Nostalgia

A friend shared this quote from the TV show, Mad Men:

Nostalgia - it's delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, "nostalgia" literally means "the pain from an old wound." It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel. It let's us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved.

 Reminded me of what Milan Kundera wrote about Nostalgia in Ignorance:

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages: añoranza, say the Spaniards; saudade, say the Portuguese. In each language these words have a different semantic nuance. Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of returning to one's country: a longing for country, for home. What in English is called "homesickness." Or in German: Heimweh. In Dutch: heimwee. But this reduces that great notion to just its spatial element. One of the oldest European languages, Icelandic (like English) makes a distinction between two terms: söknuour: nostalgia in its general sense; and heimprá: longing for the homeland. Czechs have the Greek-derived nostalgie as well as their own noun, stesk, and their own verb; the most moving, Czech expression of love: styska se mi po tobe ("I yearn for you," "I'm nostalgic for you"; "I cannot bear the pain of your absence"). In Spanish añoranza comes from the verb añorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyorar, itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss), In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there. Certain languages have problems with nostalgia: the French can only express it by the noun from the Greek root, and have no verb for it; they can say Je m'ennuie de toi (I miss you), but the word s'ennuyer is weak, cold -- anyhow too light for so grave a feeling. The Germans rarely use the Greek-derived term Nostalgie, and tend to say Sehnsucht in speaking of the desire for an absent thing. But Sehnsucht can refer both to something that has existed and to something that has never existed (a new adventure), and therefore it does not necessarily imply the nostos idea; to include in Sehnsucht the obsession with returning would require adding a complementary phrase: Sehnsucht nach der Vergangenheit, nach der verlorenen Kindheit, nach der ersten Liebe (longing for the past, for lost childhood, for a first love).

Also, later on page 77-78, he writes: 

Until then her view of time was the present moving forward and devouring the future; she either feared its swiftness (when she was awaiting something difficult) or rebelled at its slowness (when she was awaiting something fine). Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past. She sees a young man disconnecting himself from her life and going away, forevermore out of her reach. Mesmerized, all she can do is watch this piece of her life move off; all she can do is watch it and suffer. She is experiencing a brand-new feeling called nostalgia.

Update: I realized I have posted before on the subject of añoranza and Kundera's take on it here.

Our endless quest for understanding

Great quote about fiction.

"A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries." - Tim O'Brien

Also this: 

"Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story." - Tim O'Brien

I have only read Tim O'Brien's famous (and very moving) title piece, The Things They Carried, but have not read anything else by him. I really need to at least read the whole book - he seems like an author one should not miss!

The fundamental naming of the gods

While readng something else, I read about Hölderlin calling the writing of poetry as a "fundamental naming of the gods." Intrigued, I had to look up the quote.

"The writing of poetry is the fundamental naming of the gods. But the poetic word only acquires its power of naming, when the gods themselves bring us to language." - Hölderlin

One more excerpt from what Holderlin wrote:

"And therefore has language, most dangerous of possessions, been given to man, so that creating, destroying, and perishing and returning to the everliving, to the mistress and mother, he may affirm what he is--that he has inherited, learned from thee, thy most divine possession, all-preserving love."

Interestingly, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger delivered a seminar lecture in 1936 titled "Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry." (Published in Existence and Being, 270–291, 1949) in which he writes:

"Poetry is the inaugural naming of being and of the essence of all things - not just any speech...but that particular kind which for the first time brings into the open all that we then discuss and deal with in everyday language. Hence poetry never takes language as a raw material ready to hand, rather it is poetry which first makes language possible. Poetry is the primitive language of a historical people."

Lovely excerpt!

Possibilities

Soren Kierkegaard, the famous Danish philosopher wrote in his book Either/Or:

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating as possibility?

Reading is not dreaming

 Just ran across a quote:

Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.  --- Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist in Introduction to Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, Yale University Press (1988).

You can read an article based on the main thesis of the above book here (pdf).

Alienated gorillas

Found an interesting quote (emphasis mine):

A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs—something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.  - E.M. Cioran (b. 1911), Rumanian-born French philosopher. The Trouble with Being Born, ch. 11, trans. by Richard Howard, Seaver Books (1976).

Something to think about next time you crib about being bored, as I was doing this afternoon. What do I know -- I am an alienated gorilla!

