So many! So cute!

John Krasinksi imagines his alternate-universe life as a teacher

I go by Mr. K. I'm teaching English at a prep school in rural Connecticut. In my class, homework is not homework, it's preparation for the next day. I love teaching books that have been pigeonholed as ''epics,'' and my big thing is discovering for yourself why you like them. I'd have a lot of stuff written in some cryptic way on the whiteboard where you can't understand it until we start talking about the book. I'd throw desk supplies off bridges... I've gone out on several dates with the bio teacher. Her name is Sarah, and she's just a really great girl. I'm more gregarious than she is; she brings me into the underground indie-world stuff and I bring her sonnets. It's weird because the kids are talking about this new show called The Office and they're like, ''You guys are so much like Pam and Jim!'' and I'm like, ''I don't have a TV. Sorry, I'm not into pop culture stuff.''

There must be
Thousands! What's that got to do with it?
Thousands - not with camels either:
Millions and millions of mankind
Burned, crushed, broken, mutilated,
Slaughtered, and for what? For thinking!
For walking round the world in the wrong
Skin, the wrong-shaped noses, eyelids:
Sleeping in the wrong night wrong city -
London, Dresden, Hiroshima.
There never could have been so many
Suffered more for less.
...
We have no choice but to be guilty.
God is unthinkable if we are innocent.

-Archibald MacLeish, JB, 1958

(via Yee Sum)

(via more than 95 theses)

Snow Melting
by Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Snow melting when I left you, and I took
This fragile bone we’d found in melting snow
Before I left, exposed beside a brook
Where raccoons washed their hands. And this, I know,

Is that raccoon we’d watched for every day.
Though at the time her wild human hand
Had gestured inexplicably, I say
Her meaning now is more than I can stand.

We’ve reasons, we have reasons, so we say,
For giving love, and for withholding it.
I who would love must marvel at the way
I know aloneness when I’m holding it,

Know near and far as words live and die,
Know distance, as I’m trying to draw near,
Growing immense, and know, but don’t know why,
Things seen up close enlarge, then disappear.

Tonight this small room seems too huge to cross.
And my life is that looming kind of place.
Here, left with this alone, and at a loss
I hold an alien and vacant face

Which shrinks away, and yet is magnified —
More so than I seem able to explain.
Tonight the giant galaxies outside
Are tiny, tiny on my windowpane.

A Way Back Home
-Oliver Jeffers

Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.

-Walter Lippmann

Elasticity, Boccioni

When I try to put all into a phrase I say, 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.'... The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence.

-William Butler Yeats

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

-William Butler Yeats

"Nowhere to hide."

Because of piety's penchant for taking itself too seriously, theology - more than literary, humanistic, and scientific studies - does well to nurture a modest, unguarded sense of comedy. Some comic sensibility is required to keep in due proportion the pompous pretensions of the study of divinity... This comes from glimpsing the incongruity of humans thinking about God... The most enjoyable of all subjects has to be God, because God is the source of all joy. God has the first and last laugh. The least articulate of all disciplines [theology] deserves something in between.

-Thomas C. Oden, The Living God

I stretch the lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.

Canto 55

There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.

Canto 96

I found Him not in world or sun,
Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye,
Nor through the questions men may try,
The petty cobwebs we have spun.

Canto 124

-Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "In Memoriam"

let us no longer speak of love

Let us no longer speak of love.
Love is horseplay at its best
and good, I think, for just this life.

Let’s speak of something of ourselves
or of the way that we relate
that will endure beyond the grave—

but what? Your smart-ass comments,
no. Your anecdotes and hand gestures,
no and no. They’ll be the first to go.

And my rejoinders, punk-ass rhymes,
will soon be swallowed whole by time,
as will my money, my car, my keys.

Even our truest moments in speech
or touch, or listening to each other breathe
after making love and brushing teeth

and cuddling in blankets, spooning
habitually in our comfortable
nightly grave and rising like Jesus

to do it all again: All gone, and yet
without regret. When nothing’s left,
what’s there to mourn? Nothing itself?

Nothing will endure beyond the grave
(more wit), and nothing’s what
we’ll miss the most, I think (a trifle).

So actually let’s do speak of love
and horseplay, careless punches
to each other’s noses, awkward kisses,

dancing in our underwear near the edge
of the dumb void like the former
junior ringmasters that we are.

Let’s trounce the forbidden places
knowing that there’s less to life
than we had thought at first.

-Aaron Belz

The Interrogation of the Good
By Bertolt Brecht

Step forward: we hear
That you are a good man.

You cannot be bought, but the lightning
Which strikes the house, also
Cannot be bought.
You hold to what you said.
But what did you say?
You are honest, you say your opinion.
Which opinion?
You are brave.
Against whom?
You are wise.
For whom?
You do not consider your personal advantages.
Whose advantages do you consider then?
You are a good friend.
Are you also a good friend of the good people?

Hear us then: we know.
You are our enemy. This is why we shall
Now put you in front of a wall. But in consideration
of your merits and good qualities
We shall put you in front of a good wall and shoot you
With a good bullet from a good gun and bury you
With a good shovel in the good earth.

I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy and her husband, Mr. Broadwater. (She just wrote that book, A Charmed Life.) She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went at eight and at one, I hadn't opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say. The people who took me were Robert Lowell and his now wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them. Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the "most portable" person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it." That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.

