a shandean commonplace book

Just when it seemed my mother couldn’t bear one more needle, one more insane orange pill, my sister, in silence, stood at the end of the bed and slowly rubbed her feet, which were scratchy with hard, yellow skin, and dirt cramped beneath the broken nails, which changed nothing in time except the way my mother was lost in it for a while as if with a kind of relief that doesn’t relieve. And then, with her eyes closed, my mother said the one or two words the living have for gratefulness, which is a kind of forgetting, with a sense of what it means to be alive long enough to love someone. Thank you, she said. As for me, I didn’t care how her voice suddenly seemed low and kind, or what failures and triumphs of the body and spirit brought her to that point— just that it sounded like hope, stupid hope. Jason Shinder

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. G.K. Chesterton

I saw myself a ring of bone in the clear stream of all of it and vowed, always to be open to it that all of it might flow through and then heard "ring of bone" where ring is what a bell does Lew Welch

Inspiration is for amateurs.  I just get to work. Chuck Close

Shadow warns shadow that you approach, light warns light. Frightened, a wild dove starts up. You are an obstacle, not foreseen here between the pines’ loftiness and the penal divisions of low grasses. You are a foundling looking for a family, a prodigal son who has fled and returns to bear witness to the independence of trees, thistles, the quick butterflies and dying dragonflies. It is through them this moment of peace comes to us, they help grace descend on the wing of an unknown bird, and it is their voices—the ermine’s cry, moan of a dove, complaint of an owl—that remind us the hardship of solitude is measured out equally. Julia Hartwig (translated from the Polish by John and Bogdana Carpernter)

The moment one gives close attention to anything, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. Henry Miller

Just an uncommon lull in the traffic so you hear some guy in an apron, sleeves rolled up, with his  brusque sweep brusque sweep  of the sidewalk, and the slap shut of a too thin rental van, and  I told him no  a gust has snatched from a conversation and brought to you, loud.                                     It would be so different if any of these were missing is the feeling you always have on the first day of autumn, no, the first day you  think  of autumn, when somehow the sun singling out high windows, a waiter settling a billow of white cloth with glasses and silver, and the sparrows shattering to nowhere are the Summer waving that here is where it turns and will no longer be walking with you, traveller, who now leave all of this behind, carrying only what it has made of you. Already the crowds seem darker and more hurried and the slang grows stranger and stranger, and you do not understand what you love, yet here, rounding a corner

Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone? Thomas Wolfe

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.                                                             —Willa Cather Here the oak and silver-breasted birches Stand in their sweet familiarity While underground, as in a black mirror, They have concealed their tangled grievances, Identical to the branching calm above But there ensnared, each with the others’ hold On what gives life to which is brutal enough. Still, in the air, none tries to keep company Or change its fortune. They seem to lean On the light, unconcerned with what the world Makes of their decencies, and will not show A jealous purchase on their length of days. To never having been loved as they wanted Or deserved, to anyone’s sudden infatuation Gouged into their sides, to all they are forced To shelter and to hide, they have resigned themselves. J. D. McClatchy

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. Franklin D. Roosevelt

The saxophonist winds up "My Romance," the song with a scar. In the red lacquer ceiling, the night's raw throat, I can just make out lampshades the color of a smoker's breath. One is at our table. Across sits a woman in tiny furs from before the war, the mouth of one gnawing on the tail of the other, like comets. A sudden brightness on stage, a flaring spot, flashes on the nodding brass. The little thud at a nova's heart predicts the gradual, dimming ebb and flow of light—or love—soon enough burnt out, remembered only as desire's afterglow. So which one has the room key? Neither of us wants to guess what won't ever be opened. Something is found in a galactic pocket. Something is left behind on a chair. The elevator doors close soundlessly. A constellation of numbers rises in order. Again, the argument from design's invoked. Tomorrow we'll get to go back over it all, what's partially false and almost al

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons. Desmond Tutu

A sentence is an idea. An idea with urgency. A feeling for the sun before it rises. The imagination loves the wall of a building, loves the floor and the square window that looks out on it. The scent of jasmine is how the plant climbs up the wall built by the Knights of Rhodes. But the sentence stresses the meaning, making us notice an unruly jasmine against the orderly stone wall. We say our bus went down through the village of the insane, or that the eucalyptus trees were tall. That we saw a man dragging a big branch. The sun will return whether you smile or cry, clap or burn candles. But when I say  whether , the sentence may be thinking,  Even so . Linda Gregg

Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music, or pictures, or architecture, or anything else, is always a portrait of himself. Samuel Butler

