A Heart in Search of Dreams

"My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy confides to the alchemist one night as they look up at a moonless night.


"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself," the alchemist replies. "And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity."


~The Alchemist

Miracles

Rory: Why am I here?


Doctor: Because you are. The universe is big, it's vast and complicated and ridiculous, and sometimes, very rarely, impossible things just happen, and we call them miracles; and that's a theory. In nine hundred years, I haven't seen one yet, but this would do me.

~Doctor Who, "The Pandorica Opens" and "The Big Bang"

The labyrinth is thoroughly known.

"We have not even to risk the adventure alone for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path; and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; and where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; and where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; and where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."

~Joseph Campbell

Tunes for Bears to Dance to...

"He could not understand that human language is like a cracked kettledrum on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when what we long to do is make music that will move the stars to pity."

~Madame Bovary


BBC 7 Radio is running a dramatisation of Madame Bovary that's really good! Check it out here.

The most interesting line

"A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it is by no means the most interesting."


~The Doctor

Hearts have the power to soar...

"Everything visible has again been thrown into the tumultuous abyss to be melted down. The past is relinquished, the future shudders, the present lacks foundations, but the hearts, should not they have the power to soar and hover among the mighty clouds?"


~Rainier Maria Rilke, 1914

You have to find it yourself.

"Truth has never satisfied me. You can't argue with it; you can't let its bicycle tires down to teach it a lesson. All you can do with truth is swap it for other truths, like a postage stamp kept in a collection by your ex-Army uncle.

"But there is something other than truth--something deeper and richer and altogether addictive. And that something is Meaning. You can't see it. You can't buy it. You have to find it yourself."

~Oneira

Pointed.

"It's not just the work. Somebody built the pyramids. Somebody's going to build something. Pyramids, Empire State Building--these things just don't happen. There's hard work behind it. I would like to see a building, say, the Empire State, I would like to see on one side of it a foot-wide strip from top to bottom with the name of every bricklayer, the name of every electrician, with all the names. So when a guy walked by, he could take his son and say, "See, that's me over there on the forty-fifth floor. I put the steel beam in." Picasso can point to a painting. What can I point to? A writer can point to a book. Everybody should have something to point to.

"It's the not-recognition by other people. To say a woman is just a housewife is degrading, right? Okay. Just a housewife. It's also degrading to say just a laborer. The difference is that a man goes out and maybe gets smashed."

~"Mike Lefevre, Steelworker," interview from Working by Studs Terkel


I love Studs Terkel's book. The voices are so vivid. Like this one. Here he is--Lefevre--a blue collar steelworker, and he gets it. He's a modern day philosopher for the common man. And he reads. He's not dull; he's fascinating. Read the whole interview. It's worth it.

The Paradox of an Imperfect World

Continuing the earlier thread with the Zamyatin quote, I discovered this little jewel while reading Michael Moorcock's Sailor on the Seas of Fate featuring the penultimate Philosopher/Reluctant Warrior King, Elric of Melnibone.

"He ran his fingers through his milk-white hair and there was a kind of innocent anguish in his crimson eyes. He might be the last of his kind and yet he was unlike his kind. Smiorgan had been wrong. Elric knew that everything that existed had its opposite. In danger he might find peace. And yet, of course, in peace there was danger. Being an imperfect creature in an imperfect world he would always know paradox. And that was why in paradox there was always a kind of truth. That was why philosophers and soothsayers flourished. In a perfect world there would be no place for them. In an imperfect world the mysteries were always without solution and that was why there was always a great choice of solutions."

(Note: I read the first page of this book during the rehearsal of a high school play--I think Chris Saenz was reading it--It took me this long to get back to it. It was worth the wait: deep philosophical musings, pulse-pounding adventures, and some really beautiful prose. I never knew high fantasy was so much fun!)

95 Days til the Burn

Storm Warning

"A literature that is alive does not live by yesterday's clock, nor by today's, but by tomorrow's. It is a sailor sent aloft: from the masthead he can see foundering ships, icebergs, and maelstroms still invisible from the deck.


"In a storm you must have a man aloft. We are in the midst of a storm today, and SOS signals come from every side. Only yesterday a writer could calmly stroll along the deck, clicking his Kodak; but who will want to look at landscapes and genre scenes when the world is listing at a forty-five-degree angle, the green maws are gaping, the hull is creaking? Today we can look and think only as men do in the face of death: we are about to die--and what did it all mean? How have we lived? If we could start all over, from the beginning, what would we live by? And for what? What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons--horizons seen from mastheads, from airplanes; we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless 'Why?' and 'What next?'


"What is truly alive stops before nothing and ceaselessly seeks answers to absurd, childish questions. Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken--errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs. And if answers be impossible of attainment, all the better! Dealing with answered questions is the privilege of brains constructed like a cow's stomach, which, as we all know, is built to digest cud.


"If there were anything fixed in nature, if there were truths, all this would, of course, be wrong. But, fortunately, all truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number."


~Yevgeny Zamyatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters."




Ah, gotta love those Russians. Nobody does Revolution better... except, perhaps, the French. But I digress...


Zamyatin, along with the quote above, is referenced in Ursula K. Le Guin's book of essays, The Language of the Night (a book that I am proud to say I have loved into a state of near disintegration). He is primarily known for writing the dystopian science fiction novel We, which is credited as the forerunner of, if not the direct influence for, Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World. I read 1984 in my teens and Brave New World in my 30s; I found them deeply disturbing. I have no doubt We offers more of the same. I have this sense of checked impulse; I am both fascinated and repulsed by the dystopic vision.


