Peace. Temporary peace. False peace. But it's peace after all. Illusionary because peace doesn't exist in this part of the world. Illusionary yet beautiful. And beauty is what I feed on.
Evanescene. However slight as it seems, it's real, to me.
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Glide.
Cold. Below 10 degrees perhaps. I knew it wouldn't let me down. I knew it would lift my mood, like tender breeze to feathers. Wings of smoke. What I didn't know, or noticed before, was how smooth, easy, consoling the way the smoke entered and exit my lungs of air. No more scratching. Thorns blunt down. Tranqulity came two breaths late. On the third, the familiar lightness dominated. Late yet more pleasant. Pleasant just as the way it was supposed to be with pleasure. Climax came after passionate foreplay.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Impression: The Liar by Stephen Fry
His love life, however, was less happy. Earlier that afternoon he had worshipped at his alter of a private welter of misery that his public swagger never hinted at.
It had been upstairs, in the Long Dorm. The room was empty, the floorboards squeaking more faintly than usual beneath his tread. Cartwright's cubicle had its curtain drawn. The distant moan of whistles and cheers on the Upper Games Field and the nearer bang of a downstairs door slamming shit had unsettled him. They were over-familiar, with a bogus, echoing quality, a staginess that put him on his guard. The while school knew he was here. They knew he liked to creep about the House alone. They were watching, he was convinced of it. The background shouts of rugger and hockey weren't real, they were part of a taped soundtrack played to deceive him. He was walking into a trap. It had always been a trap. No one had ever believed in him. They signed him off games and let him think that he had the House to himself. But they knew, they had always known. Tom, Bullock, Heydon-Baley, even Cartwright. Especially Cartwright. They watched and they waited. They all knew and they all bided their time until the moment they had chosen for his exposure and disgrace.
For Adrian other people did not exist except as extras, as bit-players in the film of his life. No one but he had noted the splendour and agony of existence, no one else was truly of fully alive. He alone gasped at dew trapped in cobwebs, at spring buds squeaking into life. Afternoon light bouncing like a yo-yo in a stream of spittle dropping form a cow's lips, the slum-wallpaper peel of bark on birches, the mash of wet leaves pulped into pavements, they grew and burst only in him. Only he knew what it was to love.
Adrian trembled as he stood and did himself up. It was an illusion. Of course it was an illusion. No one watched, no one judged, no one pointed or whispered. Who were they, after all? Low-browed, scarlet-naped rugger-buggers with no more grace and vision than a jockstrap.
If you can't join them, he thought, beat them.
(p.g 11)
He wasn't sure if it was better to be a rotten potato or a healthy one, whether he would rather be safely bunched up in a warm bag with the goody-goodies or be thrown over the side and ploughed back into the soil. One thing was certain, either of those fates was preferable to being God.
The green potatoes were especially interesting...
This immediately made Adrian think that he was a green potato and Cartwright was the sun.
I have been kissed by the light and transformed, he thought. I am dangerous and God has rejected me.
He was always doing that these days. Everything he saw became a symbol of his own existence, from a rabbit caught in headlights to raindrops racing down a window-pane. Perhaps it was a sign that he was going to become a poet or philosopher: the kind of person who, when he stood on the sea-shore, didn't see waves breaking on a beach, but saw the surge of human will or the rhythms of copulation, who didn't hear the sound of the tide but heard the eroding roar of time and the last moaning sigh of humanity fizzing into nothingness. But perhaps it was a sign, he also thought, that he was turning into a pretentious wanker. (p.g 68)
But when boys say that they would rather be drummers than barristers, gardeners than businessmen, poets than soldiers, that they don't think much of examinations and authority and marriage, that when they are of age they intend to remake the world to fit them, not remake themselves to fit the world, then there is Trouble.
