January
“None of
this can mean anything to you. You
couldn’t understand it. You grew up
quite differently. There was the world
of the suburbs, of the railways, of the slums and tenements. Dirt, hunger, overcrowding, the degradation
of the worker as a human being, the degradation of women. And there was the world of the mother’s
darlings, of smart students and rich merchants’ sons; the world of impunity, of
brazen, insolent vice; of rich men laughing or shrugging off the tears of the
poor, the robbed, the insulted, the seduced; the reign of parasites, whose only
distinction was that they never troubled themselves about anything, never gave
anything to the world, and left nothing behind them. …
“You can’t think how lovely she was as a child, a schoolgirl. You have no idea. … I used to go to that house and see her there. She was still a child, but even then, the alertness, the watchfulness, the restlessness of those days—it was all there, you could read it all in her face, her eyes. All the themes of the century—all the tears and the insults and the hopes, the whole accumulation of resentment and pride were written in her face and bearing, which expressed both girlish shyness and self-assured grace. She was a living indictment of the age. This is something, isn’t it? It’s predestination. Something nature endowed her with, something to which she had a birthright.”
--Boris Pasternak, Doctor
Zhivago.
From first U.S. edition © 1958
Pantheon Books,
English translation by Max Hayward
and Manya Harari, pages 459-461.
“And if you think I didn’t have my share of suffering—look here, when I went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting there on the sideboard I sat down and cried like a baby. By God it was awful—”
I couldn’t forgive him or like him but I saw that what he
had done was, to him, entirely justified.
It was all very careless and confused.
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and
creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness
or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the
mess they had made . . .
… Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further. . . . And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back
ceaselessly into the past.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The
Great Gatsby (1925)
Scribner
Paperback Edition 1995, pages 187-189.
February
“What
will happen to your consciousness? Your
consciousness, yours, not anyone else’s.
Well, what are you? There’s the
point. Let’s try to find out. What is it about you that you have always
known as yourself? What are you conscious of in yourself? Your kidneys? Your liver? Your blood
vessels? No. However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some
external, active manifestation of yourself that you come across your
identity—in the work of your hands, in your family, in other people. And now listen carefully. You in others—this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed
and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life—your soul, your immortality, your
life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will
remain in others. And what does it
matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you—the you that enters the future and becomes a
part of it.
…
“There will be no death, says St.
John. His reasoning is quite
simple. There will be no death because
the past is over; that’s almost like saying there will be no death because it
is already done with, it’s old and we are bored with it. What we need is something new, and that new
thing is life eternal.”
He
was pacing up and down the room as he was talking. Now he walked up to Anna Ivanovna’s bed and putting his hand on
her forehead said, “Go to sleep.” After
a few moments she began to fall asleep.
Yura quietly left the room and told
Egorovna to send in the nurse. “What’s
come over me?” he thought. “I’m
becoming a regular quack—muttering incantations, laying on hands . .
. .”
Next day Anna Ivanovna was better.
Doctor
Zhivago
Pages
68-69.
I believe that we live after death and again and again, not
in the memory of our children or as mulch for trees and flowers, however poetic
that may be, but looking passionately and egocentrically out of our eyes.
--Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
Strength To Your Sword Arm: Selected Writings
Holy
Cow! Press, 1993, page 179.
March
“A lot you’ve explained.” He was shouted down. “A lot you’ve said when you’ve told him he’s
got stamps for the special coach! You
should look at a man first, before you start explaining. How can anyone with such a face go in the
special coach? The special coach is
full of sailors. A sailor has a trained
eye and a gun. He takes a look at him and
what does he see? A member of the
propertied classes—worse than that: a doctor, former quality. He pulls out his gun—and goodbye.”
Doctor Zhivago, pages 215-216.
“But that wasn’t what we were
talking about. I don’t think I could
love you so much if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don’t like people who have never fallen or
stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and
of little value. Life hasn’t revealed
its beauty to them.”
“It’s
this beauty I’m thinking of. I think
that to see it your imagination has to be intact, your vision has to be
childlike. That is what I was deprived
of. I might have developed my own view
of life if I hadn’t, right from the beginning, seen it stamped in someone
else’s vulgar distortion. …”
…
“I
know how much you loved her. But
forgive me, have you any idea of her love for you?”
“Sorry. What was that you said?”
“I
asked you, had you any idea of how much she loved you—more than anyone in the
world?”
“What
makes you say that?”
“Because she told me so
herself.”
“She
said that? To you?”
“Yes.”
…
“Forgive
me, but if it isn’t intruding on something too intimate, can you remember the
circumstances in which she said this?”
“She had been doing this room
and she went outside to shake the carpet.”
“Sorry, which carpet? There are
two.”
“That one, the larger one.”
