Kathleen > Recent Status Updates

For some reason I'm not able to get into this right now. I think at the right time, I'll love it, so putting it aside to try again sometime.

Stoicism: "The divinely designed system is called Nature, and our aim in life should be to live in accordance with Nature. Since all things are determined, nothing can escape Nature's laws. But human beings are free and responsible, despite the determinism of fate. The will must be directed to live in accordance with human nature by obeying reason.”

"You see how we two are sitting here, sharing? That's how people have lived in Bombay. That's why Bombay has survive floods, disease, plague, water shortage, bursting drains and sewers, all the population pressures. In her heart there is room for everyone who wants to make a home here."

“Since the Renaissance it has been traditional to regard the Academy [Plato] and the Lyceum [Aristotle] as two opposite poles of philosophy. Plato, according to this tradition, was idealistic, Utopian, other-worldly; Aristotle was realistic, utilitarian, commonsensical … In fact … Aristotle took a large part of his philosophical agenda from Plato, and his teaching is more often a modification than a refutation …”

The interweaving and intermingling of the elements, in Empedocles' system, is caused by two forces: Love and Strife. Love combines the elements together, making one thing out of many things, and Strife forces them apart, making many things out of one. History is a cycle in which sometimes Love is dominant, and sometimes Strife ... only the elements are everlasting, and only the cosmic cycle goes on forever.

Happy Birthday, Jane!

"The only cheerful and attractive face in the group was that of a beautiful hunting dog, of the large breed of pointers, whose head was resting on the knees of the younger man."

Give me a dog in the first few pages of a story and chances are I'm going to like it. :-)

I've set this aside too long now. Will continue my re-read in the new year!

“All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself. It seems to me sometimes that we never got used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder.”

"Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create ... Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away."

"… If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end."

“What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance, in the shadow-filled edifice of the world.”

It is why Sir Thomas Mallory called his very long book the Death of Arthur ... It is the tragedy ... of sin coming home to roost. That is why we have to take note of the parentage of Arthur's son Mordred, and to remember, when the time comes, that the king had slept with his own sister. He did not know he was doing so, and perhaps it may have been due to her, but it seems, in tragedy, that innocence is not enough.

The destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys, throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees.

Arthur was a young man, just on the threshold of life. he had fair hair and a stupid face, or at any rate there was a lack of cunning in it. It was an open face, with kind eyes and a reliable or faithful expression, as though he were a good learner who enjoyed being alive and did not believe in original sin ... Merlyn had a white beard which reached to his middle, horn-rimmed spectacles, and a conical hat.

I'm setting this aside for now. I think I'll enjoy it some day--some other day. I was put off in the beginning by the very confusing way the characters were introduced. Then it took on a Magic Mountain feel that made me dread picking it up. Just a note to self to try to get past these hurdles next time!

It was Christmas night in the Castle of the Forest Sauvage, and all around the castle the snow...hung heavily on the battlements, like thick icing on a very good cake and...turned itself into the clearest icicles of the greatest possible length...There was skating on the moat, which roared with the gliding bones which they used for skates, while hot chestnuts and spiced mead were served on the bank to all and sundry.

What do you want to be when you grow up? I always wanted to be the Dog Boy. "In Sir Ector's kennel there was a special boy, called the Dog Boy, who lived with the hounds day and night. He was a sort of head hound, and it was his business to take them out every day for walks, to pull thorns out of their feet, keep cankers out of their ears ... arbitrate in their quarrels and to sleep curled up among them at night."

I've been trying to connect with this book, but it's not working. I believe it will some other time, so will set it aside and try again in the future.

I'm almost halfway, but it is just dragging too much for me, so I'm going to put it aside and try it again maybe in the future.

If I had stayed in Italy I could have had a house in the hills, with white walls and a red-tiled roof. A colonnade shading its entrance, shuttered balconies against the heat; orchards, flowery walks, fountains and a vineyard; a library with frescoes depicting animals and birds, like the paintings in the chapter house at the abbey.

What does God see? Cromwell in the fifty-fourth year of his age, in all his weight and gravitas, his bulk wrapped in wool and fur? Or a mere flicker, an illusion, a spark beneath a shoe, a spit in the ocean, a feather in a desert, a wisp, a phantom, a needle in a haystack? If Henry is the mirror, he is the pale actor who sheds no lustre of his own, but spins in a reflected light. If the light moves he is gone.

'So many words,' Gregory says. 'So many words and oaths and deeds, that when folk read of them in time to come they will hardly believe such a man as Lord Cromwell walked the earth. You do everything. You have everything. You are everything.'

In Yorkshire they sing that old complaint from John Ball's day:
Now pride reigns in every place, and
greed not shy to show its face,
And lechery with never shame, and
gluttony with never blame.
Envy reigns with reason, and sloth is ever
in season.
God help us for now is the time.

Maybe I can't go home again, but I can spend Thanksgiving on Stillmeadow Road.

Sliding into a re-read of one of the best books ever.

First story, "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze"
”If the truth were known, he was half starved, and yet there was still no end of books he ought to read before he died.”

"These days, too, there are times when I feel I can't be sure of anything, that nothing is true, that Adolf may have long ago escaped by submarine to Spain and that Franco is putting him up in a castle where he's sketching plans for Truman about getting the Russians back to Russia. But one thing is beyond doubt--the deep-down feeling of defeat, the certainty of our being at the mercy of the victors."

"There is something strange in the air, though, something I can't put my finger on, something evil, menacing."

SO good. Fascinating stuff, but it's overwhelming me right now so I'm going to save it for a better time.

"You couldn't complain about anything with my father around. he knew that in order to survive, you only needed three things: bread, onions, and soap. Just those three things---that's all...They're no longer with us, our parents, their generation...But if any of them are still around, they should be put in museums, kept under glass so that no one can touch them. They went through so much!"