Someone once said that Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man and Communism is the exact reverse. I expect most of us agree with that. I don't know any schoolboy Communists, but I do know hundreds of schoolboys revolutionaries. \
We are always asked to show respect. Well, we can show respect with the best of them, what we find it hard to do is to feel respect. (p.g 71)
But for all the sensational impact of the magazine, Adrian felt somehow a sense of anti-climax. His article would never make a shred of difference to anything. He hadn't exactly expected open warfare in the form-rooms, but it was depressing to realise that if he and Bullock and the others were exposed tomorrow they would be expelled, talked about for a while and then completely forgotten. Boys are cowardly and conventional. That's why the system worked, he supposed.
He sensed too that if he came across the article in later life, as a twenty-year-old, he would shudder with embarrassment at the pretension of it. But why should his future self sneer at what he was now? It was terrible to know that time would lead him to betray everything he now believed in.
What I am now is RIGHT, he told himself. I will never see things as clearly again, I will never understand everything as fully as I do at this minute.
The world would never change if people got sucked into it.
He was one of a long line of mimsy and embittered middle-class sensitives who disguised their feeble and decadent lust as something spiritual and Socratic.
And why not? If it meant he had to end his days on some Mediterranean island writing lyric prose for Faber and Faber and literary criticism for the New Statesman, running through successions of houseboys and "secretaries", getting sloshed on Fernet Branca and having to pay off the Chief of Police every six months, then so be it. Better than driving to the office in the rain.
In a temper, he took out a large Bible, opened it at random and wrote "Irony" down the margin in red biro. In the fly-leaf he scribbled anagrams of his name. Air and an arid nadir, a drain, a radian.
(p.g 78)
"Desperate times call for desperate measures, so pour us each one desperate measure." (p.g 154)
"What I have just described is the way the world works! It's not a conspiracy. It is called Modern Western Civilisation."
"Of course the best brains are lured into industry, advertising, journalism and the rest of it. Of course universities are adapting to the demands of commerce. It's regrettable and there's little we can do about it. But I think only a Marxist would call it an international conspiracy." (p.g166)
He knew he could never jingle change in his pocket or park his car like a confident adult, he was the Adrian he had always been, casting a guilty look over a furtive shoulder, living in eternal dread of a grown-up striding forward to clip his ear.
But there again, when he sipped at the whisky his eyes failed to water and his throat forgot to burn. The body shamelessly welcomed what once it would have rejected. (200)
The ground was in a kind of valley, with the looming Gothic of Narborough Hall on one side and the church and village of Narborough on another. The pavilion was whitewashed and thatched, the weather perfect with only the faintest of breezes luffing the fielders' shirtsleeves. The grim seriousness of the children preparing to play, the detached amusement of Hugo at square leg, the church clock chiming mid-day, the round circles of fine gang-mown cuttings in the outfield, the sun winking off the roller by the sight-screen, the distant clatter of spiked shoes on the pavilion concrete, the open blue of the wide Norfolk sky, the six pebbles in the hand of Adrian's outstretched arm, this whole monstrous illusion froze, while to Adrian the world seemed to hold its breath as if uncertain that such a picture could last. This fantasy of England that old men took with them to their death-beds, this England without factories and sewers of council houses, this England of leather and wood and flannel, this England circumscribed by a white boundary and laws that said that each team shall field eleven men and each man shall bat, this England of shooting-sticks, weather-vanes and rectory teas, it was like Cartwright's beauty, he thought, a momentary vision glimpsed for a second in an adolescent dream, then dispersed like steam into the real atmosphere of traffic-jams, serial murderers, prime ministers and Soho rent. But its spectral haze was sharper and clearer than the glare of the everyday and, against all evidence, was taken to be the only reality, its vapour trapped and distilled in the mind, its image, scents and textures bottled and laid down against the long, lonely melancholy of adulthood. (211)
'Questions of free will certainly do seem to arise. It is perfectly possible to live a life from cradle to grave that is entirely dishonest. One might never reveal one's true identity, the yearnings and cravings of one's innermost self, even to the most intimate circle of family and friends; never really speak the truth to anyone. Priests and psychotherapists may believe that the confessional-box or the analysis session reveals truths, but you know that I know and every human being knows that we lie all the time to all the world. Lying is as much as a part of us as wearing clothes. Indeed, Man's first act in Eden was to give names to everything on earth, our first act of possession and falsehood was to take away a stone's right to be a stone by imprisoning it with the name "stone". There are in reality, as Fenellosa said, no nouns in the Universe. Man's next great act was to cover himself up. We have been doing so ever since. We feel that our true identities shame us. Lying is a deep part of us. To take it away is to make us something less than, not more than, human." (232)
"I cannot decide whether or not you have grown up yet. What is this fantasy world that men inhabit? I don't think there is anything so wonderful about hard-nosed realism or remorseless cynicism, but why must you always revert to type? Have you already become an irretrievable "Enemy of Promise"? I was rereading it the other day. What is that final phrase about all Englishmen...that they become "Cowardly, sentimental and in the last analysis homosexual"? It was written fifty years ago for God's sake! It can't be still true can it - after a world war, a social revolution, rock and roll and all the rest?
