Raul > Recent Status Updates

"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."

"But the realization that wasted time can never be regained becomes more and more irrefutable."

"But in fact one cannot be certain of anything, people can be so changed by life."

"I bought a book by Henry James yesterday and read it, as they say, 'until far into the night.' It was not very interesting or very good, but I can wade through pages and pages of dull, turgid James, for the sake of that sudden sweet shock, that violent throb of delight that he gives me at times. I don't doubt this is genius: only there is an extraordinary amount of pan and an amazingly raffiné flash."

"Life is a hateful business, there's no denying it."

"A person who's not afraid to know the truth can't be deceived for long. But since everybody fears some form of truth, one person's deceit usually matches the other's denials, and that's what we call compatibility."

"And something dawned on her. All the pain, all the vain longing, all the disappointed hope, all the anxiety and privation, the sudden numbing blows that result in years going by before one understands what happened - all this was knowledge of life."

"Hope, the untiring, again put out surface roots into nowhere, in spite of everything. The pain could not go on forever, nor did it. This evening she seemed to recognize that everything comes to an end, even pain. It burns itself out finally. One dies of it, or it passes out of one's system like an ache that is over. All that is left is a calcification in the mind, a hard scar, that cannot be affected again."

"Nothing is incurable, everything passes."

"And could this perhaps be one of the answers to the question by the Pole Kasimierz Brandys about what enables human beings to live under dictatorships: that they learn to restrict their curiosity to realms that are not dangerous to them?"

"Other people's prying is at the root of secretiveness, which can develop into a need, finally into a habit, and produce dangerous vices and great poetry."

"Money in your pocket makes your step light. It is a sort of credential, giving one again the right to exist and look people in the eyes, to do things that increases one's well being and self-respect: to ask about prices, choose foodstuffs, take them home and eat them, pay debts, smarten oneself up."

"She was wondering what had become of her life; every day she had thought something great was going to happen, and it was all just straying from one terrible disappointment to another."

"What is past is not dead; it is not even past. We cut ourselves off from it; we prétend to be strangers."

"Wonders do not confuse. We call them that
And close the matter there. But common things
Surprise us. They accept the names we give
With calm, and keep them. Easy-breathing then
We brave our next small business. Well, behind
Our backs they alter. How were we to know."

"...Perhaps the boy had never guessed
The trouble with grownups was that under the
magnificent shell of adulthood, just under,
Waited the baby full of tantrums."