March 2012
The practice of psychoanalysis teaches one that mental life is fluid rather than static, involving the continual, dialectical interplay of various states of consciousness, subject-positions, or self-states and modes of being that are sometimes at cross-purposes and in conflict. Living a human life is thus more like sailing, confronting exigencies that are both ever-changing and unpredictable, than...
i thank You God for this most amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes (i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay great happening illimitably earth) how should tasting touching hearing seeing...
“A recent paper about complex trade systems in prehistoric Arizona seems to assume that the only reason pottery was traded from place to place was that every household was avidly collecting sets of imported decorated earthenware. It is not that I would discount the possibility that prehistoric people were as interested as contemporary consumers in collecting things, but isn’t it at least...
“Because I am the first and the last I am the venerated and the despised one I am the prostitute and the saint. I am the bride and the virgin. I am the mother and the daughter, I am my mother’s arms, I am the sterile one, yet my children are numerous, I am the married woman and the unmarried one, I am She who gives birth and She who has never given birth, I am the consolation for the pains of...
“Sometimes he would advise me to read poetry, and would send me in his letters quantities of verses and whole poems, which he wrote from memory. ‘Read poetry,’ he wrote: ‘poetry makes men better.’ How often, in my later life, I realized the truth of this remark of his! Read poetry: it makes men better.”
- Peter Kropotkin / “Memoirs of a...
“i go where i love and where i am loved, into the snow; i go to the things i love with no thought of duty or pity”
- “The Flowering of the Rod” / H.D.
“Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow.”
—
Kahlil Gibran, Broken Wings
“Don’t melt too much into the universe, but be as solid and dense and fixed as you can. We all live together, and those of us who love and know, live so most. We help each other—even unconsciously, each in our own effort, we lighten the effort of others, we contribute to the sum of success, make it possible for others to live. Sorrow comes in great waves—no one can know that better than you—but...
“I loved you once: perhaps that love has yet To die down thoroughly within my soul; But let it not dismay you any longer; I have no wish to cause you any sorrow. I loved you wordlessly, without a hope, By shyness tortured, or by jealousy. I loved you with such tenderness and candor And pray God grants you to be loved that way again.”
-Pushkin
