[Image: “L’Empire des lumières” (commonly translated as “The Empire of Light,” although I’ve also seen it as “The Dominion of Light” — which I myself rather prefer), by René Magritte. This is one of somewhere between a dozen and sixteen works by Magritte bearing the same title, all on the same general theme: a quiet street scene at night, illuminated here and there by individual lamps… while overhead, the sky is a daytime sky. All the paintings in the series were painted over the last couple decades of Magritte’s life. As for how I got to this painting for today’s post, let’s just say I blame Elizabeth Spires’s “Pome,” below.]

From whiskey river:

Most people believe it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern and imitates it; he doesn’t even choose the pattern he imitates: he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him. And yet I verily believe there are other things to be read in man. But people don’t dare to — they don’t dare to turn the page. Laws of imitation! Laws of fear, I call them. The fear of finding oneself alone — that is what they suffer from — and so they don’t find themselves at all. I detest such moral agoraphobia — the most odious cowardice I call it. Why, one always has to be alone to invent anything — but they don’t want to invent anything. The part in each of us that we feel is different from other people is just the part that is rare, the part that makes our special value — and that is the very thing people try to suppress. They go on imitating. And yet they think they love life.

(André Gide [source (in a slightly different translation)])

…and:

It is in this darkness, when there is nothing left in us that can please or comfort our own minds, when we seem to be useless and worthy of all contempt, when we seem to have failed, when we seem to be destroyed and devoured, it is then that the deep and secret selfishness that is too close for us to identify is stripped away from our souls. It is in this darkness that we find true liberty. It is in this abandonment that we are made strong. This is the night which empties us and makes us pure.

Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created for spiritual JOY. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and spiritual joy you have not yet begun to live.

(Thomas Merton [source])

…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book):

Mindful

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for—
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world—
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant—
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these—
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

(Mary Oliver [source])

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