“The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The Bell”
― Four Quartets
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The Bell”
― Four Quartets
“Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end.”
― The Unnamable
― The Unnamable
“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”
― Waiting for Godot
― Waiting for Godot
“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.”
― Endgame
― Endgame
“The perspiration of kings is just froth of the decanter. But the pawis of peasants dries up, becomes lead that weighs them down the ages. The master wears a necktie; the slave, a grindstone. Between them no relationship is possible except that which exists between mill and grist. And what is private property without public toil? Yet the world perpetuates only the pyramids, only their pharaohs. Nobody remembers or even likes to admit that both came into existence only through brawn and blood that issued from millions upon millions of nameless serfs. You weep over sunken armadas but not over their galleon slaves. You weep over fallen crowns, not for those beheaded. This must stop! We shall stop you! Labor has a face, labor has a name! You don’t romanticize it. . . you feed its belly . . . heal its sores and sons. All written history glorifies the power of men, not the sweat of man. . . . All this feudal nonsense about lilac-strewn palaces and Cleopatra’s bath! Well, the new chronicle will smell as the tao smells. It shall be carpenter over architect, farmer over agrarianist, citizen over president....”
― But for the Lovers
― But for the Lovers
Aric’s 2025 Year in Books
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