Against Botticelli 1 In the life we lead together every paradise is lost. Nothing could be easier: summer gathers new leaves to casual darkness. So few things we need to know. And the old wisdoms shudder in us and grow slack. Like renunciation. Like the melancholy beauty of giving it all up. Like walking steadfast… Continue reading Robert Haas
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time. — Mary Oliver, Blue Pastures. (Mariner Books; 1 edition November 10, 1995)
In a dream I meet my dead friend. He has, I know, gone long and far, and yet he is the same for the dead are changeless. They grow no older. It is I who have changed, grown strange to what I was. Yet I, the changed one, ask: “How you been?” He grins and… Continue reading Wendell Berry
Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face – the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man – all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us – we have… Continue reading Christopher Isherwoo
The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the… Continue reading Derek Alcott
I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and… Continue reading F. Scott Fitzgerald
These are the dog days, unvaried except by accident, mist rising from soaked lawns, gone world, everything rises and dissolves in air, whatever it is would clear the air dissolves in air and the knot of day unties invisibly like a shoelace. The gray-eyed child who said to my child: “Let’s play in my yard.… Continue reading Robert Hass
We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves. — Leonora Carrington, The House of Fear. (Plume March 30, 1990) Originally published 1988.
At our age the imagination across the sorry facts lifts us to make roses stand before thorns. Sure love is cruel and selfish and totally obtuse— at least, blinded by the light, young love is. But we are older, I to love and you to be… Continue reading William Carlos Williams
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home. It is a journey we can… Continue reading Wendell Berry
The Vale of Soul-Making 