Escaped Thoughts: Books

To arrive where we started

A favorite section from T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding" in his book Four Quartets

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea."

Posted at 06:43 in Books, Poetry, Quotations | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tags: Four Quartets, Little Gidding, poetry, TS Eliot

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true

“I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like Martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”

― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Posted at 16:46 in Books, Quotations | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tags: American Gods, Neil Gaiman

The Great Perhaps

“Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were "I go to seek a Great Perhaps." That's why I'm going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

Posted at 18:54 in Books | Permalink | Comments (0)

Moonlight, Summer Moonlight

by Emily Bronte

'Tis moonlight, summer moonlight,
All soft and still and fair;
The solemn hour of midnight
Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere,

But most where trees are sending
Their breezy boughs on high,
Or stooping low are lending
A shelter from the sky.

And there in those wild bowers
A lovely form is laid;
Green grass and dew-steeped flowers
Wave gently round her head.

Bio note via http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org

Emily Bronte, born in Thornton, Yorkshire, England (1818) is the author of Wuthering Heights (1848), a story of love and tragedy set in the moors of Yorkshire.

She was the fifth of six talented Bronte children born to parents who seemed to have had no literary interest themselves. Their mother died when Emily was two, and the children were pretty much left to their own devices. Their father was aloof and treated his children as intellectual equals. Other than that, he mostly ignored them. The Bronte children had only themselves for playmates.

Their house was bounded on two sides by the village graveyard. They became best friends with each other. All the Bronte children were avid readers and storytellers. They made up a mythical land called Gondal, and Emily made it the subject of many of her poems. She was shy and reclusive and whenever she left home she got homesick. She joined her three older sisters at a school for clergymen's children when she was six. In 1845, Charlotte found out that Emily had been writing poetry. Charlotte had also been secretly writing verse, and so had Anne. They published their joint work the next year. Instead of using their real names, they called it Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. That book sold only two copies, but it paved the way for Charlotte's Jane Eyre (1846) and Emily's Wuthering Heights (1847) and Anne's Agnes Grey (1847).

Jane Eyre was an instant success, but Emily's book didn't get much attention until after she fell ill and died the next year, at age thirty. Charlotte wrote a preface for it explaining why it was better than her own Jane Eyre, and it became a classic.

Posted at 17:30 in Books, Poetry | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Elizabeth Bishop at 100

The poet Elizabeth Bishop was born 100 years ago on Feb. 8. Her father died months later, and her mother was institutionalized early in her childhood, so she was raised by relatives in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts.

She became one of the most beloved and important American poets of the 20th century, although her greatest fame came after her death in 1979.

To celebrate her centennial, Farrar Straus & Giroux, her publisher for most of her career, is bringing out three new editions of her writing :

Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence - her letters to and from The New Yorker
and a pair of companion volumes called simply Poems and
Prose

These books make clear that Bishop was as much a prose writer as she was a poet. Prose is in fact considerably fatter than Poems, which contains all of the The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 plus a selection from the posthumous collections of drafts and fragments.

Posted at 22:00 in Books | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Being Sure

"Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.

"Pooh?" he whispered.

"Yes, Piglet?"

"Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's hand. "I just wanted to be sure of you."

— A.A. Milne

Alan Alexander Milne with his son, Christopher Robin, and his toy bear, Pooh.

Posted at 13:53 in Books | Permalink | Comments (0)

On the bookshelf

Some of the most recent additions to my list of books read (via GoodReads). Some are new reads (mostly non-fiction), some are rereads and a few are probably old reads that I just added to my GoodReads list.