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