Would we be any better in the next life?
“We passionately long for there to be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years, we are unfaithful to what we once were, to what we wished to remain immortally. Even without supposing that death is to alter us more completely than the changes that occur in the course of our lives, if in that other life we were to encounter the self that we have been, we should turn away from ourselves as from those people with whom we were once on friendly terms but whom we have not seen for years . . . We dream much of a paradise, or rather of a number of successive paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a paradise lost, in which we should feel ourselves lost too.”
Marcel Proust
How do you prefer your sleeping bag?
‘On the outside grows the furside, on the inside grows the skinside; So the furside is the outside, and the skinside is the inside.”
Herbert Ponting, The Sleeping Bag
Or put another way
HE killed the noble Mudjokivis.
Of the skin he made him mittens,
Made them with the fur side inside,
Made them with the skin side outside.
He, to get the warm side inside,
Put the inside skin side outside;
He, to get the cold side outside,
Put the warm side fur side inside.
That ’s why he put the fur side inside,
Why he put the skin side outside,
Why he turned them inside outside.
Anonymous, The Modern Hiawatha
And from the Master
By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.
Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha III
Well Said
“A smile is the chosen vehicle for all ambiguities.”
Pierre, Melville
Like Keats, all poets seek to reason out beauty
For beauty being the best of all we know
Sums up the unsearchable and secret aims
Of nature
The Growth of Love, Robert Bridges
A Moment Lasting Forever
Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms
which I gaze on so fondly today
were to change by tomorrow and fleet in my arms
like fairy gifts fading away
Thou wouldst still be adored
as this moment thou art
let thy lovliness fade as it will
and around the dear ruin each wish of my heart
would entwine itself verdantly still
Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms, Thomas Moore
