A Commonplace Book: August 2011

Should lanterns shine

The ball I threw while playing in the park

Has not yet reached the ground.

- Dylan Thomas

We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort.

And that is why we write.

- Neil Gaiman (Newbery Award Acceptance Speech)

Last words

I must go in. The fog is rising.

- Emily Dickinson

Platitude for the Day

Young people in China see Christianity as the modern way of thinking, the way of the future, the bright shining way forward, the religion of bold new ideas, the religion that dares to say: a guy died on a stick to save you from a talking snake.

The truth

When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.

— Steve Jobs

Tender is the night

Afterward he just sat, happy to live in the past. The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future, as if they were about to happen again.

- F Scott Fitzgerald

Help Me

I am falling, I am fading, I am drowning
Help me to breathe
I am hurting, I have lost it all
I am losing
Help me to breathe

- Duvet

Nulla dies sine linea

No day without a blog post.

The meaning of life

The meaning of life is that it stops.

– Kafka

A hell of a good universe

Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go.

- e. e. cummings

A couple laughing together

I once saw a couple laughing together in the car ahead of me and I sounded my horn in anger.

- J G Ballard, Miracles of Life

The drowned and the saved

I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day. Actually, the experience of the Lager with its frightful iniquity confirmed me in my nonbelief. It has prevented me, and still prevents me, from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice . . . I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in October 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death . . . I was waiting to file past the ‘commission’ that with one glance would decide whether I should go immediately into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instance I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a nonbeliever is capable. I rejected the temptation: I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it.

- Primo Levi

Jehovah's scientists

I have never been cornered by a group of people and asked if I've considered making the most of my brief, terminal existence in an uncaring universe, or had my doorbell rung by people who wished to leave me pamphlets about the latest scientific discoveries, or seen news stories about groups of unbelievers shooting each other based on their respective understanding of the atomic weight of lead.

- Anon

Our younger selves

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

—Joan Didion

A book

A book I have, a friend gave,
Whose pencil, here and there,
Had notched the place that pleased him,--
At rest his fingers are.

Now, when I read, I read not,
For interrupting tears
Obliterate the etchings
Too costly for repairs.

- Emily Dickinson

Tonight

Tonight I think no poetry will serve

- Adrienne Rich

To be continued

As far as I'm concerned, I'm a writer who's writing books and therefore I don't want to die. You'd miss the end of the book wouldn't you? ... You can't die with an unfinished book.

- Terry Pratchett

Dew

Like the pearl of dew
On the grass in my garden
In the evening shadows,
I shall be no more.

Hector

And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses.

- Homer, The Iliad

It was good while it lasted

And if it only lasted
The Biblical span
Required to drop six feet
Through a glitter of wintry light,
There is No-One to blame.
Still, I am haunted
By that landscape,
The soft rush of its winds,
The uprightness of its
Utilities and schoolchildren –
To whom in my will,
This, I have left my will.
I hope they have time,
And light enough, to read it.

- Derek Mahon

Wanting Sumptuous Heavens

Only we, with our opposable thumbs, want
Heaven to be, and God to come, again.
There is no end to our grumbling; we want
Comfortable earth and sumptuous Heaven.
But the heron standing on one leg in the bog
Drinks his dark rum all day, and is content.

- Robert Bly

Sarcasm

Sarcasm is a body's natural defence against stupid.

- Anon

If this is a man

Silence slowly prevails and then, from my bunk on the top row, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen. Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas-chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking anymore? [...] Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again? If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.

- Primo Levi

The healthy

The healthy, the feeling well, when they felt that way, couldn’t remember feeling any other, couldn’t imagine it. They were niftily in their bodies. They were not only out of the range of sympathy; they were out of the range of mere imagining. Whereas the sick could only think of being otherwise. Their hearts, their every other thought, went out to that well person they hated a little but wanted to be. But the sick were sick. They were not in charge. They had lost their place at the top of the food chain. The feeling well were running the show; which was why the world was such a savage place.

- Lorrie Moore, The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

The Good Life

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.

- Marcus Aurelius

A Commonplace Book