'"I was so in love with you last year. I believed we were the most remarkable couple anywhere. All my friends thought I had it made, that's a terrible phrase I know, but you know what I mean. I don't think you quite believe that women exist. To you they're a kind of difficult boy with surplus flesh in some places and missing flesh in others. I'm not even sure if you ever enjoyed my company, but then I don't know if you ever enjoyed anyone else's either, including your own. I know you hate amateur psychology but there it is.
"Little girls grow up to be women, little boys grow up to be little boys." I can't believe that our generation is growing up to fulfill all the ridiculous stereotypes. So I'll become an earthy mother and you will loll in front of the television watching cricket and Clint, is that it? Then why the years of education? Why a youth at all? Why read books and try to puzzle things out if it all ends in the same way?
"To you and your kind your youth and upbringing take on this great mystique, the quality of myth. The first twenty years of my life are an open book, school and home, home and school, some friends here, some friends there. To you they are the backdrop to a gigantic world of fantasy to which you have endlessly to return. "Dearest creature, you do not understand..." I hear you say, as generations of men have always whined to their women. But it is the point! I do not understand. Nor, even if you had more persuasive powers of exposition than you already do, could you ever make me understand. Because there is nothing to understand. That is what you have to understand. You grew up, you went to this school and that one, you made these friends and those. It was nothing. The future is a much bigger deal than the past, Adrian, a much bigger deal. Not just because it has babies in it, but because there are better people in it, who are better behaved and more fun to be with; the scenery is better, the weather is better, the rewards and thrills are better. But I really am not sure that you will ever..." (271)
It had been upstairs, in the Long Dorm. The room was empty, the floorboards squeaking more faintly than usual beneath his tread. Cartwright's cubicle had its curtain drawn. The distant moan of whistles and cheers on the Upper Games Field and the nearer bang of a downstairs door slamming shit had unsettled him. They were over-familiar, with a bogus, echoing quality, a staginess that put him on his guard. The while school knew he was here. They knew he liked to creep about the House alone. They were watching, he was convinced of it. The background shouts of rugger and hockey weren't real, they were part of a taped soundtrack played to deceive him. He was walking into a trap. It had always been a trap. No one had ever believed in him. They signed him off games and let him think that he had the House to himself. But they knew, they had always known. Tom, Bullock, Heydon-Baley, even Cartwright. Especially Cartwright. They watched and they waited. They all knew and they all bided their time until the moment they had chosen for his exposure and disgrace.
For Adrian other people did not exist except as extras, as bit-players in the film of his life. No one but he had noted the splendour and agony of existence, no one else was truly of fully alive. He alone gasped at dew trapped in cobwebs, at spring buds squeaking into life. Afternoon light bouncing like a yo-yo in a stream of spittle dropping form a cow's lips, the slum-wallpaper peel of bark on birches, the mash of wet leaves pulped into pavements, they grew and burst only in him. Only he knew what it was to love.
Adrian trembled as he stood and did himself up. It was an illusion. Of course it was an illusion. No one watched, no one judged, no one pointed or whispered. Who were they, after all? Low-browed, scarlet-naped rugger-buggers with no more grace and vision than a jockstrap.