“It would have been too heavy
for her. Did you help her?”
“Yes.”
“Each
of you held one end, and she leaned far back throwing up her arms high as on a
swing and turning away her face from the blowing dust and squinted her eyes and
laughed? Isn’t that how it was? How well I know her ways! And then you walked toward each other
folding up the heavy carpet first in two and then in four, and she joked and
made faces, didn’t she? Didn’t she?”
Doctor Zhivago, page 399 and pages
462-463.
April
In
an unjust world, the roles of Deliverer and Destroyer become ambiguous.
"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth," said Jesus.
"I come not to send peace, but a sword."
--Freeman
Dyson
Disturbing the Universe (1979)
page 4.
Matthew
in 10:34 quotes Jesus uncharacteristically
telling his apostles: "Think not that I am come to
send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a
sword." You don't see that on Christmas cards and it's
not in this film, but those words can be reinterpreted—
read
today to mean that inner peace comes only after
moral struggle.
The richness of Scripture is in its openness to
interpretation answering humanity's current spiritual
needs. That's where Gibson's medieval version of the
suffering of Jesus, reveling in savagery to provoke
outrage and cast blame, fails Christian and Jew today.
--William
Safire,
Neither Christian nor Jew served well by 'Passion'
from March 1st op/ed page in Austin American-Statesman. The article
was also on the New York Times op/ed page that day.
"...
people are to march around the church, to commemorate the event, Palm Sunday,
when Jesus rode into Jerusalem and was greeted with applause and with
palms. People thought he'd come to overthrow the Romans, but no, he'd
come to change them, and that led to things turning bad."
--Garrison
Keillor, in the News from Lake Wobegon of April 3, 2004 on A Prairie Home
Companion. Thanks to David Matthews for calling me so I could hear
it.
May
They did not even know the simple things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or
necessary sacrifice. They did not know
the feeling of taking a place and keeping it, securing a village and then raising
the flag and calling it victory. No
sense of order or momentum. No front,
no rear, no trenches laid out in neat parallels. No Patton rushing for the Rhine, no beachheads to storm and win
and hold for the duration. … They did
not know strategies. They did not know
the terms of the war, its architecture, the rules of fair play. When they took prisoners, which was rare,
they did not know the questions to ask, whether to release a suspect or beat on
him. They did not know how to
feel. Whether, when seeing a dead
Vietnamese, to be happy or sad or relieved; whether, in times of quiet, to be
apprehensive or content; whether to engage the enemy or elude him. They did not know how to feel when they saw
villages burning. Revenge? Loss? Peace of mind or anguish? They did not know. … Magic, mystery, ghosts
and incense, whispers in the dark, strange tongues and strange smells,
uncertainties never articulated in war stories, emotion squandered on
ignorance. They did not know good from
evil.
--Tim O’Brien
Going After
Cacciato (1978)
Pages
320-321
June
He caught his breath, looked around
and said, “I’m your new officer.” I
grinned, held out my hand, and said, “Hi, Tubby.” That was stupid of me. He glared and kept his own hand on his
trouser seam. Standing cockily like a
bantam rooster—the wall was just high enough to let him stand—he crisply asked,
“Sergeant, are these your men?” The
Raggedy Asses grinned at one another.
The very thought of belonging to anyone amused them. I felt cold. This wasn’t the good-natured Tubby I had known. This was trouble. I said, “Tubby—” and he cut me off: “Slim, I am an officer and I expect to be treated with proper
military courtesy.” That broke the men
up. He heard their stifled chuckles and
looked around furiously. … He said, “…
I’m going to lead these men over the top, and I want you with me.”
… I said,
“Look, Tubby—Lieutenant—I think—” He
snapped, “You’re not paid to think.
You’re paid to take orders.” I
considered saying the hell with it. But
this was literally a matter of life and imminent death. I tried again, earnestly: “Going up there would be suicide. The First Bat’s down there,” I said,
pointing. … “We’re pinned down, so the
action is on the flanks.” …
He
stared at me for a long time, as though waiting for me to blink first. I blinked and blinked again. Letting his voice rise, he said, “You’re
scared shitless aren’t you?” I nodded
emphatically. His voice rose
higher. All the guys could hear him
now. … There was just a tremor in his
voice, and it dawned on me that he himself was petrified—he was masking his
fear with his rudeness to me. But what
he said next smothered my compassion.
He sneered, and keeping his voice in the same register, he said, “I know
your kind, Bub. You think we couldn’t
hear you back there in the squad bay, masturbating every night? Did you think they’d give a Marine Corps
commission to a masturbator? Only thing
I couldn’t make out was how you dried the come. I figured you had a handkerchief.” I heard a titter from Bubba.
I’m sure Bubba never masturbated.
