December 2010
21 posts
November 2010
22 posts
A slant of sun on dull brown walls
A forgotten sky of bashful blue.
Toward God a mighty hymn
A song of collisions and cries
Rumbling wheels, hoof-beats, bells,
Welcomes, farewells, love-calls, final moans,
Voices of joy, idiocy, warning, despair,
The unknown appeals of brutes,
The chanting of flowers,
The screams of cut trees,
The senseless babble of hens and wise men -
A cluttered incoherency that says at the stars:
“O God, save us.”
- Stephen Crane
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains
of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
- Walt Whitman
“The world I live in is one where I have five quarrels a day, each with someone who really takes me on over something; and if I can’t get into an argument, I go looking for one, to make sure I trust my own arguments, to hone them. I would often rather have an argument or a quarrel than be bored, and because I hate to lose an argument, I am often willing to protract one for its own sake rather than concede even a small point.”
—
Christopher Hitchens
Despite his myriad (and on occasion, miraculous) talents as literary critic, columnist, and long-form journalist, Hitchens’s genius undoubtedly lies in the art of the argument. - Eric Alterman - Something about Christopher
(via brooklynmutt)
Poem of the Day
Grass
BY CARL SANDBURG
PILE the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
“When one feels the need of talking with one particular person, he really needs this person; but when this need of conversing is so great that he must speak, so that if he were transported to a desert island or put in solitary confinement and the need of conversing were so great that every human being was the special person he wanted to talk with - then the need would be riches. For him in whom there is love to his neighbour, love is a need, the deepest need. He does not have need of men just to have someone to love, but he needs to love men. Yet there is no pride or haughtiness in this wealth, for God is the middle term and the ‘shall’ of the eternal binds and guides the great need so that it does not run wild and turn into pride. But there are no limits to the objects of love, for one’s neighbour is all men, unconditionally every human being.” - Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love