If you can't join them, he thought, beat them.
(p.g 11)
He wasn't sure if it was better to be a rotten potato or a healthy one, whether he would rather be safely bunched up in a warm bag with the goody-goodies or be thrown over the side and ploughed back into the soil. One thing was certain, either of those fates was preferable to being God.
The green potatoes were especially interesting...
This immediately made Adrian think that he was a green potato and Cartwright was the sun.
I have been kissed by the light and transformed, he thought. I am dangerous and God has rejected me.
He was always doing that these days. Everything he saw became a symbol of his own existence, from a rabbit caught in headlights to raindrops racing down a window-pane. Perhaps it was a sign that he was going to become a poet or philosopher: the kind of person who, when he stood on the sea-shore, didn't see waves breaking on a beach, but saw the surge of human will or the rhythms of copulation, who didn't hear the sound of the tide but heard the eroding roar of time and the last moaning sigh of humanity fizzing into nothingness. But perhaps it was a sign, he also thought, that he was turning into a pretentious wanker. (p.g 68)
But when boys say that they would rather be drummers than barristers, gardeners than businessmen, poets than soldiers, that they don't think much of examinations and authority and marriage, that when they are of age they intend to remake the world to fit them, not remake themselves to fit the world, then there is Trouble.
Someone once said that Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man and Communism is the exact reverse. I expect most of us agree with that. I don't know any schoolboy Communists, but I do know hundreds of schoolboys revolutionaries. \
We are always asked to show respect. Well, we can show respect with the best of them, what we find it hard to do is to feel respect. (p.g 71)
But for all the sensational impact of the magazine, Adrian felt somehow a sense of anti-climax. His article would never make a shred of difference to anything. He hadn't exactly expected open warfare in the form-rooms, but it was depressing to realise that if he and Bullock and the others were exposed tomorrow they would be expelled, talked about for a while and then completely forgotten. Boys are cowardly and conventional. That's why the system worked, he supposed.
He sensed too that if he came across the article in later life, as a twenty-year-old, he would shudder with embarrassment at the pretension of it. But why should his future self sneer at what he was now? It was terrible to know that time would lead him to betray everything he now believed in.
What I am now is RIGHT, he told himself. I will never see things as clearly again, I will never understand everything as fully as I do at this minute.
The world would never change if people got sucked into it.
He was one of a long line of mimsy and embittered middle-class sensitives who disguised their feeble and decadent lust as something spiritual and Socratic.
And why not? If it meant he had to end his days on some Mediterranean island writing lyric prose for Faber and Faber and literary criticism for the New Statesman, running through successions of houseboys and "secretaries", getting sloshed on Fernet Branca and having to pay off the Chief of Police every six months, then so be it. Better than driving to the office in the rain.
In a temper, he took out a large Bible, opened it at random and wrote "Irony" down the margin in red biro. In the fly-leaf he scribbled anagrams of his name. Air and an arid nadir, a drain, a radian.
(p.g 78)
"Desperate times call for desperate measures, so pour us each one desperate measure." (p.g 154)
"What I have just described is the way the world works! It's not a conspiracy. It is called Modern Western Civilisation."
"Of course the best brains are lured into industry, advertising, journalism and the rest of it. Of course universities are adapting to the demands of commerce. It's regrettable and there's little we can do about it. But I think only a Marxist would call it an international conspiracy." (p.g166)
He knew he could never jingle change in his pocket or park his car like a confident adult, he was the Adrian he had always been, casting a guilty look over a furtive shoulder, living in eternal dread of a grown-up striding forward to clip his ear.
