“Beauty waits in ambush for us. If we are sensitive, we will feel it in the poetry of all language.”— Jorge Luis Borges, “Poetry,” Seven Nights (trans. Eliot Weinberger)
delightful days
a bit of delight in every day
“A little madness in the spring is wholesome,”— Emily Dickinson, from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson; “A Little Madness,”
“The ocean still looked like eternity.”— Adrienne Rich, from For This // Fox: Poems 1998-2000; “Regardless,”
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“She had called back into herself everything of her that lay outside, had taken refuge, enclosed, reabsorbed, in her body.”— Marcel Proust, from The Complete Works; “Remembrance of Things Past,”
Jean-Marie Périer, Francoise Hardy, 1964
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“One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice– though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do– determined to save the only life you could save.”— The Journey, by Mary Oliver.
As chance would have it, I’m teaching Mary Oliver in a few weeks as part of my class on writing about the environment. If you haven’t read her essays before, I highly recommend Upstream. RIP.
“Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor. With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats. I didn’t choose them, I don’t fault them, but it took time to reject them. Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness. Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect.”
Mary Oliver reciting her poem “Wild Geese,” published in Selected Poems
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves
View of Exeter College Oxford’s Fellows’ Garden.
30/01/2016
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“‘Now to explain to you the meaning of my life… . … But in order to make you understand, to give you my life, I must tell you a story—and there are so many, and so many—stories of childhood, stories of school, love, marriage, death, and so on; and none of them are true. Yet like children we tell each other stories, and to decorate them we make up these ridiculous, flamboyant, beautiful phrases. How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon halfsheets of notepaper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.”— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
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“For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side, the future on another.”— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
“November won’t let go of me,”— Anaïs Nin, from a diary entry featured in Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary; 1939-1947
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Persephone Books
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“‘There are some books that live,’ she mused. ‘They are young with us, and they grow old with us.’”— Virginia Woolf, Night and Day (via enchanted-garden)
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