Ah! the morning air that has not yet been breathed, how life-giving it seems to body and soul! Bernard follows the railings of the Luxembourg Gardens, goes down the Rue Bonaparte, reaches the quays, crosses the Seine. He thinks of the new rule of life which he has only lately formulated: “If I don’t do it, who will? If I don’t do it at once, when shall I?” He thinks: “Great things to do!” He feels that he is going towards them. “Great things!” he repeats to himself, as he walks along. If only he knew what they were!… In the meantime he knows that he is hungry; here he is at the Halles. He has eight sous in his pocket – not a sou more! He goes into a public house and takes a roll and coffee, standing at the bar. Price, six sous. He has two sous left; he gallantly leaves one on the counter and holds out the other to a ragamuffin who is grubbing in a dustbin. Charity? Swagger? What does it matter? He feels as a happy as a king. He has nothing left – and the whole world is his!
— Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters 1925 (From the chapter “Bernard Awakens”)
* * *
Come, Sleep! O Sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release,
Th’ indifferent judge between the high and low.
— Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)
* * *
The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.
The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819)
* * *
Between two worlds life hovers like a star,
‘Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge.
How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be!
— Lord Byron
* * *
Se ‘l viver men che pria m’e duro e vile,
Ne piu d’Amor me pento esser suggetto,
Ne son di duol, come io solea, ricetto,
Tutto quest e tuo don, sogno gentile.
If this dire harsh life seems less extreme
And I protest no more against Love’s reign,
Nor feel, as once, I harbor too much pain,
All is a gift from you, most noble dream.
— Sonnet sent to Lucrezia Borgia by Pietro Bembo (1503)
* * *
There too, the goddess loves in stone, and fills
The air around with beauty: we inhale
The ambrosial aspect, which, beheld, instils
Part of its immortality; the veil
Of Heaven is half undrawn: within the pale
Stand, and in that form and face behold
What mind, when nature’s self would fail;
And to the fond idolaters of old
Envy the innate flash which such a soul could mould.
In Santa Croce’s holy precincts lie
Ashes which make it holier, dust which is
Even in itself an immortality,
Though there were something save the past, and this
The particle of those sublimities
Which have relapsed to chaos: – here repose
Angelo’s, Alfieri’s bones, and his,
The starry Galileo, with his woes;
Here Machiavelli’s earth returned to whence it rose.
These are four minds, which, like the elements,
Might furnish forth creation: – Italy!
Time, which hath wrong’d thee with ten thousand rents
Of thine imperial garment, shall deny,
And hath denied, to every other sky,
Spirits which soar from ruin: – thy decay
Is still impregnant with divinity,
Which gilds it with revivifying ray.
— Lord Byron
* * *
I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life – and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.
— Georgia O’Keefe
* * *
Life shrinks or expands according to one’s courage.
— Anais Nin
* * *
Let yourself be silently drawn by the pull of what you really love.
— Rumi
* * *
I am a poor fellow, and of little worth, plodding along in that art which God has assigned to me, in order to prolong my life as long as I can.” (letter to Luca Martini 1547)
The best of artists never has a concept
A single marble block does not contain
Inside its husk, but to it may attain
Only if hand follows the intellect.
(sonnet)
I am still learning. (letter c.1560)
— Michelangelo Buonarroti 1475-1564
* * *
I am certain of
nothing but of
the holiness of the
heart’s affections
and the truth of
the imagination.
— John Keats
* * *
Believe me, the secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest
enjoyment of existence is:
to live dangerously! Build your cities under
Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas!
— Nietzsche, 1882
* * *
No artist recognizes any standard of beauty but that which is suggested by his own temperament. The artist seeks to realize in a certain material his
immaterial idea of beauty, and thus to transform an idea into an ideal. That is why an artist makes things. The artist has no other object in making things.
Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. So far from being the creation of its time, art is usually in direct opposition to it.
Autobiography is irresistible…when people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting.
The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly one feels that behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual.
— Oscar Wilde 1854-1900
* * *
I tried for years to live according to everyone else’s morality. I tried to live like everyone else, to be like everyone else. I said the right things even when I felt and thought quite differently. And the result is a catastrophe.
— Albert Camus
* * *
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
— Yeats 1865-1939
* * *
Italy, my Italy!
Queen Mary’s saying serves for me-
(When fortune’s malice
Lost her – Calais) –
Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it, ‘Italy’
— Robert Browning 1812-1889
* * *
THAT ORBED MAIDEN, WITH WHITE FIRE LADEN,
WHOM MORTALS CALL THE MOON,
GLIDES GLIMMERING O’ER MY FLEECE-LIKE FLOOR,
BY THE MIDNIGHT BREEZES STREWN;
AND WHEREVER THE BEAT OF HER UNSEEN FEET,
WHICH ONLY THE ANGELS HEAR,
MAY HAVE BROKEN THE WOOF OF MY TENT’S THIN ROOF,
THE STARS PEEP BEHIND HER AND PEER;
AND I LAUGH TO SEE THEM WHIRL AND FLEE
LIKE A SWARM OF GOLDEN BEES,
WHEN I WIDEN THE RENT IN MY WIND-BUILT TENT,
TILL THE CALM RIVERS, LAKES, AND SEAS,
LIKE STRIPS OF THE SKY FALLEN THROUGH ME ON HIGH,
ARE EACH PAVED WITH THE MOON AND THESE.