But there again, when he sipped at the whisky his eyes failed to water and his throat forgot to burn. The body shamelessly welcomed what once it would have rejected. (200)
The ground was in a kind of valley, with the looming Gothic of Narborough Hall on one side and the church and village of Narborough on another. The pavilion was whitewashed and thatched, the weather perfect with only the faintest of breezes luffing the fielders' shirtsleeves. The grim seriousness of the children preparing to play, the detached amusement of Hugo at square leg, the church clock chiming mid-day, the round circles of fine gang-mown cuttings in the outfield, the sun winking off the roller by the sight-screen, the distant clatter of spiked shoes on the pavilion concrete, the open blue of the wide Norfolk sky, the six pebbles in the hand of Adrian's outstretched arm, this whole monstrous illusion froze, while to Adrian the world seemed to hold its breath as if uncertain that such a picture could last. This fantasy of England that old men took with them to their death-beds, this England without factories and sewers of council houses, this England of leather and wood and flannel, this England circumscribed by a white boundary and laws that said that each team shall field eleven men and each man shall bat, this England of shooting-sticks, weather-vanes and rectory teas, it was like Cartwright's beauty, he thought, a momentary vision glimpsed for a second in an adolescent dream, then dispersed like steam into the real atmosphere of traffic-jams, serial murderers, prime ministers and Soho rent. But its spectral haze was sharper and clearer than the glare of the everyday and, against all evidence, was taken to be the only reality, its vapour trapped and distilled in the mind, its image, scents and textures bottled and laid down against the long, lonely melancholy of adulthood. (211)
'Questions of free will certainly do seem to arise. It is perfectly possible to live a life from cradle to grave that is entirely dishonest. One might never reveal one's true identity, the yearnings and cravings of one's innermost self, even to the most intimate circle of family and friends; never really speak the truth to anyone. Priests and psychotherapists may believe that the confessional-box or the analysis session reveals truths, but you know that I know and every human being knows that we lie all the time to all the world. Lying is as much as a part of us as wearing clothes. Indeed, Man's first act in Eden was to give names to everything on earth, our first act of possession and falsehood was to take away a stone's right to be a stone by imprisoning it with the name "stone". There are in reality, as Fenellosa said, no nouns in the Universe. Man's next great act was to cover himself up. We have been doing so ever since. We feel that our true identities shame us. Lying is a deep part of us. To take it away is to make us something less than, not more than, human." (232)
"I cannot decide whether or not you have grown up yet. What is this fantasy world that men inhabit? I don't think there is anything so wonderful about hard-nosed realism or remorseless cynicism, but why must you always revert to type? Have you already become an irretrievable "Enemy of Promise"? I was rereading it the other day. What is that final phrase about all Englishmen...that they become "Cowardly, sentimental and in the last analysis homosexual"? It was written fifty years ago for God's sake! It can't be still true can it - after a world war, a social revolution, rock and roll and all the rest?
'"I was so in love with you last year. I believed we were the most remarkable couple anywhere. All my friends thought I had it made, that's a terrible phrase I know, but you know what I mean. I don't think you quite believe that women exist. To you they're a kind of difficult boy with surplus flesh in some places and missing flesh in others. I'm not even sure if you ever enjoyed my company, but then I don't know if you ever enjoyed anyone else's either, including your own. I know you hate amateur psychology but there it is.
"Little girls grow up to be women, little boys grow up to be little boys." I can't believe that our generation is growing up to fulfill all the ridiculous stereotypes. So I'll become an earthy mother and you will loll in front of the television watching cricket and Clint, is that it? Then why the years of education? Why a youth at all? Why read books and try to puzzle things out if it all ends in the same way?
"To you and your kind your youth and upbringing take on this great mystique, the quality of myth. The first twenty years of my life are an open book, school and home, home and school, some friends here, some friends there. To you they are the backdrop to a gigantic world of fantasy to which you have endlessly to return. "Dearest creature, you do not understand..." I hear you say, as generations of men have always whined to their women. But it is the point! I do not understand. Nor, even if you had more persuasive powers of exposition than you already do, could you ever make me understand. Because there is nothing to understand. That is what you have to understand. You grew up, you went to this school and that one, you made these friends and those. It was nothing. The future is a much bigger deal than the past, Adrian, a much bigger deal. Not just because it has babies in it, but because there are better people in it, who are better behaved and more fun to be with; the scenery is better, the weather is better, the rewards and thrills are better. But I really am not sure that you will ever..." (271)
Sunday, January 19, 2014
I Know That I Know Nothing
τούτου μὲν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐγὼ σοφώτερός εἰμι· κινδυνεύει μὲν γὰρ ἡμῶν οὐδέτερος οὐδὲν καλὸν κἀγαθὸν εἰδέναι, ἀλλ᾽ οὗτος μὲν οἴεταί τι εἰδέναι οὐκ εἰδώς, ἐγὼ δέ, ὥσπερ οὖν οὐκ οἶδα, οὐδὲ οἴομαι· ἔοικα γοῦν τούτου γε σμικρῷ τινι αὐτῷ τούτῳ σοφώτερος εἶναι, ὅτι ἃ μὴ οἶδα οὐδὲ οἴομαι εἰδέναι.
