Wednesday, October 8, 2008

a tidal wave


Suffering - bodily suffering - is a great privilege. We lose courage so easily. Nothing is the same after suffering. There is a new shadow on everything, a new depth in our words and in the color of the sky. How foolish it is to try to resist suffering. What insignificant wretches we make ourselves into by not sitting still in the center of the suffering and uncovering our eyes. We have to learn how to go with suffering as with a great tidal wave that will take us toward a new world.

- Wallace Fowlie in a letter to Henry Miller, 8 March 1945

Monday, October 6, 2008

dreamers with empty hands

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gSGgmQSoPo

The dreamer seeks vainly to find form and shape that will fit his ethereal essence. Like a celestial tailor, he tries on one body after another, but they are all misfits. Finally he is obliged to return to his own body, to reassume the leaden mold, to become a prisoner of the flesh, to carry on in torpor, pain and ennui.

- Henry Miller
Sexus

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

music

Snatches of a quartet squirted from a cafe with scarlet awnings reminded me of Clea once saying: "Music was invented to confirm human loneliness."

- Lawrence Durrell
Clea

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

faith

...the prodigious paradox of faith, a paradox that makes a murder into a holy and God-pleasing act, a paradox that gives Isaac back to Abraham again, which no thought can grasp, because faith begins precisely where thought stops...

- Soren Kierkegaard
Fear and Trembling

Monday, September 22, 2008

Jazz Club 2008

Photo: Meredith Machemer, chef, caterer and sometimes photographer

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

freedom

"I didn't know that freedom is not a reward or decoration that is celebrated with champagne. Nor yet a gift, a box of dainties designed to make you lick your chops. Oh, no! It's a chore, on the contrary, and a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting."

- Albert Camus
The Fall

Monday, September 15, 2008

big pictures...

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/

the old ethic

"He climbed out of the valley, wondering if he were mad. But if so, he preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free. He did not want that old sanity of the world, which was become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found world of his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying.

As for the certain grief he felt at the same time, in his soul, that was only the remains of an old ethic, that bade a human being adhere to humanity. But he was weary of the old ethic, of the human being, and of humanity."

-D.H. Lawrence
Women in Love

Sunday, September 14, 2008

release

"Whether it is a good thing or a bad thing, smashing things is also sometimes very pleasant."

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Notes from Underground

Saturday, September 13, 2008

our finest impulses

"Everyday we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty."

- Henry Miller
Sexus