Also: "Boredom and fear keep us working and obeying the laws." - Mason Cooley, who also opined that

Also, Nietzsche said:

Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom.

and also that:

One receives as reward for much ennui, despondency, boredom—such as a solitude without friends, books, duties, passions must bring with it—those quarter-hours of profoundest contemplation within oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the strongest refreshing draught from his own innermost fountain.  

So, drink from the refreshing draught of my innermost fountain I have to. There is nothing else to salvage this despondency and ennui.

A qualified unhappiness

I might have blogged this when I read Nonconformity couple years back:

"The natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are only adds to this unhappiness in the end" - F. Scott Fitzerald, as quoted in Nonconformity by Nelson Algren

And so it goes...

Labors under a curse

This excerpt from William Faulkner's Nobel lecture:

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. 

It's a short Banquet speech... but so wonderful to read! Go read it in its entirety or better still

Listen to a Sound Recording (3 min. )

The voice of the emptiness below us

I ran into this quote from Kundera and wanted to share it here:

"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves." - Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I had fervently read a lot of Kundera novels in the mid-90s when I was first introduced to his oeuvre by a friend. I so enjoyed them that I went and bought 4-5 of his novels during a trip to India in 1998! I should probably re-read a few of them some day soon -- it's been 10+ years and I am sure the books are tired waiting in anticipation on the book shelf behind me, hoping that some day someone will pick them up and read them!

From Darkness Towards Light

Was perusing through Dylan Thomas's essays Quiet Early One Morning and came across this wonderful set of Q&As (titled Replies To an Enquiry - published in New Verse, October 1934)

Q: Do you intend your poetry to be useful to yourself or others?
DT: To both. Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its itnensity on the strength of the labour put into the creation of the poetry. My poetry is, or should be, useful to me for one reason: it is the record of my individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light, and what of the individual struggle is still to come benefits by the sight and knowledge of the faults and fewer merits in that concrete record. My poetry is, or should be, useful to others for its individual recording of that same struggle with which they are necessarily acquainted.

and later..

Q: Have you been influenced by Freud and how do you regard him?
A: Yes. Whatever is hidden should be made naked. To be stripped of darkness is to be clean, to strip of darkness is to make clean. Poetry, recording the stripping of the individal darkness, must, inevitably, cast light upon what has been hidden for too long, and, by so doing, make clean the naked exposure. Freud cast light on a little of the darkness he had exposed. Benefiting by the sight of the light and the knowledge of the hidden nakedness, poetry must drag further into the clean nakedness of light more even of the hidden causes than Freud could realise.

Much more to savor in the book including essays titled "On Poetry", "How to be a poet", and "How to begin a story". But for now I am returning it to the library, with the hope that some day soon I will return to it.
--

"Poetry is not what words say but what is said between them, that which appears fleetingly in pauses and silences."  - Octavio Paz

“Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.” - Octavio Paz

More quotes about "What is poetry" here.

The magic in the stick

Repeat after me..er. her now: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

This reminds me of a word I learned to spell as a 9 or 10 year old! (Yeah.. I was (am?) geeky that way! :)) This one: Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis


For those wondering what the post title means...

“What matters is not the length of the wand, but the magic in the stick” - Anon

What goes of wands, goes for words too, no? ;)

Some other more philosophical quotes about length! :)

 “Life's like a play; it's not the length but the excellence of the acting that matters” - Seneca  

“It is not length of life, but depth of life.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Yes and No are very short words to say, but we should think for some length of time before saying them.” - Anon

Dispelled in mid-air & dissolving like clouds

Am tweeting about Wallace Stevens today and in addition to his wonderful poetry, I am finding so many great quotes by this esteemed Modernist poet. Here is one that I liked:

To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time;   nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing. Since we have always shared all things with them and have always had a part of their strength and, certainly, all of their knowledge, we shared likewise this experience of annihilation. It was their annihilation, not ours, and yet it left us feeling that in a measure, we, too, had been annihilated. It left us feeling dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children without parents, in a home that seemed deserted, in which the amical rooms and halls had taken on a look of hardness and emptiness. What was most extraordinary is that they left no mementoes behind, no thrones, no mystic rings, no texts either of the soil or of the soul. It was as if they had never inhabited the earth. There was no crying out for their return. They were not forgotten because they had been a part of the glory of the earth. At the same time, no man ever muttered a petition in his heart for the restoration of those unreal shapes. There was always in every man the increasingly human self, which instead of remaining the observer, the non-participant, the delinquent, became constantly more and more all there was or so it seemed; and whether it was so or merely seemed so still left it for him to resolve life and the world in his own terms.