-Flannery O'Connor in a letter dated December 16, 1955 to Elizabeth "Betty" Hester

All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers living or dead;
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives; because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling: make intercession
For the treason of all clerks.

Because the darkness is never so distant,
And there is never much time for the arrogant
Spirit to flutter its wings,
Or the broken bone to rejoice, or the cruel to cry
For Him whose property is always to have mercy, the author
And giver of all good things.


-W.H. Auden, At the Grave of Henry James

"To speak, to speak is what humankind has most on heart."

-Ancient Sumerian Proverb

Well he stormed with his feet
And he clapped with his hands,
He summoned all of his joy when he laughed
It suffered all of his joy when he cried.

Well in war he was a tiger
When it was over like a dove,
He summoned all of his strength in the climb
It suffered all of his strength in the fall.

He put his trust in a higher power
He held his power like a holy grail,
He summoned all of his faith in the lifting
It suffered all of his faith in the fail.

-M. Ward, Requiem

Come, ye weary, heavy-laden
Lost and ruined by the fall,
If you tarry 'til you're better
You will never come at all.

-Joseph Hart

“My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. And most are ‘offended’ by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not. But the same thing happens in our private prayers.”

-C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

"You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character..."
___________

The death close before me was terrible, but far more terrible than death was the dread of being misremembered after death.
___________

"Dear Joe, I hope you will have children to love, and that some little fellow will sit in this chimney corner of a winter night, who may remind you of another little fellow gone out of it for ever. And now, though I know you have already done it in your own kind hearts, pray tell me, both, that you forgive me! Pray let me hear you say the words, that I may carry the sound of them away with me, and then I shall be able to believe that you can trust me, and think better of me, in the time to come!"

-Great Expectations

I walked away at a good pace, thinking it was easier to go than I had supposed it would be. But the village was very peaceful and quiet, and the light mists were solemnly rising, as if to show me the world, and I had been so innocent and little there, and all beyond was so unknown and great, that in a moment with a strong heave and sob I broke into tears.

So subdued I was by those tears, that when I was on the coach, and it was clear of the town, I deliberated with an aching heart whether I would not get down when we changed horses and walk back, and have another evening at home, and a better parting. We changed, and I had not made up my mind, and still reflected for my comfort that it would be quite practicable to get down and walk back, when we changed again.

It was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.

THIS IS THE END OF THE FIRST STAGE OF PIP'S EXPECTATIONS

-Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.

By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God's sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it.

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

-Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

-subversive cross stitch
-via new on my rss feed

all you need to be emergent - ASBO Jesus

In the solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls - grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

-Thomas Hardy, The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the loss of the Titanic)

Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket, James A.M. Whistler, 1875

is Thy love indeed
A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed,
Suffering no flowers except its own to mount?

-Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven

A man who long ago learned to hold each act in light of the distant life in which he would repent it, who for years anticipated and even treasured, with a kind of half-conscious, terrible clarity, the self as it would emerge from the wreckage it created; a man grown equanimous and wise, devoid of ambition now but, what luck, replete with everything ambition brings - this house, these admirers, regret softened by renown, and this moment in which to gather his brood of wounds around him with an almost paternal pride, as a lovely elegiac light fills the room and all the intact past stands plain as a lawn. Spare me. A man can vanish into what he's done, give himself so utterly to his actions that he becomes, not the wise survivor crawling from the chaos of his deeds, but the smooth and empty shell they cast up. Who would believe this hollow noise is the sea?

-Christian Wiman (144)

"A Song to Pass the Time"
by Bright Eyes
(my favorite song, though I have yet to hear it)

There is a middle-aged woman dragging her feet.
She carries baskets of clothes to a laundromat.
While the Mexican children kick rocks into the street
and they laugh in a language I don't understand.
But I love them.
Why do I love them?
So the neighborhood is dimming as I smoke on the porch
and watch the people as they pass enclosed inside their cars.
And on their faces just anger or disappointment.
I start wishing there was something I could offer them.
A consolation, what could I offer them?
When they are sad in their suburbs, robots water the lawn
and everything they touch gets dusted spotless,
so they start to believe that they haven't touched anything at all
while the cars in the driveway only multiply.
They are lost in their houses.
I have heard them sing in the shower
and making speeches to their sister on the telephone.
Saying, "You come home.
Darling, you come here.
Don't stay so far away from me."
This weather has me wanting love more tangible,
something I can hold because it's getting cold.
So lets hold up our fists to the flame in the sky
to block out the light that is reaching for our eyes
because it would blind us.
It will blind us.
Now I have locked my actions in the grooves of routine.
So I may never be free of this apathy.
But I wait for a letter that is coming to me.
She sends me pictures of the ocean in an envelope.
So there still is hope.
Yes, I can be healed.
There is someone looking for what I concealed in my secret drawer,
in my pockets deep, you will find the reasons that I can't sleep
and you will still want me.
But will you still want me?
Well, I say come for the week. You can sleep in my bed.
And then pass through my life like a dream through my head.
It will be easy. I will make it easy.
But all I have for the moment is a song to pass the time.
A melody to keep me from worrying.
Oh, some simple progression to keep my fingers busy.
And some words that are sure to come back to me and they will be laughing.
My mediocrity. My mediocrity.