A Minute Meditation

 Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong.  They are conflicts between two rights.

-- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel --


How does one decide when faced with this conflict?

A Minute Meditation

No. 224

I never saw a discontented tree.  They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.

-- John Muir --
from  John Muir: In His own words

 
He may have a point here.  

A Minute Meditation

Henry Beston
Northern Farm: A Chronicle of Maine
written during the late 1930s
first published in 1949


When the nineteenth century and the industrial era took over our western civilization, why was it that none saw that we should all presently become peoples without a past?  Yet this is precisely what has happened and it is only now that the results of the break have become clear.

The past is gone, together with its formal arts, its rhetoric, and its institutions, and in its place there has risen something rootless, abstract, and alien, I think, to human experience.  Nothing of this sort has ever occurred in history.   

This was written during the late 1930s and published in 1949.  Is any of the above relevant today?   To be honest, I'm not even sure I know what he means.   Perhaps it's because I'm an urbanite (if there is such a word), having grown up and spent all of my life in cities.  I did spend a number of summers while growing up on my grandparents' farm in Wisconsin, but that was only for three months of the year.  I wonder if that loss he speaks of accounts for my fascination with and love of the writings of Loren Eiseley, Joseph Wood Krutch,  John Muir (a recent discovery), Konrad Lorenz, and now Henry Beston.  All focus on the natural world and on those who share this unique planet with us.

Yet, Beston speaks of this loss: The past is gone, together with its formal arts, its rhetoric, and its institutions, and in its place there has risen something rootless, abstract, and alien, I think, to human experience.  What has this to do with our alienation from the natural world?    Unlike so many fortunate people, I find only questions and more questions and seldom answers.

A Minute Meditation

Outwardly the enlightened seem the same as everybody else.  Inwardly, however, their distinctive trait is that they have no goal, but simply allow life to enfold with no concern for where it is going.  For them, effort, cunning, and purpose are the results of having forgotten one's true nature.

-- Zi Gong --
from Taoist Wisdom
Timothy Freke, editor


No goal?  No plans for the future?  Just drift with what is happening at that time?   It seems to go against everything we in the West are taught, or so it seems to me.

This sounds strange to me.   But, then again, when people asked me long ago what I was going to be when I grew up, I never had an answer.  I can look back and see how one thing led to another; however, I never imagined my life would go as it did. 

A Minute Meditation

In the arts, one must distinguish, of course, between the lie and the tall story that the audience is not expected to believe.  The tall-story teller gives himself away, either by a wink or by an exaggerated poker face: the born liar always looks absolutely natural.

-- W. H. Auden --
from his Introduction to The Complete Poems of Cavafy

Born liars look like they are telling the truth and that they actually believe what they are saying, even to the point that contradictory lies never bother them.  They just blame the ones who expose their contradictory tales.

A Minute Meditation

No. 227

In God's wildness lies the hope of the world--the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.  The galling harness of civilization drops off, and the wounds heal ere we are aware.  

-- John  Muir --
In His Own Words 

There's nothing I can add to this.   

A Minute Meditation

No. 225

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.  

-- John Muir --
In His Own Words 


This sounds strange today in a world of spaceships and trips to the moon and probes to many of the planets and moons in the Solar System.  Recently I read of a probe that has now gone beyond the boundary of the Solar System..  Perhaps he's talking about a different Universe?
 

A Minute Meditation

We are most likely to get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves are not quite certain of our own position, and are inwardly tempted to take the other side. 

-- Thomas Mann --

    Buddenbrooks


And it puzzle me to learn
That tho' a man may be in doubt of what he knows,
Very quickly he will fight. . .
He'll fight to prove that what he does not know is so!


"A Puzzlement"
Lyrics from the musical, The King and I



Obviously wrong, right?   For everybody knows that those who fight the hardest and shout the loudest have no doubts whatsoever . . . for they never give any sign that they might be wrong.   And those who admit that they have some questions or even doubts are the weakest in their faith.  It's obvious, isn't it?

A Minute Meditation

"If real people could cohabit with the creatures of their imagination--say, in a novel--then what sort of children would be the fruit of their union: changelings?"

  -- Lawrence Durrell --
  Constance or Solitary Practices


One of the joys of rereading--discovering little gems anew. This is the germ of the idea that describes part of the charm of  "The Avignon Quintet,"  for several of the characters in Blanford's novel interact with Blanford and  his friends.  Constance, for example, remarks upon meeting Sutcliffe that she was surprised because she thought Sutcliffe was a fictional character.

I wonder how I would react if I met characters from a novel I had read. 

A Minute Meditation

 Today is the birthday of Thomas Mann, the author of one of my top ten favorite novels:  The Magic Mountain.  

 

 

"Music awakens time, awakens us to our finest enjoyment of time."

