Thinking of Disraeli

We do not live in the present because we live through our minds.  We only exist through the present.  My mind is a quantity of eternity, bounded by time but not of it.

arrow point

Less is more.  Usually.  Open space clarifies the essentials left central.  Choices made benefit from open options going forward.  But this is only because of how we inhabit time.  If time were not unidirectional, less would not be more.

next

In an emergency, energy is wisdom.

smart cliches

Someone was just telling me that a draft "Succeeds almost in spite of itself."  Seconds later they're telling me that it's obvious that the writer "put a lot of effort into it, but some things don't quite come off."  While there isn't a strict contradiction in these two statements, it is easy to see that something has gone wrong.

And what went wrong was facilitated or caused by the unmeaning slip into a cliche, here, succeeding in spite of one's self.  The trouble is that this is an intelligent cliche, in that it actually expresses something that is hard to put into a few words without having advance formulation.  So the expression has utility and carries meaning.  And that's the rub - it was being misused.  All the speaker meant was that the draft was a mixed bag of things that worked and didn't, but on balance better than worse.  Perhaps feeling - wrongly - that this observation was too thin, the speaker reaches without realizing for a "smarter" way of putting it - and instead found something smarter that says something else.

fifty-seventh

Tomorrow a new Whole Foods opens a block up from my work.  I pass it every day and have watched it complete.  But today!  Whole Foods' Eve, I suppose.  A crush of activity, inside and out.  Cement workers listen in disbelief to their foreman as he tells them what they're going to rip out, pour, smooth and replace today, just outside.  Carpenters with long grey beards and (carpenter's) pencils stuck over their ears, cutting wood for last adjustments to the check-out counters.  A line of trucks, with drivers perched in their cabs, as amused as me, waiting, watching the hive of activity, taking it all in.  Stacks of empty boxes and scraps that, for once, dwarf the big garbage trucks waiting to haul it all away.  Everyone on the ground with "Hello my name is" tags on their tshirts, somebody's idea of bringing order - or at least identity - to the mass of effort.  Shopping carts, unscratched chrome shining, with blue protective plastic still clinging to new grips.  Potted orchids, already in place, stems trembling in the blow of an air conditioning vent.

sow

Marriage and children: the great wagers.

voting booths, voting boxes

small boxes, reliquaries

Traveler's Rest

The field gate is always shut
But is not a wall.


Silent winds and still hinges
Test the latch and lock


That hold monogamous, and
Wait for a lost key.

glories

Trollope's first-person narration.

Plantagenet

Lovely: The idea that one would half fill a committee, so that one's choices could bring their own choices, and thus serve happily.  The committee is, in terms of independent voices, half its apparent size, and includes helpers that are happy to be at the table.

up from the ooze

Illiteracy - or other forms of disconnectedness - localize and the human spirit and help it congeal into the strands of culture, with their funky tang, that give color and eventually substance to the broader, more sophisticated, all-too connected culture.

This is part of the magic of childhood - within which we were each aboriginals, then with our little tribe.  The smell of fire pits and drying meat.

I remember the mark of lost virginity.  My body had this tang, this slight scent in the crevices.  My own culture of odor-producing skin bacteria.  And the first time I really got up against another person, skin to skin, a hardier and more widespread colony of bacteria crossed over.  And my sweat came to smell like anyone else's.

Trollope

What is snobbery but overt observation?

checkers

Being physically attractive in the ordinary ways: fresh clothes, cut hair, upright gait, pleasant expression.  It's probably the most common, and most benign, game adults can play.

lawyering

The difficulty of service is that it cannot be faked or multiplied.

abstract

There is something spiritual about the internet.

screenname: journeytotheworld

I call this the traveler's chant, 
Sittin' on a train or in the back of a car,
Thinking: Maybe it's me, 
Yes I do have places to be;
And I'll be there.

choose

"Preserving options" is a terrible life strategy, with few exceptions.  Yet few strategies are more common or more express among my peers than this: let no door close.

tranquility of print

Scriptures, potentially the most damaging aspect of religions, are in practice the most reassuring.  This is entirely a matter of medium and age.

today

Endure.  The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all

ever

Energy exceeds intellegence.

Leland

At a certain age, older relations stop filtering their memories.  The 1930s, back on the red clay lot in back of the lumber mill, the rough old house, its walls patched with waxed cardboard.  The older sister that gave her a second-hand bicycle.  The younger sister that rode it to the cotton field, played around with Leland and got pregnant.  Her papa took the bicycle and cut it into pieces.

the grammar of blows

From a spiritual perspective, violence is indistinguishable from magic.