paterbabe's Journal

"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something -- a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things -- which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours. Shall we just have the last verse again, and I'll let you go."

(quote from Tue 2/24/2009 reading)

"For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin... But there was alwasy some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life."

"Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?"

I just noticed that the microlending site Kiva.org accepts Paypal for payments.... a great chance for me to sell some once beloved, but now excessive/outgrown items on eBay and�loan the profits to struggling small businesspeople all over the world.� When the loan is (hopefully) repaid, I can then reinvest again.

Seems like a small way for me to fight against the global credit freeze, rather than trying to 'spend our way out' of the downturn.

"If you think healthcare is expensive now, just wait until you see how expensive it is when it's free."

- P. J. O'Rourke

"If it works, it's obsolete."�

"We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future."

"'Camp' is popular because it gives people a sense of reality to see a replay of their lives."

-Marshall McLuhan

http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/main.html

"The Dutch city of Drachten has undertaken an unusual experiment in traffic managment.� The roads serving forty-five thousand people are 'verkeersbordvrij': free of nearly all road signs.� Drahten is one of several European test sites for a traffic planning approach called 'unsafe is safe.'� The city has removed its traffic signs, parking meters, and even parking spaces.� The only rules are that drivers should yield to those on their right at an intersection, and that parked cars blocking others will be towed.

The result so far is counterintuitive: a dramatic improvement in vehicular safety.� Without signs to obey mechanically (or, as studies have shown, disobey seventy percent of the time), people are forced to drive more mindfully--operating their cars with more care and attention to surrounding circumstances."

From "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It", Jonathan L. Zittrain, "Chapter 6: The Lessons of Wikipedia"

"The American way of stress is comparable to Freud's 'beloved symptom', his name for the cherished neurosis that a patient cultivates like the rarest of orchids and does not want to be cured of. Stress makes Americans feel busy, important, and in demand, and simultaneously deprived, ignored, and victimized. Stress makes them feel interesting and complex instead of boring and simple, and carries an assumption of sensitivity not unlike the Old World assumption that aristocrats were high-strung. In short, stress has become a status symbol." (from "The Misanthrope's Corner", May 2001)

cf. "The One Who Is Not Busy"

"My advice to young writers is to stop reading like readers and start reading like writers.� Reread stories, books, and passages from books that work for you.� Dissect the prose.� Write it out yourself longhand.� Get inside the mind of the writer.� Figure out why it works.� Then go forth and do the same." (p. 225, In Fact: the Best of Creative Non-Fiction,�Mark Bowden, "Finders Keepers: The Story of Joey Coyle")

This advice reminds me of Tobais Woolf in "Old School" typing out passages by his favorite writers.... of course, in that case, his identification with the stories he was copying went a bit too far.... but, it is still an intriguing technique.

"Mark had been telling us some of the lessons of his life. 'Don't wake up at the end of your life,' he said, ' and find that you've had yourself at the center of it all along.'� He went on: 'You have to find some one, some thing, some purpose greater than yourself to which you're devoted, and cultivate that devotion.� Really give yourself over to it, whether it's teaching, music, family, the law, children, meditation, yoga, gardening.� Whatever." (p. 302)

"Being 'in the state of flow' doesn't mean that we spend all of our time in bliss in the nondual realms.� Flow means allowing ourselves to be surrendered to life, to the way it is, and to forget ourselves in pure involvment in our work, our task at hand, our love - without worry over teh outcome.� As Robert Frost said, 'Freedom means moving comfortably in harness." (p. 303)

Schw�chen

Du hattest keine.

Ich hatte eine:

Ich liebte.

�

�

-Bertolt Brecht

Crying only a little bit

is no use.� You must cry

until your pillow is soaked!

Then you can get up and laugh,

Then you can jump in the shower

and splash-splash-splash!

Then you can throw open your

window and "Ha, ha! Ha, ha!"

And if people say, "Hey,

What's going on up there?"

"Ha ha!" sing back, "Happiness

was hiding in the last tear!

I wept it! Ha Ha."

-Galway Kinnell "Crying"

quoted p. 219, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self,� Stephen Cope

"You don't weep unless you've been happy first: tears always mean something enviable."

- Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps, p. 35

In moving-slow he has no Peer.

You ask him something in his ear;�

He thinks about it for a Year;

And, then, before he says a Word

There, upside down (unlike a Bird)

He will assume that you have Heard—

A most Ex-as-per-at-ing Lug.

But should you call his manner Smug,

He'll sigh and give his Branch a Hug;

Then off again to Sleep he goes,

Still swaying gently by his Toes,

And you just know he knows he knows.

Be kind and tender to the Frog,

�� And do not call him names,

As ‘Slimy skin,’ or ‘Polly-wog,’

�� Or likewise ‘Ugly James,’

Or ‘Gape-a-grin,’ or ‘Toad-gone-wrong,’���

�� Or ‘Billy Bandy-knees’:

The Frog is justly sensitive

�� To epithets like these.

No animal will more repay

�� A treatment kind and fair;

At least so lonely people say

Who keep a frog (and, by the way,

They are extremely rare).

"Business cards, of course, are not proof of anything.� Anyone can go to a print shop and have cards made that say anything they like.� The king of Denmark can order business cards that say he sells golf balls.� Your dentist can order business cards that say she is your grandmother.� In order to escape from the castle of an enemy of mine, I once had cards printed that said I was an admiral in the French navy.� Just because something is typed – whether it is typed on a business card or typed in a newspaper or book – this does not mean that it is true."

- p. 46, “Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid,” Lemony Snicket

"A great number of people are running around thinking that they’re depressed when it may be that they’re simply disappointed." (Julia)

"The reason half the world feels lonely is because the other half is pretending to be perfect." (from 'reader Susan')

-Julia Allison

http://julia.nonsociety.com/

�

They f**k you up, your mum and dad.

�They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

�And add some extra, just for you.

�

But they were f**ked up in their turn

�By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

�And half at one another's throats.

�

Man hands on misery to man.

�It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

�And don't have any kids yourself.

"For myself, I genuinely think that one of the real responsibilities of an artist and writer (or, more properly, what I look for in writing and art myself) is a clear, honest communication of what it feels like to be alive to people who haven't been born yet.� There's a unique emotional rudder that literature and art can provide to a consciousness drifting through life -- not something as banal as a roadmap or a rule book - but a sort of sympathetic rut in the road.� And whether that rut is real or imaginary, life ia a lot harder to get through without it."� (p. xviii)

“…[I]f any art is to endure, the effort expended on its creation is usurped (and one hopes eventually dwarfed) by the work’s lasting power.� For example, it takes a few days to read War and Peace, which took Tolstoy a few years to write, but it has survived and grown exponentially in strength through many generations of readers.� Being so faced with eternity, at some point the artist, writer, or cartoonist has to somehow allow his or her work, for lack of any better metaphor, to take on a life of its own – a necessary step tat admits instinct, uncertainty, or faith into the act of creation – what is frequently referred to as ‘taking a risk’ in art.� Sometimes this yielding can lead to complete failure, other times it can lead to something much larger.”(p. xix)

This resonated with me.�� I love that shiver of pleasure and sense of peace when I discover a moment of human experience – even when it is not my own experience – perfectly captured in art.� Perhaps it is the sense of being in a conversation with another mind, outside the prison-house of my own soul.� Or perhaps it is the comfort of knowing that some slice of time, some sliver of the beauty in the world, has been pinned to a�page, and� – however imperfectly and still impermanently – transcended death.