a shandean commonplace book

Daylight illuminated, but only for those who had some knowing in their seeing, and night fell for everyone, but harder for some. A belief in happiness bred despair, though despair could be assuaged by belief, which required faith, which made those who had it one-eyed amid the beautiful contraries. Love at noon that was still love at dusk meant doubt had been subjugated for exactly that long, and best to have music to sweeten a sadness, underscore joy. Those alone spoke to their dogs, but also to plants, to the brilliant agreeableness of air, while those together were left to address the wall or open door of each other. Oh for logs in the fireplace and a winter storm, some said. Oh for Scotch and a sitcom, said others. Daylight concealed, but only for those fond of the enormous puzzle, and night rose up earth to sky, pagan and unknowable. How we saw it was how it was. Stephen Dunn

When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it. Lois McMaster Bujold, Memory

One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. Wallace Stevens

He who loves reading has everything within his reach.                        William Godwin

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. --Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. Elizabeth Bishop

may have killed the cat; more likely the cat was just unlucky, or else curious to see what death was like, having no cause to go on licking paws, or fathering litter on litter of kittens, predictably. Nevertheless, to be curious is dangerous enough. To distrust what is always said, what seems, to ask old questions, interfere in dreams, leave home, smell rats, have hunches do not endear cats to those doggy circles where well-smelt baskets, suitable wives, good lunches are the order of things, and where prevails much wagging of incurious heads and tails. Face it. Curiosity will not cause us to die -- only lack of it will. Never to want to see the other side of the hill or that improbable country where living is an idyll (although a probable hell) would kill us all. Only the curious have, if they live, a tale worth telling at all. Dogs say cats love too much, are irresponsible, are changeable, marry too many wives, desert thei

At the hour when the moon appears in the city and the wide avenues slowly fill with its light then the night swells with bronze and sadness, time the barbarian smashes the wax songs, then the cuckoo counts her griefs on the stone tower and the pale woman with the sickle steps down through the dead, scattering straw on the board floor, rolling huge spokes of shadow slowly across it. Osip Mandelstam

The light in the eyes has dimmed, The smile at the corner of the mouth has been extinguished. But the day isn't dark, People go by in the streets, laughing merrily. How good that everything is thus appointed That I may disappear from the flock while no one's taking heed. Nothing happens in this world Except matters of substance, bathed In indifference. [30 November 1996] Marin Sorescu

When Verdi lay dying, the Milanese scattered straw for blocks around his house to muffle the clatter of horses so the Maestro could easily cede his breath, piano, no more fuss than that. Someone reading across the room looked up: the silence had gone slack.  Soon enough, as I thought when my father was first dead, the consolations will begin.  Time now to spurn all balms, to hold up like a glass of wine (Libiamo!) the malice I hoarded, the blessings I held in my mouth like spit, the spite I burned for fuel. Who snarls across the stage with a drawn sword; who gives and then defiles his or her word, unless it’s me, or you?  And we can’t use it, ever, what we didn’t spend. Now consolations means something. And so three massed choirs poise to sing Va, pensiero in February, 1901. Their visible, blobbed breath rose like a ghost above the flower-barnacled coffin. Fly, thought, the hymn begins, and like a falcon thought goes, and like a

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead. James Baldwin

 The eager note on my door said, "Call me, call when you get in!" so I quickly threw a few tangerines into my overnight bag, straightened my eyelids and shoulders, and headed straight for the door. It was autumn by the time I got around the corner, oh all unwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk! Funny, I thought, that the lights are on this late and the hall door open; still up at this hour, a champion jai-alai player like himself? Oh fie! for shame! What a host, so zealous! And he was there in the hall, flat on a sheet of blood that ran down the stairs. I did appreciate it. There are few hosts who so thoroughly prepare to greet a guest only casually invited, and that several months ago. Frank O'Hara

Love works its miracles in stillness. Herbert Read

Your absence has gone through me Like a thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color. W. S. Merwin

The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange. G.K. Chesterton

If endlessness offered itself to me today I don’t think I’d have done anything differently.  I was looking out the car window at the unlikely needlepoint wild asters made of an October slope, blue starry heads heaped upon each other, too wet and heavy with their own completion to stand. I didn’t even stop, but that brief yellow-eyed punctuation in a field gone violet and golden at once, sudden and gone, is more than I can say. There’s simply no way to get it right, and it was just one thing.  Holsteins, a little down the road, paraded toward the evening’s expected comforts; two cats in the long grass observed.  By a rowboat-sized pond one slanting ram floated on the thinnest legs. There were geese.  There were: the day’s narration is simple assertion; it’s enough to name the instances. Don’t let anybody tell you death’s the price exacted for the ability to love; couldn’t we live forever without running out of oc

