"Pity" the guy whose mind leaps to the summer night's distinctive support of reading, and before this image's suggestion. Before, not in lieu of. Anyway that's how low my appreciation of Stevens' line is, because that's the part I feel to be very true. Summer has a pace for a close reading and an expansive feeling of capability at the same time. The fecundity of anything is most fulfilled in summer, and remembered longest thereafter. Look at the guy; isn't it true?
The summers invoked here are probably those between age fifteen or so, and twenty-one or -two. I agree with Anonymous.
When I was 15, my father turned to me that Summer and said, "Here, you haven't read enough Dickens," and handed me Oliver Twist. I had hot dogs with Oliver, I had sunburns with Oliver, I had mosquito bites with Oliver and I have loved Charles Dickens with a passion to this day.
When I was 17, and could lurk about with my own motorcar, that Summer I gave myself a book called The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Gray seemed my age to me, although he wasn't; his friends were like friends to me, although they were not. That was my fault, not Wilde's, and a life of struggle to get that narrative right has shown me, time and again, what a friend its writer is.
When I was 22, and had achieved that great baccaulaureate triumph which we presume must thrill the gods with its lustre - :) - I contracted to sit for the portraitist of Einstein, Mann, Oppenheimer and Bruno Walter, a phenomenally genteel German lady, drenched in Navajo silver and wielding only a handheld Rolleiflex and a single bounce flash. Why was my portrait for my parents not as imposing as that of the theorist of relativity, the genius of the unspoken, the engineer of the secret, and the eliciter of the divinest noises ever written down? She didn't explain, she had me home to dinner in her garden, where in a corner, erect in a white pergola, sat a lady reading Schiller with her bees. Her mother looked up, smiled, and extended her hand.
Friedrich Schiller, in Summer, guys, a life imbued with love from the beginning. Just do it.
Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself. - Jean Dubuffet
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. . . Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
-- His Holiness the Dalai Lama . . .
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The Slabber
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If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies; succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; build anyway.
~ Mother Theresa
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. A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run. -- Elbert Hubbard .
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.My call for a spiritual revolution is thus not a call for a religious revolution. Nor is it a reference to a way of life that is somehow other-worldly, still less to something magical or mysterious. Rather, it is a call for a radical re-orientation away from our habitual preoccupation with self towards concern for the wider community of beings with whom we are connected, and for conduct which recognizes others' interests alongside our own.
- His Holiness the Dalai Lama
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Great men are they who see that the spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. . . Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters. -- José de Sousa Saramago
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Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold. -- William Shakespeare
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Fighting Against Neglect
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Our problems, both those we experience externally such as wars, crime and violence and those we experience internally as emotional and psychological suffering will not be solved until we address this underlying neglect of our inner dimension. That is why the great movements of the last hundred years and more--democracy, liberalism, socialism, and Communism--have all failed to deliver the universal benefits they were supposed to provide, despite many wonderful ideas. A revolution is called for, certainly, but not a political, an economic, or a technical revolution. We have had enough experience of these during the past century to know that a purely external approach will not suffice. What I propose is a spiritual revolution.
In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician but of the man with the best bedside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance.
"Pity" the guy whose mind leaps to the summer night's distinctive support of reading, and before this image's suggestion. Before, not in lieu of. Anyway that's how low my appreciation of Stevens' line is, because that's the part I feel to be very true. Summer has a pace for a close reading and an expansive feeling of capability at the same time. The fecundity of anything is most fulfilled in summer, and remembered longest thereafter. Look at the guy; isn't it true?
ReplyDeleteThe summers invoked here are probably those between age fifteen or so, and twenty-one or -two. I agree with Anonymous.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was 15, my father turned to me that Summer and said, "Here, you haven't read enough Dickens," and handed me Oliver Twist. I had hot dogs with Oliver, I had sunburns with Oliver, I had mosquito bites with Oliver and I have loved Charles Dickens with a passion to this day.
When I was 17, and could lurk about with my own motorcar, that Summer I gave myself a book called The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Gray seemed my age to me, although he wasn't; his friends were like friends to me, although they were not. That was my fault, not Wilde's, and a life of struggle to get that narrative right has shown me, time and again, what a friend its writer is.
When I was 22, and had achieved that great baccaulaureate triumph which we presume must thrill the gods with its lustre - :) - I contracted to sit for the portraitist of Einstein, Mann, Oppenheimer and Bruno Walter, a phenomenally genteel German lady, drenched in Navajo silver and wielding only a handheld Rolleiflex and a single bounce flash. Why was my portrait for my parents not as imposing as that of the theorist of relativity, the genius of the unspoken, the engineer of the secret, and the eliciter of the divinest noises ever written down? She didn't explain, she had me home to dinner in her garden, where in a corner, erect in a white pergola, sat a lady reading Schiller with her bees. Her mother looked up, smiled, and extended her hand.
Friedrich Schiller, in Summer, guys, a life imbued with love from the beginning. Just do it.