I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.
Thursday, December 26, 2013
Impressions: To Kill A Mockingbird
"So far nothing in your life has interfered with your reasoning process. Those are twelve reasonable men in everyday life, Tom's jury, but you saw something come between them and reason. You saw the same thing that night in front of the jail. When that crew went away, they didn't go as reasonable men, they went because we were there. There's something in our world that makes men lose their heads - they couldn't be fair if they tried. In our courts, when it's a white man's word against a black man's, the white man always wins. They're ugly, but those are the facts of life."
"You couldn't, but they could and did. The older you grow the more of it you'll see. The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash."
"That's what I thought, too," he said at last, "when I was your age. If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand something. I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time...it's because he wants to stay inside."
"So many things had happened to us, Boo Radley was the least of our fears. Atticus said he didn't see how anything else could happen, that things had a way of settling down, and after enough time passed people would forget that Tom Robinson's existence was ever brought to their attention."
"Well, it'd be sort of like shootin' a mockingbird, wouldn't it?"
"You couldn't, but they could and did. The older you grow the more of it you'll see. The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash."
"That's what I thought, too," he said at last, "when I was your age. If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand something. I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time...it's because he wants to stay inside."
"So many things had happened to us, Boo Radley was the least of our fears. Atticus said he didn't see how anything else could happen, that things had a way of settling down, and after enough time passed people would forget that Tom Robinson's existence was ever brought to their attention."
"Well, it'd be sort of like shootin' a mockingbird, wouldn't it?"
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
It's a sin to kill a mockingbird
25 December. Christmas.
To Kill a Mockingbird. Finished.
I'm a heavy coffee drinker. I don't rely on sugar for easing the bitterness. I find pleasure in it. And the limit seems to grow since the first sip I committed.
Yet I was caught off guard by a cup of cappuchino today. It was the darkest I ever tasted. To my disbelief, I found myself craving for sugar at the heat of the moment. On my tongue buring a revelation: I am not ready for the world's blackest dismay.
It's not pretty how the book got me but it is the way.
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Disillusion.
You saw my painful tears when she shattered my illusion.
Now you refuse to see my hateful tears due to your half hearted devotion.
I honor friendship. You prove me a fool for my mistrust.
I honor loyalty. Your betrayal and pampering feel me with digust.
Yes. I am a fool. A massive fool, to believe I was lucky to board on another true friendship. I already had 2 golden tickets. It's such a foolish thing suggesting to myself that I was for the third.
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Ditching umbrellas.
'Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet'
So I ditched my umbrella just to prove I'm not the one who gets wet without feeling the rain.
Messy hair. Thirsty heart.
To those who wonder why my hair grows so messy, it's because I was born with a thirsty heart. 
Monday, December 2, 2013
Impression: Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde
"You forget that I am very uncommon, and very remarkable. Why, anybody can have common sense, provided that they have no imagination. But I have imagination, for I never think of things as they really are; I always thinks of them as being quite different. As for keeping myself dry, there is evidently no one here who can at all appreciate an emotional nature. Fortunately for myself, I don't care. The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated. But none of you have any hearts. Here you are laughing and making merry just as if the Prince and Princess had not just been married."