I AM THE DAUGHTER OF EARTH AND WATER,
AND THE NURSLING OF THE SKY;
I PASS THROUGH THE PORES OF THE OCEANS AND SHORES;
I CHANGE, BUT I CANNOT DIE,
FOR AFTER THE RAIN WHEN WITH NEVER A STRAIN
THE PAVILION OF HEAVEN IS BARE,
AND THE WINDS AND SUNBEAMS WITH THEIR CONVEX GLEAMS
BUILD UP THE BLUE DOME OF AIR,
I SILENTLY LAUGH AT MY OWN CENOTAPH,
AND OUT OF THE CAVERNS OF RAIN,
LIKE A CHILD FROM THE WOMB, LIKE A GHOST FROM THE TOMB,
I ARISE AND UNBUILD IT AGAIN.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) 1819
* * *
ALONG THE CORN
When the calves grow hair
the moon rises a fat peach
Like Iroquois the corn stalks
dance the crickets’ song
In wind’s breath tasseled heads shiver
Ears pierce night’s skin
and amber stones hide from the crow
Jupiter, a solitaire on jewelers’ cloth, worries:
it’s time for the thresher.
— Maria M. Smith, Published in the Rockford Review, February 1999
* * *
Simply give away your beauty
without talk and reckoning.
You are still. She says for you: I am.
And comes in meaning thousandfold,
at last comes over everyone.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
* * *
I believe in Michael Angelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed.
— George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
* * *
XXVII
Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest,
In sort of wakeful swoon, perplex’d she lay,
Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppress’d
Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away;
Flown, like a thought, until the morrow-day;
Blissfully haven’d both from joy and pain;
Clasp’d like a missal where Paynims pray;
Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,
As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.
XXVIII
Stol’n to this paradise, and so entranced,
Porphyro gazed upon her empty dress,
And listen’d to her breathing, if it chanced
To wake into slumberous tenderness;
Which when he heard, that minute did he bless,
And breath’d himself: then from the closet crept,
Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness,
And over the hush’d carpet, silent, stept,
And ‘tween the curtains peep’d, where, lo! – how fast she slept.
XXXVI
Beyond a mortal man impassion’d far
At these voluptuous accents, he arose,
Ethereal, flush’d, and like a throbbing star
Seen mid the sapphire heaven’s deep repose;
Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odour with the violet, –
Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows
Like Love’s alarum pattering the sharp sleet
Against the window-panes; St. Agnes’ moon hath set.
— John Keats 1820 (This is the poem Percy Bysshe Shelley was reading on July 8,1822 as he sailed into the tempest in the Bay of Spezia from which he never returned.)
* * *
Dear camerado! I confess I have urged
you onward with me, and still urge you,
without the least idea what is our destination,
Or whether we shall be victorious, or
utterly quell’d and defeated.
— Walt Whitman 1819-1892
* * *
THE REAL VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY
CONSISTS NOT IN SEEKING NEW LANDSCAPES,
BUT IN HAVING NEW EYES.
— Marcel Proust
* * *
When we have once known Rome, and left her where she lies, like a long decaying corpse, retaining a trace of the noble shape it was, but with accumulated dust and a fungus growth overspreading all its more admirable features; – left her in utter weariness, no doubt, of her narrow, crooked, intricate streets, so uncomfortably paved with little squares of lava that to tread over them is a penitential pilgrimage, so indescribably ugly, moreover, so cold, so alleylike, into which the sun never falls, and where a chill wind forces its deadly breath into our lungs; – left her, tired of the sight of those immense, seven-storied, yellow-washed hovels, or call them palaces, where all that is dreary in domestic life seems magnified and multiplied, and weary of climbing those staircases, which ascend from a ground-floor of cook-shops, coblers’ stalls, stables, and regiments of cavalry, to a middle region of princes, cardinals, and ambassadours, and an upper tier of artists, just beneath the unattainable sky; – left her, worn out with shivering at the cheerless and smoky fireside, by day, and feasting with our own substance the ravenous little populace of a Roman bed, at night; – left her, sick at heart of Italian trickery, which has uprooted whatever faith in man’s integrity had endured till now, and sick at stomach of sour bread, sour wine, rancid butter, and bad cookery, needlessly bestowed on evil meats; – left her, disgusted with the pretence of Holiness and the reality of Nastiness, each equally omnipresent; – left her, half-lifeless from the lanquid atmosphere, the vital principle of which has been used up, long ago, or corrupted by myriads of slaughters; – left her, crushed down in spirit with the desolation of her ruin, and the hopelessness of her future; – left her, in short hating her with all our might, and adding our individual curse to the Infinite Anathema which her old crimes have mistakeably brought down; – when we have left Rome in such a mood as this, we are astonished by the discovery, by-and-by, that our heart-strings have mysteriously attached themselves to the Eternal City, and are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were more familiar, more intimately our home, than even the spot where we were born!