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people. Isaac Newton

I think about the past. I empty the ice-cube trays crack crack cracking like bones, and I think of decades of ice cubes and of John Cheever, of Anne Sexton making cocktails, of decades of cocktail parties, and it feels suddenly far too lonely at my counter. Although I have on hooks nearby the embroidered apron of my friend's grandmother and one my mother made for me for Christmas 30 years ago with gingham I had coveted through my childhood. In my kitchen I wield my great aunt's sturdy black-handled soup ladle and spatula, and when I pull out the drawer, like one in a morgue, I visit the silverware of my husband's grandparents. We never met, but I place this in my mouth every day and keep it polished out of duty. In the cabinets I find my godmother's teapot, my mother's Cambridge glass goblets, my mother-in-law's Franciscan plates, and here is the cutting board my first husband parqueted and two potholders I wove in grade

Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night’s sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too. Lemony Snicket

In the little house filled with dogs and resilient plants She left only a glass and a blank sheet of paper. The stadium up the road like a siren called with silent applause To climb up, climb beyond the seats and the grass Where a team of young girls kicked a white ball. Maybe she knew they were there, maybe she was calling back A line a male poet committed to the page decades ago, About time made simple by the loss of detail. Maybe she then cast out every detail but the unencumbered air To keep it simple.  And then fluttered from us. Daniel Halpern

However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light. Stanley Kubrick

What you did wasn’t so bad. You stood in a small room, waiting for the sun. At least you told yourself that. I know it was small, but there was something, a kind of pulped lemon, at the low edge of the sky. No, you’re right, it was terrible. Terrible to live without love in small rooms with vinyl blinds listening to music secretly, the secret music of one’s head which can’t be shared. A dream is the only way to breathe. But you must find a more useful way to live. I suppose you’re right this was a failure: to stand there so still, waiting for — what? When I think about this life, the life you led, I think of England, of secret gardens that never open, and novels sliding off the bed at night where the small handkerchief of darkness settles over one’s face. Meghan O’Rourke

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. John Milton

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear, the frantic automatic weapons unleashed, the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands, that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek bottom dry to suck the deadly water up into your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to say, Don’t die . Even when silvery fish after fish comes back belly up, and the country plummets into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still something singing? The truth is: I don’t know. But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move my living limbs into the world without too much pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight toward the pickup trucks break-necking down the road, because she thinks she loves them, because she’s sure, without a doubt, that th

We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over. Ray Bradbury

It's a gift, this cloudless November morning warm enough for you to walk without a jacket along your favorite path. The rhythmic shushing of your feet through fallen leaves should be enough to quiet the mind, so it surprises you when you catch yourself telling off your boss for a decade of accumulated injustices, all the things you've never said circling inside you. It's the rising wind that pulls you out of it, and you look up to see a cloud of leaves swirling in sunlight, flickering against the blue and rising above the treetops, as if the whole day were sighing,  Let it go, let it go, for this moment at least, let it all go. Jeffrey Harrison

The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life, then, is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in. Northrop Frye

The country is ruined, yet the mountains and rivers remain. In the city in spring, the grass and trees grow dense and wild. In this sorrowful time, the flowers are wet with tears. Amid our terrible scattering, the birds startle my heart. The war-fires have burned for three months. Any word from home is worth ten thousand coins. I have worn thin my short white wisps with scratching. Soon they will no longer hold my hairpin. Du Fu (712–770) trans. Kathleen Graber

Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching. From a translation of an inscription on an Assyrian clay tablet, circa 2800 B.C.E

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read to the end just to find out who killed the cook. Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark, in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication. Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot, the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones that crimped your toes, don’t regret those. Not the nights you called god names and cursed your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch, chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness. You were meant to inhale those smoky nights over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches. You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still you end up here. Regret none of it, not one of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing, when the lights from the carnival rides were the only stars you believed in, lov

The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading. In order to write a man will turn over half a library to make one book. Samuel Johnson