I believe in God, mozart and beethoven…I believe in the Holy Spirit and the truth of the one, individual Art…I believe that through this Art all men are saved, and therefore each may die of hunger for Her…I believe…that true disciples of high Art will be transfigured in a heavenly veil of sun-drenched fragrance and sweet sound, and united for eternity with the divine fount of all Harmony. may mine be the sentence of grace! Amen!
Richard Wagner
Like a child in front of the fire
Smiling vaguely with tears in my eyes
In front of this land where all moves in me
Where mirrors mist where mirrors clear
Reflecting two nude bodies season on season
I’ve so many reasons to lose myself
On this road-less earth under horizon-less skies
Good reasons I ignored yesterday
And I’ll never ever forget
Good keys of gazes keys their own daughters
in front of this land where nature is mine
In front of the fire the first fire
Good mistress reason
Identified star
On earth under sky in and out of my heart
Second bud first green leaf
That the sea covers with sails
And the sun finally coming to us
I am in front of this feminine land
Like a branch in the fire.
Paul Éluard
Unknown, she was my favorite shape,
She who relieved me of the worry of being a man,
And I see her and I lose her and I suffer
My pain, like a little sunlight in cold water.
Paul Éluard
Death is only a launching into the region of the strange untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense remote, the wild, the watery, the unshored…
For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. god keep thee! push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his god.
Tthere is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. nothing exists in itself.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
PORTIA: The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there.
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
No man is an island, entire of itself; everyman is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a cold be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were as well as if a manor of thy friends or thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because i am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII
What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Where did i leave off? at the point that i cannot imagine a situation in which life would not be a torment; that we all have been created in order to suffer, and that we all know this and try to invent means of deceiving ourselves. but when you see the truth, what are you to do?
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
What is a saint? a saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. it is impossible to say what that possibility is. i think it has something to do with the energy of love. contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. a saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. i do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. it is a kind of balance that is his glory. he rides the drifts like an escaped ski. his course is the caress of the hill. his track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. his house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. he can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. it is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.
L. Cohen, Beautiful Losers (1966)
The heavens burned,
the stars cried out
and under the ashes of infinity
HOPE, scarred and bleeding,
breathed its last.
Ulatempa Poetess