— “The Marble Faun” (1859) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
* * *
From one of the windows of this saloon, we may see a flight of broad stone steps, descending along side the antique and massive foundation of the Capitol, towards the battered triumphal arch of Septimius Severus, right below. Farther on, the eye skirts along the edge of the desolate Forum (where Roman washerwomen hang out their linen to the sun), passing over a shapeless confusion of modern edifices, piled rudely up with ancient brick and stone, and over the domes of Christian churches, built on the old pavements of heathen temples, and supported by the very pillars that once upheld them. At a distance beyond – yet but a little way, considering how much history is heaped into the intervening space – rises the great sweep of the Coliseum, with the blue sky brightening through its upper tier of arches. Far off, the view is shut in by the Alban Mountains, looking just the same, amid all this decay and change, as when Romulus gazed thitherward over his half-finished wall.
We glance hastily at these things, – at this bright sky, and those blue distant mountains, and at the ruins, Etruscan, Roman, Christian, venerable with a threefold antiquity, and at the company of world-famous statues in the saloon, – in the hope of putting the reader into that state of feeling which is experienced oftenest at Rome. It is a vague sense of ponderous remembrances; a perception of such weight and density in a by-gone life, of which this spot was the centre, that the present moment is pressed down or crowded out, and our individual affairs and interests are but half as real here as elsewhere…….
— “The Marble Faun” (1859) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
* * *
FOR BONNARD
come back Pierre
bathe me in crimson, scarlet and vermilion
splash me with emerald green
wash my hands in chinese white
splatter Naples yellow
paint my toes in cerulean
dry me wrapped in fuchsia
wipe my neck with pink and peaches
lie with me on your dressing gown
thick with burgundy and light
look out shuttered windows into
burnt sienna and green earth
— Maria M. Smith, Published in The New York Times 7.20.98, p. B2
* * *
A thrush speaks
O fret not after knowledge – I have none,
And yet my song comes native with the warmth.
O fret not after knowledge – I have none,
And yet the Evening listens. He who saddens
At the thought of idleness cannot be idle,
And he’s awake who thinks himself asleep.
If I should die I have left no immortal work behind me-
nothing to make my friends proud of my memory-
But I have loved the principal of beauty in all things,
and if I had had time
I would have made myself remembered. 1821
— John Keats (1795-1821)
* * *
Beautiful the soft, soft plunging motion of oxen moving forwards. Beautiful the strange, snaky lifting of the muzzles, the swaying of the sharp horns. And the soft, soft crawling motion of a team of oxen, so invisible, almost, yet so inevitable. Now and again straight canals of water flashed blue. Now and again the great lines of grey-silvery poplars rose and made avenues or lovely grey airy quadrangles across the plain. Their top boughs were spangled with gold and green leaf. Sometimes the vine-leaves were gold and red, a patterning. And the great square farm-homesteads, white, red-roofed, with their outbuildings, stood naked amid the lands, without screen or softening. There was something big and exposed about it all. No more cosy English ambushed life: no longer the cosy littleness of the landscape. A bigness – and nothing to shelter the unshrinking spirit. It was all exposed, exposed to the sweep of plain, to the high strong sky, and to human gaze. A kind of boldness, an indifference. Aaron was impressed and fascinated. He looked with a new interest at the Italians in the carriage with him – for this same boldness and indifference and exposed gesture. And he found it in them too. And again it fascinated him. It seemed so much bigger, as if the walls of life had fallen. Nay, the walls of English life will have to fall.
— David Herbert Lawrence, “Aaron’s Rod”
* * *
The kingly brilliance of Sirius pierced the eye with a steely glitter, the star called Capella was yellow, Aldebaran and Betelgueux shone with a fiery red. To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement.
— Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), Thomas Hardy 1840-1928
* * *
The mediocre teacher tells.
The good teacher explains.
The superior teacher demonstrates.
The great teacher inspires.
~ William Arthur Ward
* * *
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
— Thomas Carlyle 1795-1881
* * *
…knowledge is ultimately self-knowledge, and self-knowledge is the soul seen by itself.
— Cicero
* * *
Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit.
Maybe someday you will rejoice to recall even this.
— Virgil, The Aeneid
* * *
Luna a ponente, Luna crescente
Luna a levante, Luna calante
Moon facing West, Waxing Moon
Moon facing East, Waning Moon
— Anonymous