[Image: “The Abbeycwmhir Panoramic,” by Andrew Bowden. (Discovered it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) The photographer’s caption to this photo of a “crossroad” says, “On the left was a forest road plunging into a deep and dark woodland. On the right, a barren and strangely alien mound. And straight on, our path”… which you have to look hard to see. It helps to enlarge the photo by clicking on it, especially if you’ve got a nice wide monitor. Even better, visit the Flickr link above to see the original — a 9,000-pixels wide monster.]
From whiskey river:
If we knew we were on the right road, having to leave it would mean endless despair. But we are on a road that only leads to a second one, and then to a third one and so forth. And the real highway will not be sighted for a long, long time, perhaps never. So we drift in doubt. But also in an unbelievable, beautiful diversity. Thus the accomplishment of hope remains an always unexpected miracle. But in compensation, the miracle remains forever possible.
(Franz Kafka [source: searched high and low for a definitive one, but this must be a paraphrase — possibly (according to numerous sources which phrase it thusly) from his Diaries])
…and:
[Describing an incident where he felt suspended several feet above the ground enclosed in a white sphere of light, when a voice spoke to him. This was what it said:]
From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.
(R. Buckminster Fuller [source])
…and:
Metonymy as an Approach to a Real World
Whether what we sense of this world
is the what of this world only, or the what
of which of several possible worlds
—which what?—something of what we sense
may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense.
For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance
of travelers, eating foreign foods, trying words
that twist the tongue, to feel that time and place,
not thinking that this is the real world.Conceded, that all the clocks tell local time;
conceded, that “here” is anywhere we bound
and fill a space; conceded, we make a world:
is something caught there, contained there,
something real, something which we can sense?
Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw
the light lie in the deep chasm of a street,
palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in
from say, the sea, a purity of space.
(William Bronk [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Miss Groby taught me English composition thirty years ago. It wasn’t what prose said that interested Miss Groby; it was the way prose said it… What she loved most of all were Figures of Speech. You remember her. You must have had her, too. Her influence will never die out of the land. A small schoolgirl asked me the other day if I could give her an example of metonymy. (There are several kinds of metonymies, you may recall, but the one that will come to mind most easily, I think, is Container for the Thing Contained.)
…”Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” Take that, for instance. There is an unusual but perfect example of Container for the Thing Contained. If you read the funeral oration unwarily — that is to say, for its meaning — you might easily miss the C.F.T.T.C. Antony is, of course, not asking for their ears in the sense that he wants them cut off and handed over; he is asking for the function of those ears, for their power to hear, for, in a word, the thing they contain.
(James Thurber [source (previously cited here)])
…and:
If You Knew
What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?
(Ellen Bass [source])
…and:
…I can hardly rest, so eager am I to immerse myself [in Paris].
But this immersion has its peril. Because of the intensity of my particular desire, what happens to me next is what happens to almost everyone who visits Paris. As anticipation and pleasure fill me with elation, everything I see takes on a chiaroscuro of unrevealed mystery. The more I see, the more shapes of experience and shades of understanding just beyond my reach beckon to me. I read the map, turn it upside down, stop at a café, then summon my last drafts of energy and press on, walking on feet that are burning now, or legs close to folding under the effort, not to, as tourists say, take it all in, because I know in Paris that this is never possible, but to grasp an elusive state of being, signs of which can be found around every bend, tantalizing me, and which, like an exhausted lover on a chase, I want with an increasing passion but never have.
(Susan Griffin [source])
Froog says
I particularly like this week’s selection! I mean, Kafka and Thurber in the same post: bliss!!
The last immediately brought to mind the great line from Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ –
“I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.”
And glimpses of the Welsh countryside strike a nostalgic chord for me now. I’ve been marooned in China again for nearly four months, and am getting restive for a change!
Rather as with the marvellous Brainpickings (my other weekend vice), I always find myself following most of your links – which, in turn, quite often lead to other links, and so on and so on; and then to possible reminiscences and thought-tangents of my own. A quick ‘drop in’ to RAMH usually eats up the first hour of my morning on a Saturday; but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
John says
Welcome to you, sir — always welcome!
Back in China — in the ‘jing again, or Shanghai, or one of those little towns you wandered to? And are you still teaching?
