Jean Cocteau: The actual tragedies of life...
The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizzare which seems inherent in them.
Jean Cocteau, Les Enfants Terribles
French dramatist, director, & poet (1889 - 1963)
Link: Richard Francis Burton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Burton was also accused of having murdered a man on his trip to Mecca. The story was that on the journey he had accidentally revealed himself as a European and killed the man (in some versions a boy) to keep his secret. While Burton often denied this, he was also given to baiting gullible listeners. Famously a doctor once asked him coldly, "How do you feel when you have killed a man?" Burton retorted, "Quite jolly, what about you?" When asked by a priest about the same incident Burton is said to have replied "Sir, I'm proud to say I have committed every sin in the Decalogue.".[19]
And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
Sören Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (1849).
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! 75
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? 80
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, 85
And in short, I was afraid.T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917).
We ask no favours of the enemy. We seek from them no compunction. On the contrary, if tonight our people were asked to cast their vote whether a convention should be entered into to stop the bombing of cities, the overwhelming majority would cry, "No, we will mete out to them the measure, and more than the measure, that they have meted out to us." The people with one voice would say: "You have committed every crime under the sun. Where you have been the least resisted there you have been the most brutal. It was you who began the indiscriminate bombing. We will have no truce or parley with you, or the grisly gang who work your wicked will. You do your worst - and we will do our best." Perhaps it may be our turn soon; perhaps it may be our turn now.
Sir Winston Churchill, July 14, 1941
Excerpted from the Churchill Center website, which modified the speech slightly, in its words, because "In this evergreen form it serves as commentary on a day that will live in infamy, 11 September 2001." It's not forgotten how kind, how much the British stood as brothers in arms to us on that day. I have no doubt - indeed, I have pride in the contrary - that my people and my nation will stand as brothers in arms with the United Kingdom.
Perhaps Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone said it best today:
"I know that you do fear you may fail in your long term objective: to destroy our free society. And I will show you why you will fail.
"In the days that follow, look at our airports, look at our seaports and look at our railways.
Nothing you do, however many of us you kill will stop that life. Where freedom is strong and people can live in harmony, whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail."
Things will be quiet, probably for the remainder of at least this week, if not well into next week, during which time I will be struggling with setting up a new apartment and setting up my home network. For those that have emailed me and wondered why I haven't responded while posts have been popping up on this site regularly, I've been off the network for about two weeks now, with a lot of pre-packaged posts set up in the hopes that I could transition to the new location without interruption.
For those that need to reach me, mark your emails with "URGENT" or, if you have my cell phone number, attempt to contact me in that fashion.
In the meantime, I'll leave you with my favorite Zen meditation, as transcribed by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki. It's the one that I take with me everywhere.
SOYEN SHAKU, the first Zen teacher to come to America, said: 'My heart burns like fire but my eyes are cold as dead ashes.' He made the following rules which he practiced every day of his life.
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In the morning before dressing, light incense and meditate.
Retire at a regular hour. Partake of food at regular intervals. Eat with moderation and never to the point of satisfaction.
Receive a guest with the same attitude you have when alone. When alone, maintain the same attitude you have in receiving guests.
Watch what you say, and whatever you say, practice it.
When an opportunity comes do not let it pass by, yet always think twice before acting.
Do not regret the past. Look to the future.
Have the fearless attitude of a hero and the loving heart of a child.
Upon retiring, sleep as if you had entered your last sleep. Upon awakening, leave your bed behind you instantly as if you had cast away an old pair of shoes.
Soyen Shaku, quoted in Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings, 43 (Tuttle 1998).
It's worth checking out Soyen Shaku's Zen For Americans, which can be found here and was originally published, in 1906, as Sermons of a Buddhist Abbot. Shaku was the Abbot of Great Britain and, in 1893, was the first Abbot of Zen Practice to speak on the belief in the United States.
The freedom to criticise ideas, any ideas - even if they are sincerely held beliefs - is one of the fundamental freedoms of society. A law which attempts to say you can criticise and ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed.
Rowan Atkinson, quoted in BBC News, Religious jokes 'won't be crime' (Dec. 7, 2004), cited in Little Green Footballs.
Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what has drawn your soul aloft, what has mastered it and at the same time blessed it? Set up these revered objects before you and perhaps their nature and their sequence will give you a law, the fundamental law of your own true self. Compare these objects one with another, see how one completes, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they constitute a stepladder upon which you have clambered up to yourself as you are now.
Friedrich Nietzsche, cited at Pejmanesque, Thought for the Day (Nov. 8, 2004)
NB: I try to wait a while before posting a quote from another site in its entirety, as here. It doesn't seem fair to do that immediately, thereby stealing the thunder of the party that originally posted the quote. Still, I'm pretty sure that Pejman has little to worry about with regard to me stealing his thunder. His is a cool site. I visit it often, just to see his collection of sometimes-political, sometimes-literary, posts.
Trenton, New Jersey
What I've kept with me
And what I've thrown away
And where the hell I've ended up
On this glary random day
Were the things I've really cared about
Just left along the way
For being too pent up and proudWoke up way too late
Feeling hungover and old
And the sun was shining bright
And I walked barefoot down the road
Started thinking about my old man
Want to get into a car and go anywhere- Ben Folds Five, Evaporated
When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
(From When You Are Old, at Pejmanesque)
Yet another reminder that William Butler Yeats was one of the greatest modern poets. I've been a fan since the first time I read The Second Coming.
The Second Coming
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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