And yet, I do believe that Zamyatin is right in his assertion that Art should disturb, that it should ruffle the calm waters of complacency and question the very things we take for granted. Science Fiction does this especially well, when it is done right, and provides an answer, if not silences completely, those naysayers who don't believe genre fiction has anything to offer the world of Literature.


Zamyatin wrote those words almost 100 years ago, and they are no less true now. I am only left with more questions though. Who? Who are the ones in the mastheads today, the ones asking those "absurd childish questions"? The answer, I am certain, will be ongoing, with each new book I read. I'll try to find out for you...






97 Days til the Burn

Nobody Ever Brings Anything Small...

Harvey and I sit in the bars... have a drink or two... play the juke box. And soon the faces of all the other people they turn toward mine and they smile. And they're saying, "We don't know your name, mister, but you're a very nice fella." Harvey and I warm ourselves in all these golden moments. We've entered as strangers - soon we have friends. And they come over... and they sit with us... and they drink with us... and they talk to us. They tell about the big terrible things they've done and the big wonderful things they'll do. Their hopes, and their regrets, and their loves, and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar. And then I introduce them to Harvey... and he's bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And when they leave, they leave impressed. The same people seldom come back; but that's envy, my dear. There's a little bit of envy in the best of us.

~Elwood P. Dowd

Think Critically and Act with Deliberation

"Cherish therefore the spirit of our people and keep alive their attention. Do not be severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to public affairs, you and I and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors, shall all become wolves."

~Thomas Jefferson

"The logic of democracy begins with public education, proceeds to informed citizenship, and comes to fruition in the securing of rights and liberties. We have been nominally democratic for so long that we presume it is our natural condition rather than the product of persistent effort and tenacious responsibility. [...]

"[Civic literacy] encompasses the competence to participate in democratic communities, the ability to think critically and act with deliberation in a pluralistic world, and the empathy to identify sufficiently with others to live with them despite conflicts of interest and differences in character."

~Benjamin R. Barber, America Skips School

Click here and here.

27 Days til the Burn!

Advice for the Short Term Renter

"Don't live in the world as if you were renting or here only for the summer, but act as if it was your father's house. . . Believe in seeds, earth, and the sea, but people above all. Love clouds, machines, and books, but people above all."

~Nazim Hikmet, 20th century Turkish poet

Antidote for Disappointment

"Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough."


~William Saroyan, "Advice to a Young Writer"

Disappointment

"The question is, does California have anything left to say to America, or to the world, or even to itself, beyond disappointment? [...]

"Americans feel disappointment so keenly because our optimism is so large and is so often insisted upon by historians. And so often justified by history. The stock market measures optimism. If you don't feel optimistic, there must by something wrong with you. There are pills for disappointment. [...]

"What is obsolete now in California is the future. For a century and a half Americans spoke of California as the future when they wanted to escape inevitability. Now the future attaches consequences and promises constriction. Technocrats in Sacramento warn of a future that is overwhelmed by students, pollution, immigrants, cars, fluorocarbons, old people. Or the future is diminished--water quality, soil quality, air quality, education quality, highway quality, life quality. There are not enough doctors for the state's emergency rooms, not enough blue parking spaces outside, not enough oil, not enough natural gas, not enough electricity. More blackouts, more brownouts, too many air conditioners, too few houses, frogs on the verge of extinction, a fugitive middle class. A state without a white center. To the rest of the nation California now represents what the a nation fears to become."

~Richard Rodriguez, "Disappointment" from California

So Much Better

Elton dancing to ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky"

"So there you go--turns out I've had the most terrible things happen. And the most brilliant things. Sometimes, well, I can't tell the difference. They're all the same thing--they're just . . . me.

"You know Stephen King said once, he said, 'Salvation and damnation are the same thing,' and I never knew what he meant. But I do now. [...]

"But the thing is [...] what I wanted to say is . . . you know when you're a kid they tell you it's all grow up, get a job, get married, get a house, have a kid, and that's it.

"No . . . But truth is, the world is so much stranger than that. It's so much darker, and so much madder . . .

"And so much better."

~Elton Pope, Doctor Who, Second Season, "Love and Monsters"

A dream of human decency

from the Afterword

"...and I want you all to remember -- that you must not dream yourselves back to the times before the war, but the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create an ideal of human decency, and not a narrow-minded and prejudiced one. That is the great gift our country hungers for, something every little peasant boy can look forward to, and with pleasure feel he is a part of -- something he can work and fight for."

~Kim Malthe-Bruun, resistance leader, age 21, on the night before his execution, Denmark, c. 1943.

Ashes to Ashes

"And how can man die better

Than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers,

And the temples of his gods."

~Doctor Who, Second Season, "The Impossible Planet"

from "Horatius" by Thomas Babbington Macaulay

All Things Brave and Beautiful

"I wanted to write a book about people doing brave and beautiful things in an ugly world."

~Markus Zuzak

This book was on my reading list this summer. It's absolutely brilliant. So when I heard that Aussie author Markus Zuzak was appearing at Kepler's in Menlo Park, well, I had to go, didn't I. He told some really wonderful stories (which I hope to post at some point) and right in the middle of it all we had the earthquake. He quit talking and everyone was just sort of sitting there, riding it out. And the quake kept rolling, and someone shouted out, "Welcome to California!" Then everyone laughed. Kudos to him, he remained completely unruffled by the experience, and even made a few jokes about being the closest to the only table in the room.

The Book Thief is truly marvelous, a book that I wish I had written myself.

"One may tolerate a world full of demons for the sake of an angel."

~Madame de Pompadour, The Girl in the Fireplace

Doctor Who, Season Two