a shandean commonplace book

The poppies send up their orange flares; swaying in the wind, their congregations are a levitation of bright dust, of thin and lacy leaves. There isn't a place in this world that doesn't sooner or later drown in the indigos of darkness, but now, for a while, the roughage shines like a miracle as it floats above everything with its yellow hair. Of course nothing stops the cold, black, curved blade from hooking forward--- of course loss is the great lesson. But also I say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it's done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive. Inside the bright fields, touched by their rough and spongy gold, I am washed and washed in the river of earthly delight--- and what are you going to do--- what can you do about it--- deep, blue night? Mary Oliver

What the heart has once known, it shall never forget. E.B. White

My childhood room: my bed, the curtained sky above the neighbor's roof; storm windows, square just-vacuumed carpet; dresser, desk, and chair; a life in drawers, preserved against the day I might require it. Home is where you stay-- where now I stay at Christmas every year, beside myself: boxed with the past, unsure what place is left my heart can verify. But worst: he stays here with me, out of sight, holding his secret expectations tight, turning his clear new mind to every whim-- games, insects, foreign coins, math, fairy tales . . . Or lies awake. And I know what he feels, there waiting, deceived, for me to happen to him. Greg Foster

The point is that rapport with the marvelously purposeless world of nature gives us new eyes for ourselves – eyes in which our very self-importance is not condemned, but seen as something quite other than what it imagines itself to be. In this light, all the weirdly abstract and pompous pursuits of men are suddenly transformed into natural marvels of the same order as the immense beaks of the toucans and hornbills, the fabulous tails of the birds of paradise, the towering necks of the giraffes, and the vividly polychromed posteriors of the baboons… Seen thus, the self-importance of man dissolves in laughter. Alan Watts

I always thought death would be like traveling in a car, moving through the desert, the earth a little darker than sky at the horizon, that your life would settle like the end of a day and you would think of everyone you ever met, that you would be the invisible passenger, quiet in the car, moving through the night, forever, with the beautiful thought of home. Carl Adamshick

Look, I really don’t want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you’re alive, you got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. Mel Brooks

I live in the little village of the present But lately I forget my neighbors’ names. More and more I spend my days in the City: The great metropolis where I can hope To glimpse great spirits as they cross the street Souls durable as the cockroach and the lungfish. When I was young, I lived in a different village. We had parades: the circus, the nearby fort. And Rabbi Gewirtz invented a game called “Baseball.” To reach first base you had to chant two lines Of Hebrew verse correctly. Mistakes were outs. One strike for every stammer or hesitation. We boys were thankful for the Rabbi’s grace, His balancing the immensity of words Written in letters of flame by God himself With our mere baseball, the little things we knew… Or do I remember wrong, did we boys think (There were no girls) that baseball was the City And that the language we were learning by rote— A little attention to meaning, now and then— Was small and local. The Major Leagu...

Faire et se taire. Flaubert (translation: Shut up and get on with it.)

for Jamie My boy is painting outer space, and steadies his brush-tip to trace the comets, planets, moon and sun and all the circuitry they run in one great heavenly design. But when he tries to close the line he draws around his upturned cup his hand shakes, and he screws it up. The shake’s as old as he is, all (thank god) his body can recall of that hour when, one inch from home, we couldn’t get the air to him; and though today he’s all the earth and sky for breathing-space and breath the whole damn troposphere can’t cure the flutter in his signature. But Jamie, nothing’s what we meant. The dream is taxed. We all resent the quarter bled off by the dark between the bowstring and the mark and trust to Krishna or to fate to keep our arrows halfway straight. But the target also draws our aim — our will and nature’s are the same; we are its living word, and not a book it wrote and then forgot, its fourteen-billion-year-ol...

Learning is a whole-hearted affair. John Dewey

Yes, the heart aches, but you know or think you know it could be    indigestion after all, the stomach uttering its after-lunch cantata    for clarinet and strings, while blank panic can be just a two-o'clock    shot of the fantods, before the afternoon comes on in toe-shoes    and black leotard, her back a pale gleaming board-game where all    is not lost though the hour is late and you've got light pockets. There is a port-hole of light at the end of the hemlock tunnel:    birds cross it, flashing their voices at you, and you feel— from the way they tilt their heads and their throats swell— the beat of their brief song, another sign the world is what it is:    a shade-tree heavy with households, its fruit for meat, its leaf    for medicine. But that business of the first kiss is hard to fathom: knees quaking, white water over broken rock, and the coracle    you trus...