Such impatience, and for what, if tomorrow is only a little boat with no sail or oars, a bridge over nothing? Think of the old man of Alexandria, of his treasures squirreled away in a drawer with keys, leftover flakes of tobacco, the weary portrait of a deposed princeling. All it took was a car horn honking in the street, a livelier step on the stairway to wake up the room, the angel's voluptuous body, the knife-sharp fragile beauty of love, and his voice in the darkness like salt thrown on a wound, in passing. Guy Goffette Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker

In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong. John Kenneth Galbraith

It may not be the same, what we appear to thrive or slow or fade in, though across its white expanses steadily we stare; the only common element it has is loss, and it may differ in the terms it gives it. And it thickens with the days, thins in the night as if it more than seems a carbon thing, afflicted, prone to what? To us, as if obscurely hopes or harms can come to it, as if it walks the street in love, abashed, abused, as if it, too expands to wonder at the point of it, contracts to desperation in the blue morning, helplessly expands anew. Glyn Maxwell

They are happy men whose natures sort with their vocations. Francis Bacon

     There was some kind of rally going on in the common. Somebody was speaking into a bullhorn to about three hundred people, who were cheering and shouting things. I decided to drift over and check it out. The speaker was saying, "Even my three-year- old son knows better than to kick a goat." I mingled with the crowd. A woman yelled, "You got a great big cherry pie on your head!" And a dozen others said, "Yes, you do." The man continued, "And then the dog ate our sofa. Did we kick it? No, we didn't." Someone shouted, "The saints dropped the ball on that one." The man said, "I been down there where even the little birdies fear to roam. I once found an angry viper in my pocket, but I steered the course. I bonged myself with a hidden cloud." "And you never lost your way," many shrieked. I was working my way toward the front. The excitement was catching. "If you spit in a burni

Are not all civilizations, either openly or in secret, always archives of collective trauma? Peter Sloterdijk

It was my father in that restaurant On Central Avenue in Orange, New Jersey, Where I stopped for lunch and a drink, after coming away From visiting, after many years had passed, The place to which I’d brought my father’s ashes And the ashes of my mother, and where my father’s Grandparents, parents, brothers had been buried, And others of the family, all together. The atmosphere was smoky, and there was a vague Struggling transaction going on between The bright day light of the busy street outside And the somewhat dirty light of the unwashed Ceiling globes of the restaurant I was in. He was having lunch.  I couldn’t see what he was having But he seemed to be eating, maybe without Noticing whatever it was he may have been eating; He seemed to be listening to a conversation With two or three others—Shades of the Dead come back From where they went to when they went away? Or maybe those others weren’t speaking at all?  Maybe It was a dumbshow?  Pu

Everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself Tolstoy

Here, where you all are, language is an accessory to bodies lying in the street, prone in government rooms, bloated in the waterways. Or language is an accessory to the refutation of bodies lying etc. This too will pass as search vessels in the delta pass for smuggling operations bringing illicit food to refugees being autocued for media appearances. What commerce would you with us all. What coverage can you offer for coastal breach, aid refusal, for the taut sinews and caught breath of seated uprisen monks. Lytton Smith

                   to be choked with hate May well be of all evil chances chief. W. B. Yeats

I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes, took them home, boiled them in their jackets and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt. Then I walked through the dried fields on the edge of town. In middle June the light hung on in the dark furrows at my feet, and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers squawking back and forth, the finches still darting into the dusty light. The woman who sold me the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables at the road-side stand and urging me to taste even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way, she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat, eat," she said, "Even if you don't I'll say you did."                                                        Some things you know all your life. They are so si

A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance. Anatole France

Something has pried open the body of this hare, unpicked a seam from between the stilled hindlegs to the middle of the slackened, gray belly. Now the two sides of the wound part slowly, like a mouth widening as it comes on the right word, or that neat tear in the half-obscured lower thigh at the center of the theater in Eakins's The Gross Clinic where, as I remember it, the owl-eyed surgeon seems so unmoved by the thick, scarlet globules that glisten like cheap lipstick on his thumb and the anguish a mother buries in her dress sleeve as he explains precisely how he will poke a scalpel into tendon, muscle, bone, to remove the latest clot of gangrene from the left leg of her son who might, if all goes well, last out the year. Two assistants hold the patient down, while a third and fourth, with their crude tools, keep open the incision and stare deep into the mysteries of the flesh, as eager for their time with the body as the petrels

The idea is essentially repulsive of a society only held together by the relations and feelings arising out of pecuniary interests. John Stuart Mill

