N.B. This page does not pretend to be of interest to the world. But if you have stumbled on it - welcome! And peace be with you.
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but perceivest not the beam that is in thine own eye? - The New Testament, Matthew 7:3
I like a Highland friend who will stand by me, not only when I am in the right, but when I am a little in the wrong. - Sir Walter Scott
An artist is never poor. - Isak Dinesen (from the film Babette's Feast)
Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. - G. B. Shaw
If you would be a seeker after Truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. - Rene Descartes
I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move, to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting who can annoy himself about the future? - R. L. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey
[Animals] are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. - Henry Beston
We continue to recognize the greater ability of some to earn more than others. But we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him a proper security is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power. - F. D. Roosevelt
When we have a state in which no man is so rich that he can buy his neighbor, and none so poor that he must sell himself, we have present the fundamental condition of security. - H. J. Laski [But I think others, perhaps more well known, have said the same thing...?]
(Like Hamlet, Auguries of Innocence seems to be "all quotations." But here are a few selected lines that particularly strike me today as I update this page.)
A dog starved at his master's gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.
A horse misused upon the road
Calls to heaven for human blood.
...
Kill not the moth nor butterfly,
For the Last Judgment draweth nigh.
...
One mite wrung from the labourer's hands
Shall buy and sell the miser's lands....
I
shall walk down the road.
I shall turn and feel upon my feet
The kisses
of Death, like a scented rain,
For death is a black slave with little silver
birds
Perched in a sleeping wreath upon his head.
He will tell me, his
voice like jewels
Dropped into a satin bag,
How he has tiptoed after me
down the road,
His heart made a dark whirlpool with longing for me.
Then
he will graze me with his hands,
And I shall be one of the sleeping, silver
birds
Between the cold waves of his hair, as he tiptoes on.
(I would be interested in hearing any African American person's view of the "black slave" image. Well, I'd be interested in anyone's view of it - but particularly a black person's. Is this offensive? Death is not powerless. Death gets us all. If Death is a slave, who is the master? Why is the slave black? Is it just to add to the wonderful darkness of the poem?) (Oh, yeah - I don't publish an email address, thanks to all you SPAMMERS out there, so I won't be able to hear from anyone - and I shall just have to wonder about others' reactions to this poem until and unless I can brave the SPAM storm.)
Same question about Stephen Benet's "American Names."
So
we'll go no more a-roving So late into the night,
Though the heart be still
as loving, And the moon be still as bright.
For
the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul outwears the breast,
And the heart
must pause to breathe, And love itself have rest.
Though
the night was made for loving, And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go
no more a-roving By the light of the moon.
Ditto: too lazy to type the poem in at the moment, and unwilling to violate copyrights....
This is a piece I'm fond of, despite its political incorrectness. It was written at least 30 years ago by a schoolboy (my brother) who loved planes and trains and had an impressive knowledge of WWII technology despite his youth. His class was given an assignment to write a poem about Christmas. I have not corrected his spelling.
It was three weeks before Christmas
And all through the base
Not a pilot
was bragging
Not even the ace.
Five
B-17's
Were thought to come in
But nobody knew
What was about to begin.
And
all the men
Were snug in their beds
Before they heard the sargent
"Get out of there before I smash in your heads!"
Murphy,
McClusky,
Everyone was there
Until they heard someone
Cry in great
despair.
And
then someone yelled
"Pearl Harbor is being attacked!
Nobody is lying!
It's a positive true fact!"
And
while they were preying
"No more, no more,"
The Japanese were
really
Rolling the score.
And
while everything was going bad,
Even the guns were a failure
Then up went
a plane.
"Oh, hurrah for Taylor!"
He
went up there
On the run
And didn't come down
Till the job was done.
And
while he was up there
Something came to surprise.
Jolly Old Santa
Was up with those two guys.
He
yelled, "I've warned them
Several times before
But somehow they always
Come back for more!"
But
within a few minutes
Santa had to go away
Because a Jap put a bullet
Through his nice red sliegh.
(Now,
it 'twas the week of Christmas
And all through the class
We had to write
a poem.
Mine's done at last.)
Thomas Friedman - [OK, I need to add something here. But I want to be on record as a Friedman fan.]
Molly Ivins - ditto. We have lost a great mind and heart and sense of humor.
John Stuart Mill - ditto about needing to add some of his writing here.]
George Will - ditto about needing to add something here; I also want to show that I'm not completely partisan. (Hey, I even agree with Joe Soucheray a fair amount of the time!)
Fahreed Zakaria on conservatism, conservatives, David Frum, and nostalgia for the 1950's: [David Frum says that in the 1970's] "the country became far more dynamic and competitive [though] less loyal and egalitarian… more socially equal but less united and trusting… more honest and authentic but less polite and considerate…. [Frum] recognizes that the nostalgia for the 50's is misplaced [because] the middle decades of the 20th century were an entirely anomalous period in American history. Never had the state been so strong, never had people submitted as uncomplainingly, never had the country been more economically equal, never had it been more ethnically homogeneous, seldom was its political consensus more overpowering. You can see now why people might pine for those days. But would they pine for them if they remembered that the top rate of federal income tax was 90 percent? Or that the Attorney General could wiretap anybody he wanted to? And that to ship a crate of lettuce across the country, a trucker needed permission from a federal regulatory agency?… [And, commenting on a Robert Dole speech about how great Kansas used to be] Really? Kansas in the 1950's? Where most women couldn't have careers, minorities were treated as second-class citizens…? I'll take Gomorrah, thank you…." New Yorker, June 5, 2000
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Updated June 2007