[Product photography: “Volta Coffee, Tea, & Chocolate: Iron Goddess of Mercy,” by Anthony Rue; found it on Flickr. (Used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) See this Wikipedia article for the remarkably apropos story of the “Iron Goddess of Mercy” tea. While the Volta Coffee dot-com website seems defunct, the eponymous Gainesville FL café itself lives on, on Facebook, Instagram, and other social-media sites. We could find a certain grand balance even in that simple online history.]
From whiskey river:
At the end of an age, the denizens of the age still profess to believe that they can understand themselves by the theory of the age, yet they behave as if they did not believe it. The surest sign that an age is coming to an end is the paradoxical movement of the most sensitive souls of the age, the artists and writers first, then the youth, in a direction exactly opposite to the direction laid down by the theory of the age.
(Walker Percy [source])
…and (shared at whiskey river in the more commonly quoted, shorter form; below is the full passage):
Now, there’s a wonderful work of Schopenhauer’s; he says, “When you reach a certain age,” and he wrote this when he was in his 60s or so, “and look back over your life, it seems to have had an order. It seems to have had been composed by someone. And those events that when they occurred seemed merely accidental and occasional and just something that happened, turn out to be the main elements in a consistent plot.” So he says, “Who composed this plot?” And he said, “And just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself, of which your consciousness is unaware, so your whole life has been composed by the will within you.” Then he says, “Just as those people whom you met by chance became effective agents in the structuring of your life, so you have been an agent in the structuring of other lives, and the whole thing gears together like one big symphony,” he says, “everything influencing and structuring everything else.” And he said, “It’s as though our lives were the dream of a single dreamer, in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, and so everything links to everything else, moved out of the will in nature.”
That’s a beautiful idea. It’s an idea that occurs in India, in the image of what’s called the “Nee of Indra” or the net of gems. Where it’s a net of gems where every gem reflects all the other ones. And they also have the idea of a spontaneous and simultaneous arising. Everything arises in relation to everything else, and so you can’t blame anybody for anything; it’s all working around. It’s a marvelous idea. It’s as though there were an intention behind it, and yet it all is by chance. None of us has lived the life that he intended.
(Joseph Campbell [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Something with a Lifespan
How many times
should I look at you and should
I change my life?
Monarch you make
your orange assent to death.
And how much dexterity
can you really teach me?
Does your courage
even map onto these
worldly obligations
to friends, my job, desire
for a little affection in the late
hours of the evening, etc.?I can’t put myself ever
in your head.But I can lie
on your wing, with my left eye
letting my right dart forward
as you do.Don’t ask something
with a lifespan
how to change your life.Ask something you can’t
believe ever lived.
(Katie Peterson [source])
…and:
Deed
Let it finally be Friday, let me drive
downtown before five, park in the one
space left open in front and feed the meter
the exact change it needs. Let me go into the office,
sit and nod, unfold my check on the table
and sign. Let the line not be dotted, let it
be solid. Let it be my name.
Let it be final.Let me pull into the driveway while
it is still light. It’s well past five and well
into October and they are just about
to change the time. Saturday night
on the local news they’ll remind
us all to Fall Back, but I make it in
under the wire. There is still light.
There is still time.I am up the back porch steps, under
the awning, my hand on the back door lock
the realtor left on. Let me remember rightly
the numbers he gave me. Let this not be the dream
of the high school locker with the Master Lock
whose combination you forgot or fumbled, turning
too fast, going too far, everything you’d locked up
irretrievable, lost.
Let the lock fall open, let me leave it
on the steps for the realtor to pick up.
Let him pull up the flimsy stakes
of the sign in the yard that says I can be bought,
let him drive away. Let no Master
enter through my door.Let the house be a disaster, I don’t care.
Let the smoke-framed blanks where another
woman’s pictures marked the wall be the story
of how my edges caught fire and the ash at last
let me see where I stood. Let the cracked
kitchen floor make a map to teach me
where not to step, how not to fall through
and break my very own back.
Let the broken window be a way out,
the broken door a way in. Let me go
to the hardware store and buy the tools
to take the chain off the bedroom door,
let me paint the bathroom pink without asking,
walk naked and unafraid through all my rooms.Let me pick up a broom and sweep
nothing under the rug. Let me sweep it all
into the light. Let me do it. Let there be time.
Let there be light.
(Diane Gilliam [source])
…and:
This man, one of the chief architects of the atomic bomb, so the story runs, was out wandering in the woods one day with a friend when he came upon a small tortoise. Overcome with pleasurable excitement, he took up the tortoise and started home, thinking to surprise his children with it. After a few steps he paused and surveyed the tortoise doubtfully.
“What’s the matter?” asked his friend.
Without responding, the great scientist slowly retraced his steps as precisely as possible, and gently set the turtle down on the exact spot from which he had taken him.
Then he turned solemnly to his friend. “It just struck me,” he said, “that, perhaps for one man, I have tampered enough with the universe.” He turned, and left the turtle to wander on its way.
(Loren Eiseley [source])
…and:
#80: Time stretches out ahead and behind, or to the left or right — depends which way we’re facing. But it looks at all like a straight line to us only because we’re, well, standing on the line. On the other hand, only our corporeal selves must stand there; in our minds — our dreams and waking imaginations — we can quite easily shift ourselves away, step off the line now and again, roam in one and then another direction while glancing back at the supposed “line.”
Looks a lot different to us from out there, doesn’t it?
(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)
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