"Yes, and the luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can't help it."
- Nick Cave and Seán O'Hagan
Faith, Hope and Carnage
booklover
& still, the waves
"A world in which there are monsters, and ghosts, and things that want to steal your heart is a world in which there are angels, and dreams and a world in which there is hope."
- Neil Gaiman
commonplace
"Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves."
- T. S. Eliot
wait -what?
poetic outlaws
commonplace
"Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist."
- Bill Bryson
I'm a Stranger Here Myself
"Remember how long you have been putting these things off, and how often you have received an opportunity from the gods and have not made use of it. By now you ought to realize what cosmos you are a part of, and what divine administrator you owe your existence to, and that an end to your time here has been marked out, and if you do not use this time for clearing the clouds from your mind, it will be gone and so will you."
The Essential Marcus Aurelius
from The Meditations
by Marcus Aurelius
translated by George Long
S.O.S. 1995
Take a long time with your anger,
sleepy head.
Don't waste it in riots.
Don't tangle it with ideas.
The Devil won't let me speak,
will only let me hint
that you are a slave,
your misery a deliberate policy
of those in whose thrall you suffer,
and who are sustained
by your misfortune.
The atrocities over there,
the interior paralysis over here -
Pleased with the better deal?
You are clamped down.
You are being bred for pain.
The Devil ties my tongue.
I'm speaking to you,
'friend of my scribbled life'.
You have been conquered by those
who know how to conquer invisibly.
The curtains move so beautifully,
lace curtains of some
sweet old intrigue:
the Devil tempting me
to turn away from alarming you.
So I must say it quickly.
Whoever is in your life,
those who harm you,
those who help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know -
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook.
Recognize the hook.
You are listening to Radio Resistance.
- Leonard Cohen
Book of Longing
"I do believe that there's no meaning to our lives except for that which we create, and can live by. The world, however, occasionally gets in the way. Other people tend to complicate things. Love and duty often muddy up a good plan, scarcity has been known to abrogate dearly held principles, neuroses undermines will; it's pretty hard, and maybe not entirely desirable, to live any ism."
- Stephen Dunn
the commonline journal
commonplace
a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts."
- Vladimir Nabokov