The passage is from Stevens' essay "Two or three ideas" (from Opus Posthumous; NYT Review). Though written in prose, it is supposed to be "a great hymn to absence and to the heroically human self."

From an overclothed blindness to a naked vision

Read this in the the write-up for the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, in The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemparary Poetry (vol 2)*

Dylan Thomas...

.. liked to speak of his poems as narratives, as in his reply to a questionnaire in 1934: "Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, moment from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its intensity on the strength of the labor put into the creation of the poetry. My poetry is, or should be, useful to me for one reason: it is the record of my individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light."

Emphasis mine, to highlight the beautiful words that capture the essence of poetry.

Later in the write-up, this quote from Dylan Thomas:

"I make one image, though "make" is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be made emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual and critical forces I possess -- let it breed another; let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict. Each image holds within it the seed of its own destruction, and my dialectical method, as I understand it, is a constant building up and breaking down of the images that come out of the central seed, which is itself destructive and constructive at the same time . . . The life in any poem of mine cannot move concentrically round a central image, the life must come out of the center; an image must be born and die in another; and any sequence of my images must be a sequence of creations, recreations, destructions, contradictions . . . Out of the inevitable conflict of images . . . I try to make that momentary peace which is a poem."

Lovely!

* This two volume set is precious. I'm reading a library copy (for the second time in my life - had read it 3-4 years back once). Some day I need to buy it - $37.50 for the 2 volume set is not that expensive, given how much treasure is in here!

No stranger to faltering and fear

Picked up a book by Willa Cather called Obscure Destinies at the library yesterday. Randomly opened it and came upon this paragraph that starts the short piece, Two Friends.

I loved it and decided to share it here.

Even in early youth, when the mind is so eager for the new and untried, while it is still a stranger to faltering and fear, we yet like to think that there are certain unalterable realities, somewhere at the bottom of things. These anchors may be ideas; but more often they are merely pictures, vivid memories, which in some unaccountable and very personal way give us courage. The sea- gulls, that seem so much creatures of the free wind and waves, that are as homeless as the sea (able to rest upon the tides and ride the storm, needing nothing but water and sky), at certain seasons even they go back to something they have known before; to remote islands and lonely ledges that are their breeding-grounds. The restlessness of youth has such retreats, even though it may be ashamed of them.

Not sure if one is ashamed to go back to such retreats but so it goes...

--
"Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others."-Robert Louis Stevenson

Social Interactions & Friendships

As if in a subliminal note being sent to me, have run into wwo articles in the last 2 days that emphasize the importance of social interaction and human company in life. The second is specifically talking about friendship between women and though I'm not one, the learnings about the need for friendships in getting through troubled times apply as much to men as to women, I think. The flight-and-fight vs. tend-and-befriend responses to stress need not be independent of each other.

1) This piece by Dr. Atul Gawande in this month's New Yorker is more about solitary confinement & torture but it begins with a good introduction about the human need for social interaction.

Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.

Children provide the clearest demonstration of this fact, although it was slow to be accepted. Well into the nineteen-fifties, psychologists were encouraging parents to give children less attention and affection, in order to encourage independence. Then Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, produced a series of influential studies involving baby rhesus monkeys.

He happened upon the findings in the mid-fifties, when he decided to save money for his primate-research laboratory by breeding his own lab monkeys instead of importing them from India. Because he didn’t know how to raise infant monkeys, he cared for them the way hospitals of the era cared for human infants—in nurseries, with plenty of food, warm blankets, some toys, and in isolation from other infants to prevent the spread of infection. The monkeys grew up sturdy, disease-free, and larger than those from the wild. Yet they were also profoundly disturbed, given to staring blankly and rocking in place for long periods, circling their cages repetitively, and mutilating themselves.

