a shandean commonplace book

A man eats a chicken every day for lunch, and each day the ghost of another chicken joins the crowd in the dining room. If he could only see them! Hundreds and hundreds of spiritual chickens, sitting on chairs, tables, covering the floor, jammed shoulder to shoulder. At last there is no more space and one of the chickens is popped back across the spiritual plane to the earthly. The man is in the process of picking his teeth. Suddenly there's a chicken at the end of the table, strutting back and forth, not looking at the man but knowing he is there, as is the way with chickens. The man makes a grab for the chicken but his hand passes right through her. He tries to hit the chicken with a chair and the chair passes though her. He calls in his wife but she can see nothing. This is his own private chicken, even if he fails to recognize her. How is he to know this is a chicken he ate seven years ago, on a hot and steamy Wednesday in July, with a little tarragon...

Our capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful Survives, unlike beauty Amid the harshest distractions. James Longenbach

All you have to do is listen to the way a man sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people and notice how intent he is on making his point even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver, and you will know why the women in science fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine when the men from earth arrive in their rocket, why they are always standing in a semicircle with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart, their breasts protected by hard metal disks. Billy Collins

A too great disproportion among the citizens weakens any state. Every person, if possible, ought to enjoy the fruits of his labor, in a full possession of all the necessaries, and many of the conveniences of life.                        David Hume

You weren't well or really ill yet either, just a little tired, your handsomeness tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace. I didn't for a moment doubt you were dead. I knew that to be true still, even in the dream. You'd been out — at work maybe? — having a good day, almost energetic. We seemed to be moving from some old house where we'd lived, boxes everywhere, things in disarray: that was the *story* of my dream, but even asleep I was shocked out of narrative by your face, the physical fact of your face: inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert. Why so difficult, remembering the actual look of you? Without a photograph, without strain? So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face, your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth and clarity of you -- warm brown tea -- we held each other for the time the dream allowed. Bless you. You came back, so I could see you once more, plainly, so I c...

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis of Education”

We can talk to one another on telephones   in banks, in cars, in line. No more sitting on the floor attached to a cord while everybody listens. No more standing outside the booth in the cold, fingering an adulterous dime. We send each other mail without stamps. Watch television without antennas. Wear seatbelts, smoke less, and never on a bus, never in the lobby while we're waiting for the lawyer to call on us. Nowhere now, a typewriter ribbon. Quaintly the record album's scratch and spin. Our groceries, scanned. Pump our own gas. Take off our shoes before boarding our plane. Those towers: Gone. And Pluto's no longer a planet: Forget it. I could go on and on, but you're still dead and nothing's any different. Laura Kasischke

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.                        William Faulkner

It's hard to imagine how unremembered we all become, How quickly all that we've done Is unremembered and unforgiven, how quickly Bog lilies and yellow clover flashlight our footfalls, How quickly and finally the landscape subsumes us, And everything that we are becomes what we are not. This is not new, the orange finch And the yellow-and-dun finch picking the dry clay politely, The grasses asleep in their green slips Before the noon can roust them, The sweet oblivion of the everyday like a warm waistcoat Over the cold and endless body of memory. Cloud-scarce Montana morning. July, with its blue cheeks puffed out like a putto on an ancient map, Huffing the wind down from the northwest corner of things, Tweets on the evergreen stumps, swallows treading the air, The ravens hawking from tree to tree, not you, not you, Is all that the world allows, and all one could wish for. Charles Wright

Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts. Leo Rosten

As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: 'Love has no ending. 'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street, 'I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky. 'The years shall run like rabbits, For in my arms I hold The Flower of the Ages, And the first love of the world.' But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime: 'O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time. 'In the burrows of the Nightmare Where Justice naked is, Time watches from the shadow And coughs when you would kiss. 'In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or to-...

Real education should consist of drawing the goodness and the best out of our own students. What better books can there be than the book of humanity?                        Cesar Chavez

They don't love what live things do, not the blue drain of veins, not the swell of lungs, certainly not the slide of balls in sockets, that slick organic superiority. All this time, they've been eyeing our particular kind of flexibility as they go on drilling and driving piles, wondering at our lack of sensitivity. Look at the belly of a jet sometime and see how thin, how far, the skin's been stretched, look at a crane's bent arm, hold in your hand the cripple of a stripped screw. None of these things know what to do. No matter what they say, banging their anger, sighing with that high whine, shrieking fatigue, all we hear is noise, all we see is something serving. The occasional accident we put down to human error, while all the while they stare back smiling from the wreckage, knowing what we made them for. Caroline Fraser

People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced. Samuel Butler

In the first verse I find his skeleton nested in shore grass, late one autumn day. The loss of life and the life which is decay have been so gentle, so clasped one-to-one that what they left is perfect; and here in the second verse I kneel to pick it up: bones like the fine white china of a cup, chambered for lightness, dangerously thin, their one clear purpose forcing them toward flight even now, from the warm solace of my hand. In the third verse I bend to that demand and -- quickly, against the deepening of night, because I can in poems -- remake his wild eye, his claws, and the tense heat his muscles keep, his wings' knit feathers, then free him to his steep climb, in the last verse, up the streaming sky. Jonathan Revere

Each act of tenderness amends the violence of history. Toi Derricote

It was a year in which sadness fulfilled the Socialist ideal and was given to everyone. Of little there is never shortage. The news featured our neighbors, as if agony lacked a local representative, and friends came over in all their casualty with pictures of sadness in billfolds beside their babes. Meanwhile our mothers tried sorrow on for size, like a casket, and I who might have had your new year's child, gave birth to blood. A hoard of emotion opened, gradual as shrapnel, the wall grieved down my thighs and still born in the drench -- after such sadness what resolution? -- the beginning. Christina Davis

Nothing can make our lives, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.                        Leo Tolstoy

They're feeding each other, two small birds swiveling on a sea-stone, open beaks kissing and closing—creatures seeing to each other's needs without question, drawing the big world into their brief circle of wing-quiver, heart-shiver, quick cries as if the nerves themselves gave tongue, the path between desire and satisfaction shorter than thought, the ground dividing being from being—one flesh-protected spark of life from another—covered in no time, so even time, for the moment, is a matter of no moment, smoke that vanishes into air, into thin air, to leave but a flaring thing behind—candescent, burning its one good instant till all is ash, redemptive breath recovering itself, eyes seeking in eyes an answer to what's happened. The fire at the heart of things is what these two birds ignite in their give and take, saying we live in the one world—where some law of loving exchange is what tends the blaze and can startle us into a kind of intermission o...

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and, if it were possible, speak a few reasonable words.                        Goethe

The lowest trees have topps, the ante her gall, The flie her spleene, the little sparke his heat: The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small, And bees have stinges, although they be not great; Seas have their sourse, and soe have shallow springes: And Love is Love, in beggars and in Kinges. Wher waters smothest ronne, ther deepest are the foords, The diall stirrs, yet none perceives it move; The firmest fayth is found in fewest woordes, The turtles doe not singe, and yet they love; True heartes have ears and eyes, no tongues to speake: They heare and see, and sigh, and then they breake. Sir Edward Dyer (c. 1540-1607)

“Pain or damage don't end the world. Or despair or fucking beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store.”                       Al Swearengen, in Deadwood

I love to see the old heath's withered brake Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling While the old heron from the lonely lake Starts slow and flaps his melancholy wing And oddling crow in idle motions swing On the half-rotten ash tree's topmost twig Beside whose trunk the gypsy makes his bed - Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread; The fieldfare chatters in the whistling thorn And for the 'awe round fields and closen rove, And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain And hang on little twigs and start again. John Clare