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“And that great house!
Mercy upon us! if it could be concealed, it would be well for all who are not pained to see the pleasantest of earthly spots deformed by man.”
I mean the sharp ache we feel when a place made for peace is ruined by greed or vanity. The island at Windermere was once wild and green, but men have cut its trees and laid down smooth grass where sheep used…
“He seems to speak what comes into his head, and is never at the trouble of raising his voice.”
Yesterday I sat with a manuscript that refused to yield its music. I tried to force the rhythm, to make the sentences march in time with some grand design I had in my mind. I raised my voice until my throat was raw, demanding from the page what it would not give. The result was dry and flat, a mechanical thing without breath. When I finally stopped striving and let…
“Farewell with him all that made sickness pompous.”
“The only coöperation which is commonly possible is exceedingly partial and superficial; and what little true coöperation there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony inaudible to men.”
I saw neighbors sharing fences yet never minds, their voices clashing while they pretended unity. True labor requires souls moving as one heart, not just hands meeting at a wall. Before nightfall, test your own work: does it stand alone or vanish when another leaves the room?
At radiation they have pictures on the ceiling to distract you while you are getting zapped.
I noticed a black and white photo of a woman next to Xena Warrior Princes.
“Is that Marie Curie,” I asked the tech.
“Yep,” she replied.
“Didn’t she die of radiation poisoning,” I asked.
“Oh…,” she said. “I didn’t think about that.
“I don’t know what made me think it was you, but I did think so.”
“They often throw themselves off to fight on foot, having taught their horses not to stir in the meantime from the place.”
“The head is ever the dupe of the heart.”
The first question from so many people: “Did you get to keep the ball?”
Not “Did getting hit on your crown by a baseball hurt?”; not “How are you feeling now?” I know that concussions often cause emotional regulation to veer off the charts, but “did you manage to get a souvenir of your injury” being the dominant query struck me as strange. (And no, I didn’t. It bounced off my head and into the fracas of people trying to catch it for themselves.)
“He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.”
“For the laborers as such, there is in these new captains of industry neither love nor hate, neither sympathy nor romance; it is a cold question of dollars and dividends.”
I saw this truth in the Tennessee hills where I taught, when the white overseers counted our bellies for profit with the same eyeless stare they gave a mule. Do not ask your brother to forgive his master’s greed, but organize yourself so that the dollar must buy your bread and not merely your labor.
“I searched in the washings for a diamond and found it myself—the only true diamond, they said, that was ever found in the United States.”
My friend, touch what moves before you ask if it is gold. Let your hands find truth in the dust of things, not just in books or words. Do this today.
“Or if thou do, return unto them again with all possible speed.”
Friend, I ask only this of you before the sun sets: when your mind wanders into anger or greed, turn back to those names at once. Do not let a moment of distraction make you forget what you promised yourself in the quiet hours of yesterday. The slip is easy, but the return must be swift and without shame, for the path is open as long as you walk it.
“Exercise, therefore, what is in your power.”
I saw a young man standing before his mirror, polishing his beard and adjusting his cloak because he feared the crowd would see him as poor. He asked why I did not tell him to earn more gold. I told him that the gold is outside his control, just as the wind is outside the hands of a sailor. If you focus on the weather, you will always be wet.…
“Only give to any of us, whom you please, an illiterate man to discuss with, and he cannot discover how to deal with the man.”
I once saw a young man in the forum who could argue logic like a god but had no answer for a farmer asking why he must pay taxes. The youth grew red-faced, then sneered at the farmer’s lack of training until the crowd laughed and the farmer wept. I watched him fail because he believed his worth lay in his clever words rather than his ability to lead another…
“They lose all simplicity, all dignity of mind, in acquiring power, and act as men are observed to act when they have been exalted by the same means.”
I saw this very scene in a drawing room where a mother, having gained control over her household through sharp wit and petty schemes, suddenly forgot how to be gentle with her own child. She treated the girl not as a soul to be cultivated but as a tool for her own vanity, just as men treat their peers when they climb too high on the ladder of ambition. We…
“On coming suddenly to the brow of the precipice, it was a grand spectacle to see between twenty and thirty of these great birds start heavily from their resting-place, and wheel away in majestic circles.”
The wind cut sharp against my face as I crept along the basalt edge near Santa Cruz, the air thick with the scent of dung long piled upon the rocks. Suddenly, the silence broke; dozens…
“So heart-hungry at times may one be to see a friend in the flesh, however happily full and care-free one’s life may be.”
“What makes me liable to great calamity is my having the body (which I call myself).”
“Whoso is content with pure experience and acts upon it has enough of truth.”