“When the whole world is running headlong towards the precipice, one who walks in the opposite direction is looked at as being crazy.”
“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on — because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.”
“There are stories, like maps that agree... too consistent among too many languages and histories to be only wishful thinking.... It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything. “
-Thomas Pynchon
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer."
-Albert Camus
“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”
“I went into the desert only at the darkest moment of the night, when the sun was farthest below the world. I came to a place where no light shone any longer, and there I found the beginning of the way. And so, when I endured all the darkness and the terror, and the innermost fortresses of my soul were broken into, I saw the lowest and the darkest, and it was beyond hope and fear. Then suddenly the sun was there, rising brilliantly.”
Wait for me and I’ll return,Only wait very hard. Wait as you’re filled with sorrow as you watch the yellow rain. Wait as the wind sweeps the snowdrift. Wait in the sweltering heat. Wait when others have stopped waiting,Forgetting their yesteryears. Wait even when from afar no letters come to you. Wait even when others are tired of waiting. Wait even when my family think I am no more,And when friends sit around the fire drinking to my memory. Wait, and do not hurry to drink to my memory too. Wait –for I’ll return. Defying every death,And let those who do not wait say that I was lucky. They will never understand that in the midst of death,You, with your waiting, saved me. Only you and I will know how I survived–Because you waited as no one else would. “In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.”
Calm. Kindness, kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace, I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion: I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down, there was no longer any ground beneath my feet.
What is... what is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life, to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. No, the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror, or an audience, or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice?Everything.
And while the frontiers are ever-expanding
Our living rooms fall into disarray
And no one seems interested in fixing what they've broken
They just sweep the pieces into the bushes and slip away
“It’s very, very difficult to dispel ignorance, if you retain arrogance.”
“People will bring flowers to your funeral but won’t bring you soup when you’re sick.”
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
Oh, the torment bred in the race,
The grinding scream of death
And the stroke that hits the vein,
The hemorrhage none can staunch, the grief,
The curse no man can bear.
But there is a cure in the house, And not outside it, no,
Not from others but from them,
Their bloody strife. We sing to you,
Dark gods beneath the earth.
Now hear, you blissful powers underground –
Answer the call, send help.
Bless the children, give them triumph now.
(Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers)
A nuclear reactor power plant that harnesses not any strange harmful energy,
But rather the energy of the sun. Of daisies. Of golden marbles.
Filled up past the brim. Behind me, there is a rainbow.
The nuclear reactor that I am harnesses the power of the rainbow.
Capturing a whole spectrum of colour and light.
This is how she makes me feel.
Like a great, grey, stone tall tower rising up out of the ocean.
From my room at the top of that tower I watch the world.
There is nothing but ocean for so far.
From up here, the ocean looks like it is the biggest thing in the universe.
From up here, it is the universe.
From my window, sitting atop the top of the universe,
Watching its waves of water move in unison together,
I feel like maybe I am bigger.
This is how she makes me feel.
Like I was seventeen, running in slow motion through a field lit with light.
Particles of dust moving through the air, the sun burning their bodies.
Perhaps it is dust. Perhaps it is magic dust.
Perhaps this magical dust is what I am made from.
I open my eyes and everything I see floats.
I am on a boat. It is night.
The world has calmed itself just to hold me inside all that is dark,
Just to rock me gently.
This is how she makes me feel.
The subway chambers of Moscow. I am vaulted.
I have giant chandeliers hanging from my underground ceilings.
I glow with so much light. I am a ballroom for the trains of Russia.
If you happen to be a child that has climbed down my steps to yell into my body,
Those echoes will bounce their way across those vaulted underground ceilings.
This happens all the time.
My dark tunnels are filled with these sounds.
This is how she makes me feel.
Like I will live forever. Like there is nothing that can possibly harm me.
Like this body will somehow stay so young, so perfect.
There are cities growing inside my chest.
The cities all look like New York in the fifties.
Every building is tall enough to touch a cloud.
Every automobile is a convertible.
All the men wear hats and neckties.
The women all have beautiful shapes of colour upon them.
Someone has saved a baby. There is a parade.
Someone has saved every baby – there is the biggest parade moving through my streets.
The sky explodes with ticker tape, strangers kiss on every corner.
Their kisses are what make me live forever.
This is how she makes me feel.
Like honey and trombones. Like honey and trombones
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.
However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.
It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general’s head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.
And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.
It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.
I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.
I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman’s tea cup.
But don’t worry, I’m not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and–somehow–the wine.