"There are times when a man must act as though life were equally sweet in any company. I've know such a time, and, what's more, I shan't now pretend to pull a long face over my necessity, because a good many of that bad company from want of moral---moral---what shall I say?---posture, or from some other equally profound cause, were twice as instructive and twenty times more amusing than the usual respectable thief of commerce you fellows ask to sit at your tables without any real necessity---from habit, from cowardice, from good nature, from a hundred sneaking and inadequate reasons."

"It was solemn, and a little ridiculous, too, as they always are, those struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be, this precious notion of a convention, only one of the rules of the game, nothing more, but all the same so terribly effective by its assumption of unlimited power over natural instincts, by the awful penalty of its failure."

"A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last, the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life. Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person----this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest? Those striving with unreasonable forces know it well---the shipwrecked castaways in boats, wanderers lost in a desert, men battling against the unthinking might of nature, or the stupid brutality of crowds."

----- Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad

"My earliest memory of Larry was when we were starting off. We were at our first rehearsal in his kitchen and all these girls kept climbing over the walls and looking in the window at Larry. Larry just shouted at them and told them to go away. And then turned the hose on them! Larry likes to play drums." -- Bono

"Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don't have to be a complete fool in order to succeed. Play the game, but don't believe in it---that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it your own way----part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate---I wish I had more time to tell you only a fragment. We're an ass-backward people, though. You might even beat the game. It's really a very crude affair. Really pre-Renaissance---and that game has been analyzed, put down in books. But down here they've forgotten to take care of the books and that's your opportunity. You're hidden right out in the open---that is, you would be if you only realized it. They wouldn't see you because they don't expect you to know anything, since they believe they've taken care of that. . . . ."

-----The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

"The tremulous scrupulosity of those who are obsessed with pleasures they love and fear narrows their souls and makes it impossible for them to get away from their own flesh. They have tried to become spiritual by worrying about the flesh, and as a result they are haunted by it. They have ended in the flesh because they began in it, and the fruit of their anxious asceticism is that they "use things not," but do so as if they used them. In their very self-denial they defile themselves with what they pretend to avoid. They do not have the pleasure they seek, but they taste the bitter discouragement, the feeling of guilt which they would like to escape. This is not the way of the spirit. For when our intention is directed to God, our very use of material things sanctifies both them and us, provided we use them without selfishness or presumption, glad to receive them from Him who loves us and whose love is all we desire."

-----"No Man Is An Island", Thomas Merton

"Indifference to evil is the enemy of good, for indifference is the enemy of everything that exalts the honor of man. We fight indifference through education; we diminish it through compassion. The most efficient remedy? Memory.

To remember means to recognize a time other than the present; to remember means to acknowledge the possibility of a dialogue. In recalling an event, I provoke its rebirth in me. In evoking a face, I place myself in relationship to it. In remembering a landscape, I oppose it to the walls that imprison me. The memory of an ancient joy or defeat is proof that nothing is definitive, nor is it irrevocable. To live through a catastrophe is bad; to forget it is worse."

-----On Sept. 11, 2001, Elie Wiesel

This week's New Yorker has some good articles in it, the best of which is probably Claudia Pierpont's piece on Nietzsche. The article can be found here:

www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?020408crbo_books

It's a very good piece which somehow manages to tie Nietzsche's life in with his thought (I've always believed this to be important, but I've never seen it accomplished so succinctly). It's a sympathetic, but not sychophantic, view of his major works and how his life shaped how his works were brought into being and interpreted.

Read it.

"An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man's mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut."

------The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis

. . . and so he parted ways with the Postmodernists. . . .

In the book "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," Hunter S. Thompson talks about standing on a rise outside Vegas at the end of a particularly long and frightening drug trip. In that scene Thompson commented on how he could almost see where the wave of the 60's broke over Vegas and then pulled back. As if the 60's had risen to a great height and beauty and then crashed violently leaving behind a huge void.

In a strange way, Easter Sunday reminds me of Thompson's underground homage to 60's drug culture. . . . all the sins of church-people throughout history. . . .rising up like a great big gaudy/hallucinatory wave crashing on the shore of Christendom, at the feet of Christ.

I consider my own life, the sins of it, no less ridiculous and futile than Thompson's sojourn through the drug culture.

But thanks be to God that he sent his son Jesus to stand in our place and renew us through his great sacrifice. He died so that we will never have to, so that we might have eternal life. Remember it today, believe it, take comfort in it. Don't settle for what Thompson settles for. . . don't settle for making beauty out of suffering alone.

