Ecclesiastes 5

Much dreaming and many words are meaningless. Therefore stand in awe of God.

excerpts, Bright Eyes--Bowl of Oranges

The rain, it started tapping on the window near my bed. There was a loophole in
my dreaming, so I got out of it. And to my surprise my eyes were wide and
already open. Just my nightstand and my dresser where those nightmares had just
been. So I dressed myself and left them, out into the gray streets. But
everything seemed different and completely new to me. The sky, the trees,
houses, buildings, even my own body. And each person I encountered, I couldn't
wait to meet. and I came upon a doctor who appeared in quite poor health. I said "there is nothing that I can do for you that you can't do
for yourself." He said "Oh yes you can. Just hold my hand. I think that would
help." So I sat with him a while and then I asked him how he felt. He said, "I
think I'm cured. In fact, I'm sure. Thank you stranger, for your therapeutic smile."

So that is how I learned the lesson that everyone is alone. And your eyes must
do some raining if you are ever going to grow. But when crying don't help and
you can't compose yourself. It is best to compose a poem, an honest verse of longing or a simple song of hope. That is why I'm singing... Baby don't worry cause now I
got your back. And every time you feel like crying, I'm gonna try and make you laugh. And if I can't, if it just hurts too bad, then we will wait for it to pass and I will keep you company through those days so long and black. And we'll just keep working on the problem we know we'll never solve of Love's uneven remainder, our lives are fractions of a whole. But if the world could remain within a frame like a painting on a wall. Then I think we would see the beauty then. We would stand staring in awe at our still lives posed like a bowl of oranges, like a story told by the fault lines and the soil.

excerpts, The Little Prince

But certainly, for us who understand life, figures are a matter of indifference. I should have liked to begin this story in the fashion of the fairy-tales. I should have like to say: "Once upon a time there was a little prince who lived on a planet that was scarcely any bigger than himself, and who had need of a sheep . . ."

To those who understand life, that would have given a much greater air of truth to my story.

--The Little Prince

excerpts, "Sylvia Plath"

I wish I had a Sylvia Plath
Busted tooth and a smile
And cigarette ashes in her drink
The kind that goes out and then sleeps for a week
The kind that goes out on her
To give me a reason, for well, I dunno
And maybe she'd take me to France
Or maybe to Spain and she'd ask me to dance
In a mansion on the top of a hill
She'd ash on the carpets
And slip me a pill
Then she'd get pretty loaded on gin
And maybe she'd give me a bath
How I wish I had a Sylvia Plath
And she and I would sleep on a boat
And swim in the sea without clothes
With rain falling fast on the sea
While she was swimming away, she'd be winking at me
Telling me it would all be okay
Out on the horizon and fading away
And I'd swim to the boat and I'd laugh
I gotta get me a Sylvia Plath
And maybe she'd take me to France
Or maybe to Spain and she'd ask me to dance
In a mansion on the top of a hill
She'd ash on the carpets
And slip me a pill
Then she'd get pretty loaded on gin
And maybe she'd give me a bath
How I wish I had a Sylvia Plath
I wish I had a Sylvia Plath

--Ryan Adams

Arrivals

I am here: Surburbia, IL.

excerpts, Notes from Underground

"I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts."

--Opening lines, Fyodor Dostoevsky

excerpts, True Love Will Find You In The End

True love will find you in the end
You'll find out just who was your friend
Don’t be sad, I know you will,
But don’t give up until
True love finds you in the end.

This is a promise with a catch
Only if you're looking will it find you
‘Cause true love is searching too
But how can it recognize you
Unless you step out into the light?
But don’t give up until
True love finds you in the end.

--Daniel Johnston

excerpts, "The Brothers Karamazov"

"For when I do leap into the pit, I go headlong with my heels up, and am pleased to be falling in that degrading attitutde, and pride myself upon it. And in the very depths of that degradation I begin a hymn of praise. Let me be accursed. Let me be vile and base, only let me kiss the hem of the veil in which my God is shrouded. Though I may be following the devil, I am Thy son, O Lord, and I love Thee, and I feel the joy without which the world cannot stand."

--Dmitri.

(Dostoevsky)

excerpts: "Seeing" from "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"

"It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek; the sun was low in the sky, upstream. I was sitting on the sycamore log bridge with the sunset at my back, watching the shiners the size of minnows who were feeding over the muddy sand in skittery schools. Again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a split second across the currecnt and flash! the sun shot out from its silver side. I couldn't watch for it. It was always just happening somewhere else, and it drew my vision just as it disappeared: flash, like a sudden dazzle of the thinnest blade, a sparking over a dun and olive ground at chance intervals from every direction. Then I noticed white specks, some sort of pale petals, small, floating from under my feet on the creek's surfact, very slow and steady. So I blurred my eyes and gazed towarrds the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll up, like the worlds's turning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time. Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone."
...
"The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hunderd deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literarature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return from the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name. Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in my mouth Ailinon, alleluia! I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff."


--Annie Dilliard, who writes well.

excerpts, "Opening the Bible"

The New Testament asserts that the full manifestation of God is in fact a self-emptying (kenosis) in which God becomes man and even submits to death at the hands of men... The word of God is now not only event but person, and the entire meaning and content of the Bible is to be found, say the Apostles, not in the message about Christ but it an encounter with Christ, who is at once person and word of God and who lives as the Risen Lord. The fulness of the Bible is, then (for Christians), the personal encounter with Christ Jesus in which one recognizes him as "the one who is sent" (the Messiah or anointed Lord, Kyrios Christos). He contains in himself all the questions and all the answers, all the hope and all the meanings, all the problems and all the solutions. To become utterly committed to this person and to share in the event which is his coming, his death, and his resurection is to find the meaning of existence, not by figuring it out but by living it as he did.

--Thomas Merton

excerpts, Spleen

And Life, a little bald and gray,
Languid, fastidious, and bland,
Waits, hat and gloves in hand,
Punctilious of tie and suit,
(Somewhat impatient of delay)
On the doorstep of the Absolute.

---

T.S. Eliot

excerpts, Across the Universe

Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup,
They slither while they pass, they slip away across the universe
Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my opened mind,
Possessing and caressing me.

Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes,
That call me on and on across the universe,
Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box they
Tumble blindly as they make their way
Across the universe

Sounds of laughter shades of earth are ringing
Through my open ears inciting and inviting me
Limitless undying love which shines around me like a
Million suns, it calls me on and on

Across the universe

Nothings gonna change my world.

---
John Lennon