I contemplate a tree. 

I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground.

I can feel it as movement: the flowing veins around the sturdy, striving core, the sucking of the roots, the breathing of the leaves, the infinite commerce with earth and air--and the growing itself in its darkness.

I can assign it to a species and observe it as an instance, with an eye to its construction and its way of life.

I can overcome its uniqueness and form so rigorously that I recognize it only as an expression of the law--those laws according to which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or those laws according to which the elements mix and separate.

I can dissolve it into a number, into a pure relation between numbers, and eternalize it.

Throughout all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition.

But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seized me.

This does not require me to forego any of the modes of contemplation. There is nothing that I must not see in order to see, and there is no knowledge that I must forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and instance, law and number included and inseparably fused.

Whatever belongs to the tree is included: its form and its mechanics, its colors and its chemistry, its conversation with the elements and its conversation with the stars--all this in its entirety.

The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I must deal with it--only differently.

One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relation: relation is reciprocity.

Does the tree then have consciousness, similar to our own? I have no experience of that. But thinking that you have brought this off in your own case, must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself.

-Martin Buber, I and Thou

Source: http://www.myjewishlearning.com/holidays/Jewish_Holidays/Tu_Bishvat/Ideas_and_Beliefs/Rabbinic/Every_Person_is_a_Tree/I_and_Thou_a_Tree.shtml

Desire is about wanting more than it is about getting. It is the hunger that highlights the food; the patience that heightens the faith; the arousal that anticipates the sex. The salt of a lover's lips or the sweet juice of grapes is not just pleasurable anymore: with desire, they become exquisite. Desire is the discipline to live on that edge between wanting and satisfaction. It is not for the timid or the fickle. [...]

Yearning itself may even come to be experienced as a pleasure. The Song is concerned with the provocative question of whether the exquisite sensation of wanting another could surpass in any realistic sense the pleasure of actual consummation. The surprising claim that it cann does seem to be the premise of the song, which stays focused on the experience of yearning, not its relief.


-Carey Ellen Walsh, Exquisite Desire: Religion, the Erotic, and the Song of Songs

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

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)

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

In the big empty office the man and the woman at looking at each other and they were a good deal alike. Their bodies were different, as were also the color of their eyes, the length of their noses, and the circumstances of their existence, but something inside them meant the same thing, wanted the same release, would have left the same impression on the memory of an onlooker. Later, and when he grew older and married a young wife, the doctor often talked to her of the hours spent with the sick woman and expressed a good many things he had been unable to express to Elizabeth. He was almost a poet in his old age and his notion of what happened took a poetic turn. "I had come to the time in my life when prayer became necessary and so I invented gods and prayed to them," he said. "I did not say my prayers in words nor did I kneel down but sat perfectly still in my chair. In the late afternoon when it was hot and quiet on Main Street or in the winter when the days were gloomy, the gods came into the office and I thought no one knew about them. Then I found that this woman Elizabeth knew, that she worshipped also the same gods. I have a notion that she came to the office because she thought the gods would be there but she was happy to find herself not alone just the same. It was an experience that cannot be explained, although I suppose it is always happening to men and women in all sorts of places."

-Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost, she said to herself, and was pleased with the phrase. It made her feel as if somebody had given her a present.

-Flannery O'Connor, A Temple of the Holy Ghost

Williams + Mann

They craved the miraculous!

-W.C.W., Paterson


With evening, love wakens
though its shadows
which are alive by reason
of the sun shining--
grow sleepy now and drop away
from desire .

-W.C.W., Paterson


--


Aschenbach, receiving this smile, hurried away with it as with a fateful gift. He was so deeply shaken that he was forced to flee the light of the terrace, the front gardens, and he hastily sought the darkness of the park behind the hotel. Strangely indignant and affectionate exhortations were wrung from him: "You musn't smile like that! Listen, you mustn't smile at anyone like that!" He flung himself on a bench, he was beside himself, he breathed the nocturnal fragrance of the plants. And leaning back, with dangling arms, overwhelmed, and shuddering again and again, he whispered the standard formula of desire...

-Thomas Mann, Death in Venice


Bizarrely fertile intercourse of the mind with a body!

-Thomas Mann, Death in Venice