Life is not in the mess, life is in looking through the mess at the joy set before us in the Resurrection of Christ.

"I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this. It is not in my nature to make myself responsible for other people. I find it hard enough to pick my own way along."

"Women think that beauty lies in approximation to a harmonious norm. The only reason why they fail to make themselves indistinguishably similar is that they lack the time and the money and the technique."

"Subtle people, like myself, can see too much ever to give a straight answer. Aspects have always been my trouble."

"What is more tormenting than a meeting after a long time, when all the words fall to the ground like dead things, and the spirit that should animate them floats disembodied in the air?"

"I was greatly attached to her, but I could see even then that her character was not all that it should be. Anna is one of those women who cannot bear to reject any offer of love. It is not exactly that it flatters her. She has a talent for personal relations, and she yearns for love as a poet yearns for an audience. To anyone who will take the trouble to become attached to her she will immediately give a devoted, generous, imaginative, and completely uncapricious attention, which is still a calculated avoidance of self-surrender. . . . This has the sad result too that her existence is one long act of disloyalty; and when I knew her she was constantly involved in secrecy and lying in order to conceal from each of her friends the fact that she was so closely bound to all the others. Or sometimes she would try another technique, that of deadening, by small and steady shocks, the sharpness of jealousy, until in the end the victim became resigned to the liberal scope of her affections, while remaining just as much her slave as ever. I don't care for this; and I saw through Anna very rapidly. Yet my interpretation of her never robbed her of her mystery, nor did her emotional promiscuity ever turn me against her. Perhaps this was because I so constantly felt, like the warm breeze that blows from a longed-for island bringing the seafarer the scent of flowers and fruit, the strength and reality of her tenderness for me. I knew that it was very possible that it was with exactly this charm that she held all her admirers. But it made no difference."

-----Under the Net, Iris Murdoch

Hope is with you when you believe
The earth is not a dream but living flesh
That sight, touch, and hearing do not lie,
That all things you have ever seen here
Are like a garden looked at from a gate.

You cannot enter. But you're sure it's there.
Could we but look more clearly and wisely
We might discover somewhere in the garden
A strange new flower and an unnamed star.

Some people say we should not trust our eyes,
That there is nothing, just a seeming,
These are the ones who have no hope.
They think that the moment we turn away,
The world, behind our backs, ceases to exist,
As if snatched up by the hands of theives.

------Hope, by Czeslaw Milosz

Papa was, he still is, such a dude. And I resemble him, inevitably. Sons are bound to pick up the graces and gestures of their daddies. I was using his conventional tricks and mannerisms before I could know what I was doing. In what follows I may appear to poke fun at him. Disavowal is useless. One is forever finding pockets of venom beside one's best feelings, so let's not ask for the moon. . . . .

Mother didn't like to discuss my attachment to Benn, whereas Father was forever digging up my motives. He said, 'Kenneth, you're one of those continuing-education types and you think Benn still has something to teach you. In return, you have to take care of him because, as Aristophanes would say, he's got his head up his ass.' (Dad disliked vulgar expressions and always found a respectable sponsor for them.)

-----More Die of Heartbreak, Saul Bellow

Life, like holiness, can be known only by being experienced. To experience it is not to "figure it out" or even to understand it, but to suffer it and rejoice in it as it is. In suffering it and rejoicing in it as it is, we know that we do not and cannot understand it completely. We know, moreover, that we do not wish to have it appropriated by somebody's claim to have understood it. Though we have life, it is beyond us. We do not know how we have it, or why. We do not know what is going to happen to it, or to us. It is not predictable; though we can destroy it, we cannot make it. It cannot, except by reduction and the grave risk of damage, be controlled. It is, as Blake said, holy. To think otherwise is to enslave life, and to make, not humanity, but a few humans its predictably inept masters.

------Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, Wendell Berry

"When people are kids their parents teach them all sorts of stuff, some of it true and useful, some of it absurd hogwash (example of former: don't crap your pants; example of latter: Columbus discovered America). This is why puberty happens. The purpose of puberty is to shoot an innocent and gullible child full of nasty glandular secretions that manifest in the mind as confusion, in the innards as horniness, upon the skin as pimples, and on the tongue as cocksure venomous disbelief in every piece of information, true or false, gleaned from one's parents since infancy. The net result is a few years of familial hell culminating in the child's exodus from the parental nest, sooner or later followed by a peace treaty and the emergence of the post-pubescent as an autonomous, free-thinking human being who knows that Columbus only trespassed on an island inhabited by our lost and distant Indian relatives, but who also knows not to crap his pants."

-----The River Why, David James Duncan