Brainpickings is a wonder, isn’t it? I so much envy Maria Popova’s having the time and other resources needed to keep going there. (Actually, at this point I think the resource in shortest supply here is simple energy. It never ceases to amaze me that I once had it in me to post something here every, single, DAY. Of course, Popova doesn’t post that often; but when she does post, it never feels like she did it while sleepwalking. Her posts are felt, and the products of intention and effort — even on Wednesdays when she digs out gems from the archives.)
It genuinely gladdens my heart to know that you continue to find the Friday posts here worthwhile. Thanks so much!
Froog says
Not Beijing, no. Beijing is over for me. I don’t think I could bear to go back there now. The place I loved 10 or 15 years ago has vanished completely, and all my friends – Chinese and foreign – have long since left too.
I am in the hinterland of Shanghai (so, even though it’s a relatively undeveloped ‘lower tier’ city, the cost of living is wince-makingly high, compared to what I’d grown used to in my early days in the country).
There are no ‘small towns’ in China. Even a ‘village’ typically runs to some thousands, if not tens of thousands of people. Any substantial ‘town’ dwarfs most of our ‘cities’.
And my new home does call itself a ‘city’ – although a very minor and unregarded one. It’s not even a fully autonomous entity, but falls under the jurisdiction – and is often denigrated as merely an ‘exurb’ – of Suzhou (which, in turn, is only the ‘second city’ of the province, though probably the richest), 30 or 40 miles to the south. But it’s a fairly sprawling metropolis, of probably getting on for a million people.
I’ve always been drawn to quieter, less famous, less-foreigner-dense places like this (I think staff at my school probably make up 80 or 90% of the entire foreign population here): friendlier, more laidback – the traffic (what there is of it: very little, outside of the rush hours) stops for you!
But the curse of modernization, Westernization, affluentization (yes, I just made that one up) is everywhere now. Even in a place like this, McD’s, Starbucks, KFC are popping up all over. Traditional street food vendors are dwindling, largely outlawed. Mom & pop hole-in-the-wall restaurants (the thing I’ve always loved most about this country) are becoming few-and-far-between as well. Everything’s becoming a fast-food chain now; what you may gain in consistency and hygiene, you lose ten times over in taste – and ‘atmosphere’.
And, oh my god, the prices!! The rou jia mo (affectionately Westernized as the ‘Roger Moore’: shredded, stewed meat in a small flat bun, ideally served with fresh cilantro and strips of green chilli), even during my final days in Beijing, could still be found in many places for only 3 or 4 RMB (it used to be 1.50 when I first arrived); the other day, one of these new fast-food stalls in a mall charged me 18 for one – and it wasn’t very good.
I have been forced into teetotalism as an economic necessity too. Booze prices have got sky-high. Although many things here (locally produced food, heavily subsidised utilities and public transport) are still very, very cheap, overall the cost of living – especially if you want to go to a bar, eat at foreign restaurant, or treat yourself to some imported food brands – is higher than it is in major cities back home. Really, it is cheaper to drink in London now. So, I’m saving my liver for next summer!!
The job is MAD. The school is ‘prestigious’, respected, but…. new. Hence, badly run and under-staffed. Also, rather bizarrely for a residential school, weekends are (usually) work-free, and Fridays rather slack and under-utilized; this, unfortunately, means that we have to try to cram at least 60 working hours a week mostly into the Monday-through-Thursday period – which leaves us too exhausted to do much with the two or three days off.
My happy South-East Asian interlude was only originally intended to be brief, and a ‘semi-retirement’; but, unfortunately, I couldn’t find a decent job down there, and a serious leg injury hampered my search for one over the last two years. My extensive travels were burning through my savings a little too rapidly, so I’ve been forced to go back into full-time employment for a few years to try to set myself up for a ‘real’ retirement. I had hoped this might be my ‘job for life’: save 99% of my salary for 5 or 6 years, and then return to Cambodia or Laos to await The Reaper with a gin & tonic in my hand.
But I’m having to re-think that. Most of the colleagues who joined with me at the start of this year are contemplating breaking their contracts and quitting after one year. And I’m finding it difficult to conceive of how I could survive more than two.