-- Thomas Mann --

The Magic Mountain

 

 

I would add this: Music is the Voice of Time.  

 

 

A Minute Meditation

Language is the stuff of the imagination.  The imagination is the creative aspect of language.  It enables us to use language to its highest potential.  It enables us to realize a reality beyond the ordinary, it enables us to create and to re-create ourselves in story and literature.  It is the possible accomplishment of immortality.

-- N. Scott Momaday --
from  The Man Made of Words

Can we imagine anything without words?  

A Minute Meditation

To really appreciate a place or time----to extract the poignant essence of it--one should see it in the light of a departure, a leavetaking.  

-- Lawrence Durrell --
from Livia, Book 2 of  The Avignon Quintet

Is this true?  If so, it's sad that one can only appreciate a time or a place when one leaves it. 

A Minute Meditation

Some ride in palanquins
Some bear palanquins:
Some weave sandals
For palanquin bearers

                   -- Anon --
from Japanese Proverbs


It seems to me that the poem refers to three classes of society: those supported by society, those who support society, and those who accommodate the supporters.











"A palanquin is a covered litter, usually for one passenger. It is carried by an even number of bearers (between two and eight, but most commonly four) on their shoulders, by means of a pole projecting fore and aft. The word is derived from the Sanskrit palyanka, meaning bed or couch."
-- Wikipedia Definition --

A Minute Meditation

The storyteller is the one who tells the story.  To say this is to say that the storyteller is preeminently entitled to tell the story.  He is original and creative.  He creates the storytelling experience and himself and his audience in the process.  He exists in the person of the storyteller for the sake of telling the story.  When he is otherwise occupied, he is someone other than the storyteller.  His telling of the story is a unique performance.  The storyteller creates himself in the sense that the mask he wears for the sake of telling the story is of his own making, and it is never the same.   He creates his listener in the sense that he determines the listener's existence within, and in relation to, the story, and it is never the same.  The storyteller says in effect: "On this occasion I am, for I imagine that I am; and on this occasion you are, for I imagine that you are.  And this imagining is the burden of the story, and indeed it is the story."  

-- N. Scott Momaday --
from The Man Made of Words


N. Scott Momaday obviously possesses a different philosophy regarding storytelling than do many of his contemporaries.   Some commentaries I had read a short time ago imply that there is no such thing as a good book or a bad book, that there is no such thing as a good storyteller or a bad storyteller, that there are only good readers and bad readers.

Sheer unadulterated twaddle.

A Minute Meditation

I realized then the truth about all love:  that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all.  The other feelings, compassion, tenderness and so on, exist only on the periphery and belong to the constructions of society and habit.  But she herself--austere and merciless Aphrodite--is a pagan.  It is not our brains or instincts which she picks--but our very bones.

-- Lawrence Durrell --
from Justine, Part II

I think that there are a number of examples of this in the novel:  Darley, Melissa, Justine, Nessim, Mountolive, Leila, although it is not clear just whom these characters are in love with. 

A Minute Meditation

No. 65

Reading these grand mountain manuscripts displayed through every vicissitude of heat and cold, calm and storm, upheaving volcanoes and down-grinding glaciers, we see that everything in Nature called destruction must be creation--a change from beauty to beauty.

-- John Muir --

from   John Muir:  In His Own Words

A Minute Meditation

The white blossoms of pear trees and the slashes of red earth in the grasses, the brown rivers high and roiling.  The sky is the very blue of serenity, and the horizons are so far away as to exceed the reach of vision.  But here, just here, is a small bird hopping.

-- N. Scott Momaday --
from Again the Far Morning:  New and Selected Poems


This quotation is from the section of the book titled "Notebook."   There are a number of entries in the section, some of which I recognize as related to poems in this book, but I don't recognize this one.  However, it is one of those statements that cause me to read and pause and reread and reread again, but I am never sure why. 

Is the bird simply a distraction or is Momaday making a point here,  one which I'm missing?

A Minute Meditation

Being in a strange and perverse mood, I found this to resonate with today's headlines and stories about people in the news.     



                                                                       If you make
                                                                       yourself a dog
                                                                       make yourself
                                                                       a rich man's dog       
                                                                                        -- Anon --
                                                                      from Japanese Proverbs




Cynical?      Wise?     Practical?      

A Minute Meditation

A SUGGESTION TO MY FRIEND LIU

There's a gleam of green in an old bottle,
There's a stir of red in the quiet stove,
There's a feeling of snow in the dusk outside--
What about a cup of wine inside?
                             -- Po Chu-yi --
from The Jade Mountain
trans.  Witter Bynner



Don't know about you, but it works for me.

A Minute Meditation

"Don't worry and everything will naturally sort itself out."
                                                                     -- Lao Tzu --
from Taoist Wisdom, September 23

I wonder if this is one of his most misunderstood sayings.