Paul > Recent Status Updates

“Distance Not Time”: “I want to be more than one brief life / that will become frail, but rather a journey / over plains, glaciers, and oceans, / with people whose language / has no past tense, so we forgive / and continue to tell happy stories / of where we have traveled / beyond this place… So now I need you to know the mystery, / that neither of these grow here, / not in this place.” (63)

“I think all this wile I am stopped, / waiting for an old turtle to cross the road. / She carries her known past / in the amazing design of shell, / the claws, a being all whole and unbroken, / She is so old the moss grows on her back. / All this while in the distance waiting.” (57)

“But another power swallows us now. / It steals hearts and souls. Then more. / It steals the mind. My friend said of our present lives, / a mind is a terrible thing to steal.” (49)

“They still loved life, / so why don’t you?” (52)

“Power eats the world. / It swallows the waters / that come out of earth.” (47)

“The old ones knew true riches: / each plant, each stone, all the creeks, / human tributaries, / the story of what transpired/ in every place, / and now what has happened there.” (48)

“I know prayers rise with smoke / the way some people / are so perfectly uplifted / from their first roots. / But when this life of trying is finally over, / bring to my bed a small branch / smelling of green forest, / the melting pure water of snow, / these mysteries discovered / one more time.” (32)

“It’s the largest organ of the body and I wish / I could tell you what it was to lose so much of it… just like the underground strands of communication / from tree to tree.” 39)

“It is hard for some to know / the world is a living being. / They live with forgotten truth / replaced with belief.” (26) “You can weep over such things / as lost love, or the padding of loved ones, / but always remember those birds, the bison, / their grief, too, and how the land hurts / in more chambers than one small heart / may ever hold.” (27)

“The hands have their reasons / unknown to the heart, / a needed touch, / the kindness of another skin. // The fingers have their own aims, / to make beauty, to touch softly / something to live by.” (22)

“I have grown, I have grown older? / Never will I not love / this skin which is created of those women… the left between my legs, / the belly still so gently soft, / all the skin so once tight / but loosening now / as if there is more, much more / room for life, / for this body, more love to live inside / the beauty I have become / made flesh, / warmer now than the water.” (8)

“A human does throw off the bonds if she can, if she tries, if it’s possible. / The body is so finely a miracle of its own, created of the elements / of anything that lived on earth / where everything that was / still is.” (6)

“But the red part I recall the most / had to do with generosity, and then / our giving up the taken land and forest / to those who wanted it so. / We parted with our clothing, / our families, and on our way / we left the red farewell / of a blood trail along the land / we walked, / writing that became / the book coming after us / with words of truth.” (4)

“Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly... She liked taking deep breaths here.”

“”I see no difference,” replied Fern, still hanging on to the ax. “This is the most terrible case of injustice I ever heard of.”
A queer look came over John Arable’s face. He seemed almost ready to cry himself.”
“All right, he said. “You go back to the house and I will bring the runt when I come in. I’ll let you start it on a bottle, like a baby. Then you’ll see what trouble a pig can be.”” (3)

“Nothing makes a man come to grips more directly with his conscience than the Presidency.... The burden of his responsibility literally opens up his soul. No longer can he accept matters as given; no longer can he write off hopes and needs as impossible.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

“The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.” ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

“History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all we do.” ~ James Baldwin

“It is very hard to describe that feeling... What struck me was the fact that she was singing, as you say, about a disaster, which had almost killed her, and she accepted it and was going beyond it. The fantastic understatement in it. It is the way I want to write, you know. When she says, “My house fell down, and I can’t live there no more”—it is a great... a great sentence. A great achievement.” (3)

Bessie Smith’s “Back Water Blues” (1927): “When it thunders and lightning and the wind begins to blow, / When it thunders and lightning and the wind begins to blow, / There’s thousands of people / They ain’t got no place to go. / My house fell down, / And I can’t live there no more.” (3)

Orhan Pamuk’s The New Life: “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.” (viii)

Wallace Stevens’ “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”: “We say God and the imagination are one... / How high that highest candle lights the dark.” (2)

“In 1977 the heart icon became a verb. The “I love NY” logo was created to boost morale for a city that was in severe crisis. Trash piled up on the streets, the crime rate spiked, and New York City was near bankruptcy. Hired by the city to design an image that would increase tourism, Milton Glaser created the famous logo that has since become both a cliché and a meme.” (219)

“These rings produced in the fishing village of Claddagh near Galway were inscribed with a heart symbolizing love that was placed between two open hands symbolizing friendship and surmounted by a crown symbolizing loyalty... Some of the most elegant items are unisex wedding bands that combine the Claddagh heart with Celtic eternity knots as a joint expression of enduring love and Irish identity.” (184)

“Yet most of all, as in the Middle Ages when the heart icon was born, it continues to represent the ineffable allure of romance and our shared belief, since around 1800, that love should be the primary ingredient in the choice of a spouse.” (178)

“Americans have had a love affair with the heart for a very long time. From colonial times to the present, the heart has adorned a plethora of everyday items suitable for a democratic society. No longer reserved for the elite, the heart belongs to everyone. We call upon it to express our deepest emotions, from love to loss. When misfortune strikes, it symbolizes our broken hearts and our sympathy for others.” (178)

“In 1741 the Foundling Hospital was established in London for the city’s sizeable number of abandoned children. Along with their babies, mothers often left tokens of love, such as a piece of jewelry or a poem, which could be used in identifying the child of the mother ever came back to claim the boy or girl. Unfortunately, most of the mothers never saw their children again.” (159)

“Locke contributed considerably to the new cartography of the self in Western thought. Along with other seventeenth-century thinkers, Locke gave the heart a sound beating. Henceforth, Enlightenment philosophers as well as physicians would conceptualize the heart materialistically and abandon its ancient metaphoric meanings.” (158)

“”The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.” Without denying the value of reason, Pascal pointed to a different kind of knowledge perceived instinctively by the heart and inaccessible to rational thought. Pascal’s heart remained open to the mystery of love in both its human and divine forms.” (157)

“It has been estimated that the world heart appears more than a thousand times in Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays, almost as often as the word love.” (138)
“In Shakespeare the heart has characterological significance: one’s heart determines one’s destiny.” (139).

“Heart-shaped maps of the world, called cordiform by cartographers, appeared in Europe early in the sixteenth century.” (115)
“Luther’s Rose/Heart”: “Luther argued that the black cross symbolizing Christ’s death, the red heart symbolizing faith, and the white rose symbolizing belief in the Resurrection all reinforced each other.” (126)

“In all these cases the heart was understood as a partial substitute for the person whose body was buried elsewhere. But in the fifteenth century the heart sometimes superseded its status as a partial representative. It wanted to be more independent. It wanted to be the whole person. And so in literature the heart became an individual in its own right.” (103)

“In all these cases the heart was understood as a partial substitute for the person whose body was buried elsewhere. But in the fifteenth century the heart sometimes superseded its status as a partial representative. It wanted to be more independent. It wanted to be the whole person. And so in literature the heart became an individual in its own right.” (103)