At first, Harlow and his graduate students couldn’t figure out what the problem was. They considered factors such as diet, patterns of light exposure, even the antibiotics they used. Then, as Deborah Blum recounts in a fascinating biography of Harlow, “Love at Goon Park,” one of his researchers noticed how tightly the monkeys clung to their soft blankets. Harlow wondered whether what the monkeys were missing in their Isolettes was a mother. So, in an odd experiment, he gave them an artificial one.

In the studies, one artificial mother was a doll made of terry cloth; the other was made of wire. He placed a warming device inside the dolls to make them seem more comforting. The babies, Harlow discovered, largely ignored the wire mother. But they became deeply attached to the cloth mother. They caressed it. They slept curled up on it. They ran to it when frightened. They refused replacements: they wanted only “their” mother. If sharp spikes were made to randomly thrust out of the mother’s body when the rhesus babies held it, they waited patiently for the spikes to recede and returned to clutching it. No matter how tightly they clung to the surrogate mothers, however, the monkeys remained psychologically abnormal.

In a later study on the effect of total isolation from birth, the researchers found that the test monkeys, upon being released into a group of ordinary monkeys, “usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by . . . autistic self-clutching and rocking.” Harlow noted, “One of six monkeys isolated for three months refused to eat after release and died five days later.” After several weeks in the company of other monkeys, most of them adjusted—but not those who had been isolated for longer periods. “Twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially,” Harlow wrote. They became permanently withdrawn, and they lived as outcasts—regularly set upon, as if inviting abuse.

The research made Harlow famous (and infamous, too—revulsion at his work helped spur the animal-rights movement). Other psychologists produced evidence of similarly deep and sustained damage in neglected and orphaned children. Hospitals were made to open up their nurseries to parents. And it became widely accepted that children require nurturing human beings not just for food and protection but also for the normal functioning of their brains.

We have been hesitant to apply these lessons to adults. Adults, after all, are fully formed, independent beings, with internal strengths and knowledge to draw upon. We wouldn’t have anything like a child’s dependence on other people, right? Yet it seems that we do. We don’t have a lot of monkey experiments to call upon here. But mankind has produced tens of thousands of human ones, including in our prison system. And the picture that has emerged is profoundly unsettling.

Among our most benign experiments are those with people who voluntarily isolate themselves for extended periods. Long-distance solo sailors, for instance, commit themselves to months at sea. They face all manner of physical terrors: thrashing storms, fifty-foot waves, leaks, illness. Yet, for many, the single most overwhelming difficulty they report is the “soul-destroying loneliness,” as one sailor called it. Astronauts have to be screened for their ability to tolerate long stretches in tightly confined isolation, and they come to depend on radio and video communications for social contact.

The problem of isolation goes beyond ordinary loneliness, however.

2) UCLA study on friendship among women - Tend and Befriend vs. Fight or Flight response to stress 

 

Of course, this is nothing new. Some would argue it is stating the obvious. Afterall, Alfred Adler wrote in the early 20th century..

"Man is a social being. Expressed differently: The human being and all his capabilities and forms of expression are inseparably linked to the existence of others, just as he is linked to cosmic facts and to the demands of this earth." - Critical Considerations on the Meaning of Life, IZIP, Vol.III, 1924

 

And since true happiness is inseparable from the feeling of giving, it is clear that a social person is much closer to happiness than the isolated person striving for superiority. Individual Psychology has very clearly pointed out that everyone who is deeply unhappy, the neurotic and the desolate person stem from among those who were deprived in their younger years of being able to develop the feeling of community, the courage, the optimism, and the self-confidence that comes directly from the sense of belonging. This sense of belonging that cannot be denied anyone, against which there are no arguments, can only be won by being involved, by cooperating, and experiencing, and by being useful to others. Out of this emerges a lasting, genuine feeling of worthiness. " - Individual Psychology, Einführung in die neuere Psychologie, 1926

Even Mahatma Gandhi is said to have said:

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

And also Rochefoucaul:

What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received; it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love. 

And so it goes....

The cause of variance and contentions

Some days I feel like this - like I'm that man walking with life's ominous uncertainties creeping up on me...



Maybe I'll try to inspire myself with some quotes (A quote is like "bread for the famished", the Talmud says!)

“Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security.” - John Allen Paulos



“Uncertainty and mystery are energies of life. Don't let them scare you unduly, for they keep boredom at bay and spark creativity.”   - R. I. Fitzhenry 

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.” - Ursula K. LeGuin 

“The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”   - Erich Fromm 


“Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing, through the overtaking and possessing of a wish discovers the folly of the chase.”  - William Congreve


“Certainty is the mother of quiet and repose, and uncertainty the cause of variance and contentions”   - Edward Coke


“Uncertainty will always be part of the taking charge process.”  - Harold S. Geneen

And so it goes...

Try like mad to cope with it

Quote of the day:

I was asked to act when I couldn't act. I was asked to sing "Funny Face" when I couldn't sing and dance with Fred Astaire when I couldn't dance - and do all kinds of things I wasn't prepared for. Then I tried like mad to cope with it. - Audrey Hepburn

Here she is, accepting the Oscars for best actress in 1951 for what is one of my wife's favorite movies - Roman Holiday. Such grace, such humility.

Contrast that with these recent expressions of fake over-animated joy of recent years! (Yes... Roberto Benigni went crazy at the Oscars too.. but that was at least entertaining and funny!)

Btw, speaking of emotion at the Oscar presentations, very few beat Charlie Chaplin's emotional and yet succinct speech when he (finally) received an Oscar (albeit an Honorary one) from the Academy.

Patriotism

Don Boudreaux, in a recent letter written in response to a WaPO article about McCain's long on appeals to patriotism ("What McCain Hasn't Tried," October 13), quotes H. L. Mencken:

"Patriotism, though it is based upon the natural and indeed instinctive love of home, has been elevated in the modern world into an unparalleled congeries of imbecilities. What it demands of the individual citizen, as a practical matter, is that he yield not only his judgment but also his property and even his life to whatever gang of scheming politicians happen to be in power."

Indeed! Jefferson also said it best* ..."Dissent is the highest form of patriotism" but try telling that to the Bush administration. (Or in the words of Wendy Kaminer: "Patriotism does not oblige us to acquiesce in the destruction of liberty. Patriotism obliges us to question it, at least."

* Apparently, he did not say it!! Nadine Strossen, who was President of the ACLU in the early 90s may have said it in 1991, Howard Zinn also said it again more recently and Dorothy Hewitt Hutchinson may have said it in the 1960s!

As if what exists

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious

Beautiful lines from a poem "In Passing" by winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Lisel Mueller. I found it in the preface to a book of short stories, Rear View, by Peter Duval. (Raving intro to the book by poet, writer, biographer, critic, anthologist (and literary executor for Gore Vidal), Jay Parini, btw.)

Here's the entire poem. Short and sweet but so poetic and packs a punch. This is what poetry is all about!

In Passing

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious

~ Lisel Mueller ~
from her book of poems, Alive Together

More poems by Lisel Mueller in a Book Review of Alive Together.

Leave you with this beautiful prose from famous poets:

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither. - Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defense of Poetry.

“During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both.” - S. T. Coleridge, Chapter XIV, Biographia Literaria (1817)

And, Wordsworth, of course, described poetry as the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," and "emotions recollected in tranquility"; phrases that I heard first in 8th 0r 9th grade from my English teacher - Ramachandran Sir*, who was the one I should credit with me falling in love with the English language and for my literary interests, which have obviously developed and honed continually since then.

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. - William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads.

* I have no idea if Ramachandran Sir is still around (he was probably in his early 60s in 1984-85) but perhaps appropriate then to dedicate this post to my memories of that which is lost but has became precious; not because I lost it but because I treasure the memories still. (I actually woke up today with memories of my father.... actually woke up with the words "the taste of memories on my tongue" somehow popping in my head! I have more or less given up writing poetry (an endeavor which never really developed further from being an attempt to seek catharsis through writing) but maybe that phrase needs to be developed into a short poem some day!

The shadow-truths that endure

"Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot." - Neil Gaiman, #19 in The Sandman series.

Again...this reminds me of something I wrote recently! I really need to go rework that piece. Its good but good enough for others to read yet (outside of the workshop setting, where I shared it.) I need to polish it and maybe even re-write it in another way before I can share it here or on some other public forum.

Anyways, leave you with other quotable quotes from Gaiman's famous Sandman comic book series, which I have to get around to reading some day!