Things Our Heroine Needs to Remember...

just one in a looooooong series.

Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.

-- Thomas a Kempis

Percy as Poem

I've been feasting on the archives at Korrectiv when I should be working.

He caught TB in med school,
bending over the corpses
of bums who died in the street.

He was sent away to rest,
surrender to the only cure:
rest, no exercise, sleep.

And so he read: Nietzsche,
Proust, and his favorite,
“the melancholy Dane.”

Happiness was despair,
he learned, even in America:
smug faces in the checkout lines,
a nation that believed
in bigger cars, more pills,
better bombs.

He thought about his ancestors,
their Delta plain and seas
of cotton, men who were
merely stoics at the end…

One day, he checked himself
out, drove across the country
to New Mexico.

He walked outside, night
after night, his heart
turning to a painful stone.

He saw the darkness between
the distant stars, faint light
at best.

But what if the sky
was only a book, open
to another, more careful
reading?

Out there, in the desert,
anything was possible,
even God.
~~~~~~~~
– William Miller
Literary Review, Winter
2004, Vol. 47 Issue 2, p. 103-4

Of Soren and Socrates

I miss my finger puppet...

The majority of men in every generation, even those who, as it is described, devote themselves to thinking (dons and the like), live and die under the impression that life is simply a matter of understanding more and more, and if it were granted to them to live longer, that life would continue to be one long continuous growth in understanding. How many of them ever experience the maturity of discovering that there comes a critical moment where everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more and more that there is something which cannot be understood. That is Socratic ignorance, and that is what the philosophy of our times requires as a corrective…It is quite literally true that the law is: increasing profundity is understanding more and more that one cannot understand. And there once again comes in “being like a child,” but raised to the second power.

— Soren Kierkegaard

Things I Need Reminding Of - Part I

To live in the past and future is easy. To live in the present is like threading a needle.

- Walker Percy, Lancelot

Humility

"Sometimes I lie awake at night and ask, 'Where did I go wrong?' Then a voice says to me 'This is going to take more than one night.'" -- Charles M. Schultz

Our Heroine Has A Contrite Heart

Out Heroine has been exerting entirely too much control over her life lately, and so it comes as no surprise to her that the results are so unsatisfactory & underwhelming. Y'all, William Cowper knew what ailed me back in 1779:

A Contrite Heart

THE Lord will happiness divine

On contrite hearts bestow;

Then tell me, gracious God, is mine

A contrite heart or no?


I hear, but seem to hear in vain,

Insensible as steel;

If aught is felt, ‘tis only pain

To find I cannot feel.



I sometimes think myself inclined

To love thee, if I could;

But often feel another mind,

Averse to all that’s good.



My best desires are faint and few,

I fain would strive for more:

But when I cry, “My strength renew,”

Seem weaker than before.



Thy saints are comforted, I know,

And love thy house of prayer;

I therefore go where others go,

But find no comfort there.



O make this heart rejoice or ache;

Decide this doubt for me;

And if it be not broken, break,

And heal it if it be.

Awwww, C'Mon

C'mon guys -- if I lose Mad Men so soon after LOST, I will have to see a grief counselor:

The Emmy-winning show is the subject of a bloody battle between creator and executive producer Matthew Weiner and network honchos at AMC. The show has yet to be renewed for a fifth season, and the sides are far apart on a deal. Money is the issue, Deadline and The Daily report, but it has nothing to do with Weiner's contract; the two sides were close to agreeing on a two year, $30 million deal for the mind behind the acclaimed period drama. Instead, the struggle involves budgeting in other areas, namely advertising and even actors.

Read the whole horrible thing. Best case, we have to wait til 2012.