His father, the Alabama preacher in whose steps he hoped to follow, had
shown him the way to what he called “Nigra poontang” when he reached
adolescence. But I wasn’t interested in
Bubba’s good opinion. What Tubby had
done, and it was unforgivable, was make me look ridiculous in the eyes of all
my men. He knew that was wrong. They had taught that at
Quantico. …
… He turned, pointed to Bubba, and said, “You, over
here.” Bubba came over and linked his
hands. Tubby put in a foot, as if into
a stirrup, swung up, rolled atop the wall, and rose till he stood
sideways. Both his hands were pointing. His left forefinger was pointing down at us,
his right forefinger at the Japs. It
was a Frederic Remington painting. He
breathed deeply and yelled, “Follow me!”
The
men’s faces still were turned up, expressionless. Nobody moved. I stood
beneath the wall, my arms outstretched, waiting to catch what would be left. At that moment the slugs hit him. It was a Nambu; it stitched him vertically,
from forehead to crotch. One moment he
was looming above us in that heroic pose; in the next moment red pits blossomed
down him, four on his face alone, and a dozen others down his uniform. One was off center; it slammed into the
Marine Corps emblem over his heart; the gunner knew his job. Blood had just begun to stream from there,
from his face, from his belly, and from his groin, when he collapsed, tottering
on the edge and falling and whumping in my arms face up. His features were disappearing beneath a
spreading stain, and he was trying to blink the blood out of his eyes. But he could see. He saw me. He choked
faintly: “You . . . you . . . you . .
.” Then he gagged and he was gone.
--William Manchester (April 1, 1922 – June 1, 2004)
Goodbye Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (1980)
Pages 274 – 278 in Dell paperback edition,
1987.
(See also the quotes of
the month for April 2003. The incident described
here occurred on the Monday after Manchester left the hospital to return to his
men. Manchester doesn’t give the date,
but with a little research I learned it was June 4, 1945. The place was Okinawa, on one of the beaches
of the Oroku Peninsula. Manchester kept
a journal that managed to survive the war along with him.)
July
Below lies dense L.A., threaded by freeways. Then we glide down the bleak concrete and
cinderblock sleeve of Watts and out past Cabrillo Beach. Below, the tide restlessly gnaws at the
shore; up here, in the pristine cleanliness, I am cosseted with pillows, steak,
champagne, a movie if I want it (I don’t), and a pretty, young, boisterous,
outrageously outspoken stewardess who has my number. Serving me dinner, she drops a fork and mutters, “Shit.” The Sergeant in me says, “Nice girls don’t
talk dirty.” Her eyes lick at me
merrily. She grins and says, “I’m a
woman, not a girl. Anyway, you should
talk. I saw you giving me the
once-over, you dirty old man.” I say, “I’m not a dirty old man, I’m a sexy senior
citizen.” She: “Where’d you get that?” I:
“Some bumper sticker at the Old Folks’ Home.” But the game stops there.
She passes on, a member of the Pepsi generation who has deduced that I
am on the wrong side of fifty-five, a senescent old-timer, laden with
medication for hypertension, antibiotics for rotting teeth, and tricyclics for
endogenous depression—a walking drugstore in no condition for any strenuous
activity. Which is as it should
be. At my age I ought to feel calm,
untroubled, unchallenged by any female, or for that matter, anybody. Yet I am uneasy. A few Japanese soldiers, I have read, still lurk in the bush on
the islands; every now and then one emerges.
It would be just my luck to be the victim of the last bonzai
charge. That is ridiculous, of course;
still, I am nervous. The fact is that I
have no idea of what I shall find Out There.
--William Manchester, Goodbye Darkness,
pages 56-57 of Dell 1987 paperback edition.
My mother used to say that life begins at forty. That was her age when she had her first baby. I say, on the contrary, that life begins at fifty-five, the age at which I published my first book. So long as you have courage and a sense of humor, it’s never to late to start life afresh. A book is in many ways like a baby. While you are writing, it is curled up in your belly. You cannot get a clear view of it. As soon as it is born, it goes out into the world and develops a character of its own. Like a daughter coming home from school, it surprises you with unexpected flashes of wisdom. The same thing happens with scientific theories.
--Freeman
Dyson, from the preface to his collection of essays, From Eros to Gaia
(1992).
August
...I had only told Josif of my
problem because I thought I would get sympathy from a man I deeply respected
and who I thought would be on my side.
I expected him to...say, “R.T., you are right to feel so angry! Tell me all about it. Get it out of your system.”
But
no! He compassionately but soberly
rebuked me and would not let me off the hook.
Those
words came to me during the greatest trial I had ever had until that time. I couldn’t discuss it with my friends or
family members, but because Josif was from Romania and was far removed from the
situation, I was able to tell him everything. ...
