Raul > Recent Status Updates

O you blessed, whole ones, you
who seem to be the beginning of hearts.
Bows for arrows, targets for darts,
more everlasting your smile shines through the tears.

Don't fear to suffer pain;
give the heaviness back to earth's weight again;
heavy are mountains, heavy the seas.

"Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds."

"...I knew what she must have gone through, seeing her past go swiftly by in front of her. What an awful thing that is, as if the ground on which you are standing is being slowly pulled out from under your feet and beneath is nothing, a hole through which you fall forever."

"...I knew what she must have gone through, seeing her past go swiftly by in front of her. What an awful thing that is, as if the ground on which you are standing is being slowly pulled out from under your feet and beneath is nothing, a hole through which you fall forever."

For we know: only love
and the hand of a friend
can lift us high

For we know: only love
and the hand of a friend
can lift us high

"My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom—freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves."

“Many people prefer not to be enlightened. The world terrifies them and yet their very refusal to be enlightened terrifies them more. They are vaguely aware that ‘all is not right in the state of Denmark’, they are constantly tugged this way and shattered by this so they flee to God to protect them from their fears.”

"As for Martha, it had occurred to her that this compulsive process of analysis and comparison was nothing but an excuse for doing nothing."

"Like us, our children will reckon with the small and large shocks that overturn what today seems to them stable and conclusive. And, like us, they will learn to their cost that nothing, for good and for ill, is given to us forever, and that our fundamental rights have to be won over and over again."

"Never mind," he repeated. "Yours is not the worst of sorrows. Life is long, there is good and bad yet to come, there is everything yet to come..."

"Books. Words. There must surely be some patterns of words which would neatly and safely cage what she felt–isolate her emotions so that she could look at them from outside."

"There was nothing more paradoxical about her situation than that, while she insisted on being unique, individual, and altogether apart from any other person, she could be comforted in such matters only by remarks like 'Everybody feels this" or "It is natural to feel that."

"And dismal thoughts prevented him from enjoying himself, and he kept thinking that all about him was not life but scraps of life, fragments, that everything here was accidental, that one could draw no conclusion from it..."

"I felt emptied-out and peaceful - like when you've had a toothache and it stops for a bit, and you know quite well it's going to start again but just for a bit it's stopped."

It's funny when you feel as if you don't want anything more in your life except to sleep, or else, to lie without moving. That's when you can hear time sliding past you, like water running.

"History is messy for the people who must live it."

The eighteenth century followed the same path with a touch of perversity: the more European merchants and mercenaries bought and conquered other men and women, the more European philosophers wrote and talked about Man. Viewed from outside the West, with its extraordinary increase in both philosophical musings and concrete attention to colonial practice, the century of the Enlightenment was also a century of confusion

“The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still. Like when they say, ‘As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.’”

"When reality does not coincide with deeply held beliefs, human beings tend to phrase interpretations that force reality within the scope of these beliefs. They devise formulas to repress the unthinkable and to bring it back within the realm of accepted discourse."

"Archives assemble. Their assembly work is not limited to a more or less passive act of collecting. Rather, it is an active act of production that prepares facts for historical intelligibility. Archives set up both the substantive and formal elements of the narrative."

"Between killing and dying there is a third alternative: living."

"Why do I go on living if not to learn the things one learns before death?"

"The classification of all non-Westerners as fundamentally non-historical is tied also to the assumption that history requires a linear and cumulative sense of time that allows the observer to isolate the past as a distinct entity. Yet Ibn Khaldhún fruitfully applied a cyclical view of time to the study of history."

"History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots."

"The suffering was simply too great to take in: ‘It seemed to almost everyone that one became stupefied by seeing the pain.....Boccaccio noted that people in Florence stopped weeping at funerals and started cracking jokes instead – a phenomenon he seems to have regarded unsympathetically, although it is a common enough form of emotional self-defence."

"Not all contemporaries shared Gasquet’s views in detail, but there was widespread agreement that the plague had wrought a cataclysmic change, not only in society but within the individual. All the old certainties of the ‘high’ middle ages had been swept away: the feudal system collapsed; respect for social hierarchy and order was undermined; and the intellectual authorities of the past ceased to be believed."

"The truth is nothing like as simple or as straight-forward a thing as Lymie believed it to be. It masquerades in inversions and paradoxes, is easier to get at in a lie than in an honest statement. If pursued, the truth withdraws, puts on one false face after another, and finally goes underground, where it can only be got at in the complex, agonizing absurdity of dreams."

"For many contemporaries the plague fitted easily into the chronology of the Last Days. Its horrors – along with the earthquakes and wars which had preceded it – were identified with the devastation which would follow the unleashing of Gog and Magog. William Dene of Rochester made the connection explicitly, and it is implicit in the biblical phrases used by other writers in their descriptions of the plague."