The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own. William Empson

I Roads shouldered by enclosing walls with narrow cobbled tracks for streets, those hill towns with their stamp-sized squares and a sea pinned by the arrow of a quivering horizon, with names that never wither for centuries and shadows that are the dial of time. Light older than wine and a cloud like a tablecloth spread for lunch under the leaves. I have come this late to Italy, but better now, perhaps, than in youth that is never satisfied, whose joys are treacherous, while my hair rhymes with those far crests, and the bells of the hilltop towers number my errors, because we are never where we are, but somewhere else, even in Italy. This is the bearable truth of old age; but count your benedictions—those fields of sunflowers, the torn light on the hills, the haze of the unheard Adriatic—while the day still hopes for possibility, cloud shadows racing the slopes. II The blue windows, the lemon-colored counterpane, the knowing that the sea is beh...

Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind. Marston Bates

I remember picking up a fistful of sand, smooth crystals, like hourglass sand and throwing it into the eyes of a boy. Johnny or Danny or Kevin—he was not important. I was five and I knew he would cry. I remember everything about it— the sandbox in the corner of the room at Cinderella Day Care; Ms. Lee, who ran over after the boy wailed for his mother, her stern look as the words No snack formed on her lips. My hands with their gritty, half-mooned fingernails I hid in the pockets of my blue and white dress. How she found them and uncurled small sandy fists. There must have been such rage in me, to give such pain to another person. This afternoon, I saw a man pull a gold chain off the neck of a woman as she crossed the street. She cried out with a sound that bleached me. I walked on, unable to help, knowing that fire in childhood clenched deep in my pockets all the way home. January Gill O'Neil

Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count, and everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted. Albert Einstein

What a day: I had some trouble following the plotline; however, the special effects were incredible. Now this, the dreaming breathing body lying right beside my own, just think— at any given instant it might undergo a change so enormous that nothing is left of it but mere object, a thing to be taken away from me, never to be seen again, never. Franz Wright

Men shout to avoid listening to one another. Miguel de Unamuno

My friend spends all summer mending fence for the elk to blunder back down and the cows to drag the wires and the snow to sit and sag on, so all the twist and hammer and tauten and prop amounts at last to nought, knot, tangle. The next year he picks up his pliers and fixes the odds all over again. There are no grownups, and I think that all of us children know and play some variation on this theme, the game of all join hands so that someone can run them open. Then war whoops, shrieks, and laughter and regather together as if any arms might ever really hold. I’m trying to finger the source—pleasure of or need for—these enactments of resistance, if Resistance is indeed their name. I’m trying to walk the parallels to terminus— call them lickety-split over rickety bridge, tightrope, railroad tie, or plank as you see fit— trying to admit to seeing double, innumerable, to finding myself beset by myself on all sides, my hear...

The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility. Vaclav Havel

There are two ghosts in the house Ray Milland and his sister move into at the beginning of the movie. They don't know that, of course, and they're both skeptical when things start happening—the weeping before dawn, the room their dog won't go near, that elusive scent of mimosa. It's all pretty tame by today's standards, where you can count on somebody getting a spike through her head as soon as she's had sex with her boyfriend. But in 1944 there was time to be unsettled. There were good mothers and bad ones, and it took a while, as it does in this movie, to figure that out. At the end you looked back at your life and saw how the pieces fit together—why there was weeping, and what made it stop. So the past isn't over until you understand it, which is one of the reasons ghosts keep appearing. They need you to see who they were, and sometimes they won't rest until you forgive them. Lawrence Raab

It is my belief that the writer, the free-lance author, should be and must be a critic of the society in which he lives. It is easy enough, and always profitable, to rail away at national enemies beyond the sea, at foreign powers beyond our borders who question the prevailing order. But the moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home; to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own culture. If the writer is unwilling to fill this part, then the writer should abandon pretense and find another line of work: become a shoe repairman, a brain surgeon, a janitor, a cowboy, a nuclear physicist, a bus driver. Edward Abbey

Where an ash bush grows in the lake a ring of stones has broken cover in this summer's drought. Not high enough to be an island, it holds a disc of stiller water in the riffled lake. Trees have reclaimed the railway line behind us; behind that, the road goes east— as two lines parallel in space and time run away from us this discovered circle draws us in. In drowned towns bells toll only for sailors and for the credulous but this necklace of wet stones, remnant of a wattle Atlantis, catches us all by the throat. We don't know what beads or blades are held in the bog lake's wet amber but much of us longs to live in water and we recognise this surfacing of old homes of love and hurt. A troubled bit of us is kin to people who drew a circle in water, loaded boats with stone, and raised a dry island and a fort with a whole lake for a moat. Moya Cannon

To cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life. Samuel Johnson

I still believe in it, though I don't know who else does. I first experienced it in the building I have an office in now And called it poetry, but the word was just a placeholder For something undefined, though that's too simple a way to put it. You aspire to what you admire, whether you understand it Or not, and now that I've retired into it, I want to remain here In my home away from home, roaming without sadness Through the whole creation, through the long song of myself. Some days I wake up in a room suffused with sunlight "Like a yellow jelly bean," as Jimmy Schuyler put it In his great poem "Hymn to Life," but it's not that kind of day. There was a blizzard overnight, and everything's shut down, Including my seminar, and so instead of ruminating on that poem I'm fooling around with this one, and looking out the window at the snow. What is poetry anyway? It falls like snow, and settles where it falls, And m...

Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know. Groucho Marx

One clear night while the others slept, I climbed the stairs to the roof of the house and under a sky strewn with stars I gazed at the sea, at the spread of it, the rolling crests of it raked by the wind, becoming like bits of lace tossed in the air.  I stood in the long whispering night, waiting for something, a sign, the approach of a distant light, and I imagined you coming closer, the dark waves of your hair mingling with the sea, and the dark became desire, and desire the arriving light. The nearness, the momentary warmth of you as I stood on that lonely height watching the slow swells of the sea break on the shore and turn briefly into glass and disappear . . . Why did I believe you would come out of nowhere?  Why with all that the world offers would you come only because I was here? Mark Strand

People are never so ready to believe you as when you say things in dispraise of yourself; and you are never so much annoyed as when they take you at your word. Somerset Maugham

and pine. One can dismiss a whisper’s revelations and go on as before as if everything were perfectly fine. One does. One loses wonder among stores of things. One can even miss the basso boom of the ocean’s rumpus room and its rhythm. A man can leave this earth and take nothing —not even longing—along with him. Todd Boss

It is impossible to live pleasurably without living prudently and honorably and justly, and also without living courageously and temperately and magnanimously, and without making friends, and without being philanthropic. disciple of Epicurus quoted in New Yorker

Going too fast for myself I missed more than I think I can remember almost everything it seems sometimes and yet there are chances that come back that I did not notice when they stood where I could have reached out and touched them this morning the black shepherd dog still young looking up and saying Are you ready this time W. S. Merwin

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. Anatole France

The winter they abandoned Long Point Village — A dozen two-room house of pine frames clad With cedar faded to silver and, not much whiter Or larger, the one-room church—they hauled it all Down to the docks on sledges, and at high tide Boats towed the houses as hulks across the harbor And set them on the streets of Provincetown. Today they’re identified by blue tile plaques. Forgotten the fruitless village, in broken wholes Transported by a mad Yankee frugality Sweating resolve that pickled the sea-black timbers. The loathsome part of American Zen for me Is in the Parable of the Raft: a traveller Hacks it from driftwood tugged from the very current That wedged it into the mud, and lashed it With bitter roots he strips between his teeth. And after the raft has carried him across The torrent in his path, the teacher says, The traveller doesn’t lift the raft on his back And lug it with him on his journey: oh no, He leaves it there behind him, does...

Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this. Flaubert

The words reappear, slowly developing on a vast unknown but precise number of pages as I enter: the great building empty of visitors except for me, reading the minds of the dead— moving with exaggerated and slow-motion care, as when assigned to lead the blind kid to his classroom forty years ago, down rows between dusty volumes, a light snow beginning. Franz Wright

It seems to me that life in general is . . . one universal act of solitude. Daniel Defoe

You give me cloudberry jam from Lapland, Bog amber, snow-line tidbits, scrumptious Cloudberries sweetened slowly by the cold, And costly enough for cloudberry wars (Diplomatic wars, my dear).                                                Imagine us Among the harvesters, keeping our distance In sphagnum fields on the longest day When dawn and dusk like frustrated lovers Can kiss, legend has it, once a year.  Ah, Kisses at our age, cloudberry kisses. Michael Longley

No person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended. Alice Walker

What had seemed till recently as clear as day darkens now, beaten to violet breakers, whose troughs' deep indigos amaze all hands, befogging, separatist as ampersands or the dotted line land divides along. No bearings in this blue, no channel gong to hark us back from our wrong turn, no scenes of harbor, of islands wood-smoked and greening. Still, in light of all that we've remarked of sudden weather and the yellow stars, best to batten down, stand watch for signs of orange at evening, or a slackening in the lines, trusting that this time of red alert might ease its frequency, back in pacific seas. David Yezzi

It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought -- that is to be educated. Edith Hamilton

      The world of dew   is the world of dew.       And yet, and yet— Issa

I dare you all, test your strength.  Open a book. Chuck Jones

This morning, from under the floorboards of the room in which I write, Lawrence the handyman is singing the blues in a soft falsetto as he works, the words unclear, though surely one of them is  love , lugging its shadow of sadness into song. I don’t want to think about sadness; there’s never a lack of it. I want to sit quietly for a while and listen to my father making a joyful sound unto his mirror as he shaves—slap of razor against the strop, the familiar rasp of his voice singing his favorite hymn, but faint now, coming from so far back in time: Oh, come to the church in the wildwood  . . . my father, who had no faith, but loved how the long, ascending syllable of  wild echoed from the walls in celebration as the morning opened around him . . . as now it opens around me, the light shifting in the leaf-fall of the pear tree and across the bedraggled back-yard roses that I have been careless of but brighten the air, never...

Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties . . . . John Adams, Massachussetts constitution