And then
came those remarkable words—spoken in his Romanian accent: “You must totally forgive them.”
“I
can’t,” I replied.
“You can,
and you must,” he insisted.
Unsatisfied with his response, I tried to continue. “I just remembered. There is more. What I didn’t tell you . . .”
“R.T.,”
he interrupted, “you must totally forgive them. Release them, and you will be set free.”
--R.T. Kendall,
Total Forgiveness,
Charisma House, 2001, pages xxv-xxvi.
Thanks to JKW for loaning me the book.
The 2nd quote for August is in audio form, from a
speech given by Marian Wright Edelman, president and founder of the Children’s
Defense Fund. (I have part of this speech on a cassette.) This particular speech is from the early
1990s, but she has given similar ones since then. www.geocities.com/dwtrulock/marian.mp3
September
Paul said
that love “keeps no record of wrongs” (I Cor. 13-5). But he did not mean that you must be blind to those wrongs…the
fact that there is something wrong, especially if it is staring you in
the face, is not to be denied. In fact,
…sometimes the people we admire the most can do the most hurtful things to
us. And it is of no value to pretend we
didn’t see it happen. … Love doesn’t
erase our memories. And it is actually
a demonstration of greater grace when we are fully aware of what occurred—and
we still choose to forgive. … We cannot truly forgive until we see clearly the
offense we are forgiving and understand its seriousness.
…
Love is a choice. Total forgiveness is a choice. It is not a feeling—at least at first—but is
rather an act of the will. … When we do this all the time—as a lifestyle—we not
only avoid bitterness, but we also eventually experience total forgiveness as a
feeling—and it is a good feeling.
…
Graciousness
is not the way presidential elections are won.
A former presidential campaign manager claimed two facts:
· Candidates
with high negative ratings in the opinion polls—above 35%—lose.
· Negative
ratings are far easier to create than positive ones.
In other words, to win it is not
enough to look good; you must also make your opponent look bad. And unfortunately, it works.
…
Graciousness is shown by what you don’t say, even if what you
could say would be true. Self-righteous
people find it almost impossible to be gracious; they claim always to be after
“the truth,” no matter the cost. Total
forgiveness sometimes means overlooking what you perceive to be the truth and
not letting on about anything that could damage another person.
… It is my experience that most
people we must forgive do not believe they have done anything wrong at all, or
if they know that they did something wrong, they believe it was justified.
… Total forgiveness, therefore,
must take place in the heart. If I have
a genuine heart-experience, I will not be devastated if there is no
reconciliation. … This is also why a person can achieve inner peace even when
forgiving someone who has died.
--R.T. Kendall, Total
Forgiveness,
Pages 17, 18, 21, 27, 28, and 29.
Then he too
stood and wept, tears ran down his cheeks, like those that had smarted the skin
of the English officer of marines:
those clear drops flowing in such bitter abundance every hour of our day
all over our world, till in sheer poetic justice we have named the earth we
live in after them; that alkaline, salty gland-secretion which is pressed from
our system by the nervous stress of acute pain, whether physical or
mental. It contained, as Hans Castorp
knew, a certain amount of mucin and albumin as well.
--Thomas Mann, The Magic
Mountain,
originally published in German as
Der Zauberberg (S.
Fischer Verlag, Berlin, 1924).
Translation by Helen T.
Lowe-Porter (Alfred A. Knopf, 1927).
Excerpt from First Vintage
International Edition, March 1992, p.538.
October
…I saw my own feelings reflected in Herbert’s face, and, not
least among them, my repugnance towards the man who had done so much for me.
Heaven knows that we need never be ashamed of our tears, for
they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried than
before—more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. If I had cried before, I should have had Joe
with me then.
In the little world in which children have their existence,
whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely
felt as injustice.
…I was not only odd-boy about the forge, but if any neighbor
happened to want an extra boy to frighten birds, or pick up stones, or do any
such job, I was favoured with the employment.
--Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, first
published
serially
in 1860-61. I wrote down these quotes
when I read the
book
(thanks to prompting from DPS) in September and October
of
1999. The quotes come from pages 366,
172, 66, and 45
of the
Bobbs-Merrill 1964 edition.
MACBETH
…
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a
rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles
of the brain,
And with some sweet,
oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of
that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
DOCTOR Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.
MACBETH Throw physic
to the dogs! I’ll none of it.
…
--William
Shakespeare, Macbeth,
Act 5,
Scene 3.
Like Charles Dickens, who experienced the same lurching
fall of family fortune in adolescence, Shakespeare seems to have sworn to do
anything in life that he could to get himself and his family well out of the
flood of fear, and safe somehow in a big bourgeois house.
--Adam
Gopnik, in “Will Power,” a review of the book
Will in the
World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.
The New Yorker,
September 13, 2004, page 91.
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