With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.

-A.E. Housman

My foolish heart leads me on, and I obey my heart.

-Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain The Knight of the Lion

There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric.


"I ask you, what is a human life? Is it not a maimed happiness -- care and weariness, weariness and care, wit the baseless cozenage of a brighter tomorrow?"


Religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice -- inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome.


"I have vowed unto God above a thousand times that I would become a better man: but I never performed that which I vowed. Hereafter I will make no such vow: for I have now learned by experience that I am not able to perform it."


Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy, things that sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness.


"There is indeed one element in human destiny," Robert Louis Stevenson writes, "that not blindness itself can controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted. Our business is to continue to fail in good spirits."


"Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the Sun: but if a man live many years and rejoice in them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many."


Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting; still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.


"When I reflect on the fact that I have made my appearance by accident upon a globe itself whirled through space as the sport of the catastrophes of the heavens," says Madame Ackermann; "when I see myself surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible as I am myself, and all excitedly pursuing pure chimeras, I experience a strange feeling of being in a dream. It seems to me as if I have loved and suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a dream. My last word will be, 'I have been dreaming.'"


A lover has notoriously this sense of the continuous being of his idol, even when his attention is addressed to other matters and he no longer represents her features. He cannot forget her; she uninterruptedly affects him through and through.


The man's interior is a battle-ground for what he feels to be two deadly hostile selves, one actual, the other ideal.


Wrong living, impotent aspirations; "What I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I," as Saint Paul says; self-loathing, self-despair; an unintelligible and intolerable burden to which one is mysteriously the heir.


"My peace would be in and out twenty times a day; comfort now and trouble presently; peace now and before I could go a furlong as full of guilt and fear as ever heart could hold."



-William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Si bene calculum ponas, ubique naufragium est.
'If you reflect well on it, life is a shipwreck everywhere.'


Qualis nox fuit illa, di deaeque,
quam mollis torus! Haesimus calentes
et transfudimus hinc et hinc labellis
errantes animas. Valete curae
mortales. Ego sic perire coepi.
'O gods, O goddesses - what a night was that!
How soft the bed, as we hotly clung
to one another, and with every wandering kiss
we poured our souls into each other!
I bade farewell to mortal cares,
and so began to die.'



-from Petronius' Satyricon

QUAESTIO MIHI FACTUS SUM -- I have been made a question unto myself.


-- St. Augustine.




Religion is for lovers, for men and women of passion, for real people with a passion for something other than talking profits, people who believe in something, who hope like mad in something, who love something with a love that surpasses understanding.


There is no merit in loving moderately, up to a certain point, just so far.


Religion, I say at the risk of being misquoted, is for the unhinged. (That is, for lovers.)


Religion on my telling is a pact or covenant with the impossible. To have a religious sense of life is to long with a restless heart for a reality beyond reality, to tremble with the possibility of the impossible.


It is love that drives our search to know.


-- John D. Caputo, On Religion

There's a sort of miracle happening here, boss. (Zorba the Greek)

We were sitting yesterday in front of the hut. When he had drunk a glass of wine, he turned to me in alarm: "Now whatever is this red water, boss, just tell me! An old stock grows branches, and at first there's nothing but a sour bunch of beads hanging down. Time passes, the sun ripens them, they become as sweet as honey, and then they're called grapes. We trample on them; we extract the juice and put it into casks; it ferments on its own, we open it on the feast day of St. John the Drinker, it's become wine! It's a miracle! You drink the red juice and, lo and behold, your soul grows big, too big for the old carcass, it challenges God to a fight."

--

I was happy and said to myself: "This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To take part in the Christmas festivities and, after eating and drinking well, to escape on your own far from all the snares, to have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right: and to realize of a sudden that, in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale."

--

For me Paradise is this: a little perfumed room with gay-colored dresses on the wall, scented soaps, a big bed with good springs, and at my side the female of the species.

--

"And what might you be after in the ruins?"
"I'm studying antiquity."
"What good do you get out of that?"
"None."
"None. Nor do I. This is all dead, and we're alive. You'd do better to go, quick. God be with you!"

--

"I long for heaven! I tell jokes and cut capers about the place and make the monks laugh. They all say I'm possessed by the devil and insult me. But I say to myself: 'It can't be true; God must like fun and laughter. "Come inside, my little buffoon, come inside," he'll say to me one day, I know. "Come and make me laugh!"' That's the way I'll get into Paradise, as a buffoon!

--

"This is my second theory: every idea that has a real influence has also a real existence. It is really there, it does not float invisibly in the atmosphere--it has a real body--eyes, a mouth, feet, a stomach. It is male or female and therefore runs after men or women, as the case may be. That is why the Gospel says: 'The Word became flesh . . .'"
He looked at me anxiously again.
"My third theory," he went on hurriedly, as he could not bear my silence, "is this: there is some Eternity even in our ephemeral lives, only it is very difficult for us to discover it alone. Our daily cares lead us astray. A few people only, the flower of humanity, manage to live in eternity even in their transitory lives on this earth. Since all the others would therefore be lost, God had mercy on them and sent them religion--thus the crowd is able to live in eternity, too."
He had finished and was visibly relieved for having spoken. He raised his small eyes, which had no lashes, and smiled at me. It was as though he were saying: "There, I am giving you all I have, take it!" I was very moved by the sight of this little old man thus offering me outright, when he hardly knew me, the fruits of a lifetime's work.
He had tears in his eyes.
"What do you think of my theories?" he asked, taking my hand between his own and looking into my eyes. I felt that he depended on my reply to tell him whether his life had been of any use or not.
I knew that, over and above the truth, there exists another duty which is much more important and much more human.
"These theories may save many souls," I answered.
The bishop's face lit up. That was the justification of his entire life.
"Thank you, my son," he whispered, squeezing my hand affectionately.
Zorba leapt from his corner.
"I've got a fourth theory!" he cried.
I looked anxiously at him. The bishop turned to him.
"Speak, my son, and may your theory be blessed! What is it?"
"That two and two make four!" said Zorba gravely.
The bishop looked aat him, flabbergasted.
"And a fifth theory, old man," Zorba went on. "What two and two don't make four. Go on, my friend, take a chance! Make your choice!"
"I don't understand," stammered the old man, casting a questioning glance at me.
"Neither do I!" said Zorba, bursting into laughter.

--

God changes his appearance every second. Blessed is the man who can recognize him in all his disguises. At one moment he is a glass of fresh water, the next your son bouncing on your knees or an enchanting woman, or perhaps merely a morning walk.

--

"You're cruel!" the old cabaret singer said all of a sudden in a hoarse voice.
Zorba raised his head and looked at her. His eyes softened. He could never hear a woman say anything to him a harrowing tone without being completely overwhelmed. One tear from a woman could drown him.




(Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek)

It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization. All this still is not quite enough.
In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.
If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.

-Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

Job had been paying no attention to me, but he looked up when I rose. "Do you still want to go there?" he asked, gesturing toward the charred signboard. "It won't do any good. You can't escape."
"I know." I spoke as quietly as he. "I'm just going toward something before it comes and gets me."

-John Myers Myers, Silverlock

this was the first tmg song i ever heard.
what a spaz he is!! i love it.

moment, 3:31