I'll never forget the day, this beautiful woman right out in the office said I was "sneaky": I didn't know I was sneaky: I didn't feel sneaky: but there are mechanisms below our mechanisms, so I assume the lady was right: living with that has not helped my progress in the world, if there is any such thing, progress, I mean: also it has hurt my image of myself: I have used up so much fellow- feeling on the general --- all of which I have forgotten specifically about, as have the fellows --- no offices, no clear images or demonstrations --- I don't understand why that one remark holds its place ungivingly in me: and now to talk about it, admit to the world (my reading public, as it happens) that I am scarred by an old, old wound about to heal and about to bleed: this may do confessional good but I will no longer appear perfect to others: conceivably, that could be a good thing: others may be scarred, t

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones. Raymond Carver

This upstart thistle Is young and touchy; it is All barb and bristle, Threatening to wield Its green, jagged armament Against the whole field. Butterflies will dare Nonetheless to lay their eggs In that angle where The leaf meets the stem, So that ants or browsing cows Cannot trouble them. Summer will grow old, As will the thistle, letting A clenched bloom unfold To which the small hum Of bee wings and the flash of Goldfinch wings will come Till its purple crown Blanches, and the breezes strew The whole field with down. Richard Wilbur

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. Douglas Adams

Another drought morning after a too brief dawn downpour, unaccountable silvery glitterings on the leaves of the withering maples— I think of a troop of the blissful blessed approaching Dante, “a hundred spheres shining,” he rhapsodizes, “the purest pearls…” then of the frightening brilliant myriad gleam in my lamp of the eyes of the vast swarm of bats I found once in a cave, a chamber whose walls seethed with a spaceless carpet of creatures, their cacophonous, keen, insistent, incessant squeakings and squealings churning the warm, rank, cloying air; of how one, perfectly still among all the fitfully twitching others, was looking straight at me, gazing solemnly, thoughtfully up from beneath the intricate furl of its leathery wings as though it couldn’t believe I was there, or were trying to place me, to situate me in the gnarl we’d evolved from, and now, the trees still heartrendingly asparkle, Dante again, this time the way he’ll refer to a

There are three rules for writing a good novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. Somerset Maugham

When we looked up after hours of staring at a crimp in a log, the shooting blue flames, puffs of smoke, the tide that was right here had gone way out, so the waves were now strokes of gray in the distance, and the dark night closed in on us, everywhere at once. Everywhere at once the sky was touchable, for of course it was right here, over us, as well as way out over the smaller and smaller waves, coming forward but still going out. Coming forward but still going out, leaving us to watch this crashing in and in yet each time receding, the way our conversation happened along those same lines. Along those lines we managed a few untouchable subjects, the way we imagine we can touch a star or the moon on a night like this but know we really can't. We imagine we see everything more clearly, but that doesn't work with the past. Which is what we were dealing with— in the way families try to deal with this sort of thing. Families dea

Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong. Dandamis

Here I am writing my first villanelle At seventy-one, and feeling old and tired— “Hey, pops, why dontcha just give us the old death-knell?”— And writing it what’s more on the rim of hell In blazing Arizona when all I desired Was north and solitude and not a villanelle, Working from memory and not remembering well How many stanzas and in what order, wired On Mexican coffee, seeing the death-knell Of sun’s salvos upon these hills that yell Bloody murder silently to the much admired Dead-blue sky. One wonders if a villanelle Can do the job. Yes, old men must tell Our young world how these bigots and these retired Bankers of Arizona are ringing the death-knell For all of us, how ideologies compel Children to violence. Artifice acquired For its own sake is war. Frail Villanelle, Have you this power? And must I go and sell Myself? “Wow,” they say, and “cool”—this hired Old poetry guy with his spaced out death-knell. Ah, far from home a

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. Marcus Aurelius

Remember us, you not yet here. Of the sparrow-colored fields of mid-November, we the perceivers, the sayers and rememberers: call us to mind, say the words in our name — they are our name, who breathed here in these underground cloud- darkened wind-uttered fields, and spoke like you each object’s word. Franz Wright

A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own. H.G. Wells

Returning alone after long absence I was engulfed. No novel, no play had prepared me for this, the arched November trees glazed with ice, the night-emptied sidewalks chipped with mica in silent offering. I had left it all behind and here—it rose!  The City's fiery parcels all undone . It was the season of regret and the great wave of first love lost swept over me. Catching the buildings' hooded eyes from afar— my true paramours!—I was adolescent with longing for everything laid out before me, down on my knees in the frigid air, on the first night, asking for benevolence, second chances without end. Melanie Rehak