, as the clock ticks. They never say “Live and let live.” How many times have I tried to sing them to sleep? Eternal bride and bridegroom, I do what I do to make my death handsome, to make them proud, to win a faceless smile by a leap- ing somersault to childhood. I pay ransom to my kidnappers, who tie me to their bed — to weep in their pillow, to sleep, to dream, to do or undo, to twinkle twinkle in their firmament of two. Silly to think there was a death: a father and mother before there was time. Perhaps there was a single egg, like the egg that hatched love, or something profane, other, an indebtedness to which we should...

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him:  "What are you going through?"  It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen . . . but as [an individual]. . . . For this reason it is . . . indispensable to know how to look at him in a certain way.  This way of looking is first of all attentive. Simone Weil

When we said logic was transcendental, we felt other words we might have said find form the way shadows find form, with dependence on things both intimately close and infinitely separate, palpable as the sky palpating with a blue we saw and loved and never felt surrounded by, palpable as what we saw with our eyes closed. We could feel the unsaid begin to touch our mouths the same way shadows began first where two things met and might be parted, where touch obscured a body's edge so brilliantly. How casually the light declined. The roundest pearls gave way to oval shadows. Mornings we found it snowed all night. There was often a feeling of rest gathering to meet itself outside ourselves; there was the feeling that thinking one thing had caused another thing to be. Kathleen Peirce

 . . . a man’s hatred is always concentrated on that which makes him conscious of his bad qualities. Carl Jung

When I saw the heroin standing up to its spindleshins in mud where the lake’s deep water yesterday caught the light and cracked it into a scatter of small flames, each fragment of fractured mirror gripping a coloured shard of sky or leaf or the glancing glimpse of a wing flapping over (taupe for a goose, stony bluegrey a heron, various shades of white the gulls), when I saw this statued heron, light burning its beak to an aluminum triangle, a tapered hammerhead of glass, it could have been the sign I was searching for: a solitary creature dealing with this unsettle set of fresh conditions, not stuck in the mud but surrounded by it, trying to draw something to live by from it, some surprise live morsel that would make survival possible. So I walked the bank and looked at it from every angle, hoping to winkle a hint or two to help shed any ray of light on things. But it just stood hunched, ruffling once, twice, its shoulder feathers, the gleam of its beak ...

Only the educated are free. Epictetus

after Li Po I found him wandering on the hill one hot blue afternoon. He looked as skinny as a nail, as pale-skinned as the moon; below the broad shade of his hat his face was cut with rain. Dear God, poor Du Fu , I thought: It’s the poetry again . Don Paterson

He who postpones the hour of living is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses. Horace

Although things vanish, are what mark our vanishing, we still hold on to them—ballast against the updraft of oblivion—as I hold on to this umbrella in a world of rain, of heavy wet greens and grays dissolving into a new atmosphere, a sort of underwater dulled electric glow off everything, the air itself drowning in it, breath thickening, growing mold. Yesterday I felt the smell of grass greeting me as across a great distance, trying to tell me some good thing in an underglaze of memory, some forgotten summer trying to speak its piece.  It is the way of things and it never stops, never calls a halt— this knocking and dismantling, this uprooting, cutting out and digging down, so tall oaks and honey locusts are laid low and drop to earth like felled cattle, shaking the ground we’ve taken a stand on as if it were a steady establishment, a rock of ages to outface ruin itself, not the provisional slippery dissolving dissolute thing it is— whic...

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. Franz Kafka