Raul > Recent Status Updates

"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."

"Fundamentally, life was so arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all understanding that when you thought about it you were terrified and your heart sank."

"To know the world's injustice requires only a small amount of experience. To accept it without bitterness or envy you need almost the sum total of human wisdom, which Lymie Peters at fifteen did not have."

"Be careful with your life
even when risk seems minimal.
Be careful with your trust
even when love is being claimed.
Be careful to speak exactly what you mean,
lucidness is the first step in becoming.
Honor your every loyalty,
the first being to yourself."

You wanna sleep on my chest?
You wanna listen to my heart beat
all through the night?
It’s the only jazz station
with a twenty-four-hour signal
if you wanna listen.
If you know what I mean.

"Oh Time, the past still present,
pregnant with all about to come,
you walk with me on the cold path,
weaver of the threads of hope and impatience!"

"If a poem becomes common,
passed around, hand to hand, it’s OK:
gold is chosen for coins."

"Words are what one lives for, the things that one really breathes. "

"And first, in the security bred of many harmless marriages, it had been forgotten that Love is no hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the edge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed..."

"She had arrived at something important in life, and she had arrived there unawares, as we so often do."

“Everything passes, life wipes out its own traces.”

"Don't let yourself be paralysed by the bad days, when nothing happens. Something is lying there, turning into something, something that you don't know how to grasp. You feel a wastrel and a criminal. If you try to help, you catch hold of an arm or a leg and everything is at deadlock, like an embryo lying in the wrong position. Yet you must go on tugging and pulling. Life demands it, one must live."

"The imagination of the citizens of America, the world power, who haven't learned to read the faces of the populations they have bombed or bribed, must be based on the assumption that every child on this earth can deem himself fortunate to grow up in the American civilization. This explains their lack of understanding about why other people think their South Vietnamese child-adoption program is obscene."

From Chu Hsi's "Thoughts While Reading":
The mirror of the pond gleams,
Half an acre in size.
The splendor of the sky,
And the whiteness of the clouds
Are reflected back upon themselves.
I ask the pond where I can find
Anything else as pure and transparent.
"Only in the springs of the water of life."

This terrifying world is not devoid of
charms,
of the mornings
that make waking up worthwhile.

Good and evil—
they knew little of them, but knew
all:
when evil triumphs, good goes into
hiding;
when good is manifest, then evil lies
low.
Neither can be conquered
or cast off beyond return.
Hence, if joy, then with a touch of
fear;
if despair, then not without some quiet hope.
Life, however long, will always be
short.
Too short for anything to be added.

"This spring the birds came back
again too early.
Rejoice, O reason: instinct can err,
too."

"Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to
practice."

"What happiness it is to listen to rain at night; joyful relief, ease; a lapping-round and hushing and brooding tenderness, all are mingled together in the sound of the fast-falling rain."

Dec 8 "I thought and thought this morning but not to much avail. I can't think why, but my wits seem to be nearly deserting me when I get back to earth. I am all right - sky high. And even in my brain, in my head, I can think and act and write wonders - wonders; but the moment I really try to put them down I fail miserably."