THE REMARKABLE ROCKET
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Upon these journeys of discovery, as he would call them - and, indeed, they were to him real voyages through a marvellous land, he would sometimes be accompanied by the slim, fair-haired Court pages, with their floating mantles, and gay fluttering ribands; but more often he would be alone, feeling through a certain quick instinct, which as almost a divination, that the secrets of art are best learned in secret, and that Beauty, like Wisdom, loves the lonely worshipper."
"Shall Joy wear what Grief has fashioned?"
THE YOUNG KING
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no god but this mirror that thou seest, for this is the Mirror of Wisdom. And it reflecteth all things that are in heaven and on earth, save only the face of him who looketh into it. This it reflecteth not, so that he who looketh into it may be wise. Many other mirrors are there, but they are mirrors of Opinion. This only is the Mirror of Wisdom. And they who possess this mirror know everything, nor is there anything hidden from them. And they who possess it not have not Wisdom. Therefore is it the god, and we worship it."
"Weeping as one smitten with pain he flung himself down beside it, and he kissed the cold red of the mouth, and toyed with the wet amber of the hair. He flung himself down beside it on the sand, weeping as one trembling with joy, and in his brown arms he held it to his breast. Cold were the lips, yet he kissed them. Salt was the honey of the hair, yet he tasted it with a bitter joy. He kissed the closed eyelids, and the wild spray that lay upon their cups was less salt than his tears.
And to the dead thing he made confession. Into the shells of its ears he poured the harsh wine of his tale. He put the little hands round his neck, and with his fingers he touched the thin reed of the throat. Bitter, bitter was his joy, and full of strange gladness was his pain."
THE FISHERMAN AND HIS SOUL--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Monday, November 25, 2013
Brave New World
"Because our world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers without steel - and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's soma. Which you go and chuck out of the window in the name of liberty, Mr. Savage. Liberty!"
"But that's the price we have to play for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead."
"But they don't mean anything."
"They mean themselves; they mean a lot of agreeable sensations to the audience."
"It all seems to me quite horrible."
"Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contended has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."
"It's an absurdity. An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work - go mad, or start smashing things up. Alphas can be completely socialized - but only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they aren't sacrifices; they're the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he's got to run. He can't help himself; he's foredoomed. Even after decanting, he's still inside a bottle - an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course, [...] goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happy to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles. It's obvious theoretically. But it has also been proved in actual practice. The result of the Cyprus experiment was convincing."
"We are not our own any more than what we possess in our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. We are God's property. Is it not our happiness this to view the matter? Is it any happiness or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way - to depend on no one - to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgement, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man - that it is an unnatural state - will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end..."
"A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear o death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false - a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses."
"One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn't dream about was this [...] us, the modern world. 'You can only be independent of God while you've got youth and prosperity; independence won't take you safely to the end.' Well, we've now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. 'The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.' But there aren't any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when there is social order?"
"[...] Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears - that's what soma is."
"Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east..."
"But that's the price we have to play for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead."
"But they don't mean anything."
"They mean themselves; they mean a lot of agreeable sensations to the audience."
"It all seems to me quite horrible."
"Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contended has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."
"It's an absurdity. An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work - go mad, or start smashing things up. Alphas can be completely socialized - but only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they aren't sacrifices; they're the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he's got to run. He can't help himself; he's foredoomed. Even after decanting, he's still inside a bottle - an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course, [...] goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happy to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles. It's obvious theoretically. But it has also been proved in actual practice. The result of the Cyprus experiment was convincing."
"We are not our own any more than what we possess in our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. We are God's property. Is it not our happiness this to view the matter? Is it any happiness or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way - to depend on no one - to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgement, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man - that it is an unnatural state - will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end..."
"A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear o death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false - a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses."
"One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn't dream about was this [...] us, the modern world. 'You can only be independent of God while you've got youth and prosperity; independence won't take you safely to the end.' Well, we've now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. 'The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.' But there aren't any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when there is social order?"
"[...] Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears - that's what soma is."
"Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east..."
Saturday, November 23, 2013
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Be a Rose
Beauty without the quality of evocation is no more than a flower without fragrance.
Be a Rose.
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