Whitney’s Comments (group member since Dec 10, 2015)

Whitney’s comments from the Snippets That Inspire group.

From "Ever After" by Graham Swift:

To build a bridge! Is not that one of the noblest of man’s endeavors? To link terra firma with terra firma; to throw a path across a void.

This poem, entitled "On Reading Brecht" by Jane Hirschfield, is from "Of Gravity & Angels."


A child packs snow around a bit of
stone
and throws it at his brother.
Each recalls this all his life, the one who threw it, and the one
who cried out in surprise.
And whatever there is of love
between them includes it.
So, too, these words of Brecht’s,
who could not forget
what man does to man in the name of art
or country, yet pressed these poems hard,
and threw.

“Truth cannot be imparted,” says a character in Brian Evenson’s Dark Property. “It must be inflicted.”

- Cited by Maggie Nelson in The Art of Cruelty.

A few highlights from a book called "Sit, Walk, Stand" by Watchman Nee:

[We are like] a cripple in a power-driven invalid carriage. What does he do? He goes—but he also sits. And he keeps going because he remains sitting. He has first learned to sit. He has come to a place of rest in God. As a result, his walking is not based on his efforts but on God’s mighty inward working.

God means something similar in what it means to “stand.” We do not try to gain ground; we merely stand on the ground which the Lord Jesus has gained for us, and resolutely refuse to be moved from it.

Are we in such a union with the Lord that He will thus commit Himself to what we are doing? It is a question of the identification of my purpose with the eternal purpose of God.

It was Winston Churchill who said, "If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver."

From St. Augustine:

“Faith is to believe what you do not yet see; the reward for this faith is to see what you believe.”

From Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott:

She was urging me to go slow and not make any commitment to the guy or want one until we’d gone out for months and months. She said, Think of it as having come upon a beautiful canoe on the shore. Now, no matter how much you want to get in it and paddle way out into the water, maybe all the way across the Pacific, no matter how long you’ve had to wait to do so, you simply don’t do it. You’d paddle around the shore for awhile, maybe for weeks, take little excursions, test it out. Maybe it would seem okay the first few times, but then it might turn out to be full of tiny holes and cracks and start to sink, and you would need to bail. It would have turned out that you had gotten the last good hours out of this beautiful shiny little boat. It was a good thing that you hadn’t gone out very far.

From "Old School: by Tobias Wolff:

I hadn’t heard anyone speak of a writer as having power. Truth, yes. Wit, understanding, even courage -- but never power. We had long talked in class about Pasternak and his troubles, and the long history of Russian writers being imprisoned and killed for not writing as the Party wished. Augustus Caesar had sent our Latin master’s beloved Ovid into exile. And when the progressive Mr. Ramsey -- himself a gift from England -- wanted to show us what mushrooms we all were, he recalled our nation’s inhospitality to Lolita, which he considered the century’s greatest novel since Ulysses -- another victim of churlish American censors! Yet the effect of all these stories was to make me feel not Caesar’s power, but his fear of Ovid. And why would Caesar fear Ovid, except for knowing that neither his divinity nor all his legions could protect him from a good line of poetry.

From "The Art of Cruelty" by Maggie Nelson:

Kafka wrote in a now-famous letter that “we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

From "A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amor Towles:

Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov stirred at half past eight to the sound of rain on the eaves. With a half-opened eye, he pulled back his covers and climbed from bed. He donned his robe and slipped on his slippers. He took up the tin from the bureau, spooned a spoonful of beans into the Apparatus, and began to crank the crank.

Even as he turned the little handle round and round, the room remained under the tenuous authority of sleep. As yet unchallenged, somnolence continued to cast its shadow over sights and sensations, over forms and formulations, over what has been said and what must be done, lending each the insubstantiality of its domain. But when the Count opened the small wooden drawer of the grinder, the world and all it contained were transformed by that envy of the alchemists -- the aroma of freshly ground coffee.

In that instant, darkness was separated from light, the waters from the lands, and the heavens from the earth. The trees bore fruit and the woods rustled with the movement of birds and beasts and all manner of creeping things. While closer at hand, a patient pigeon scuffed its feet on the flashing.

Easing the little drawer from the Apparatus, the Count poured its contents into the pot (which he had mindfully primed with water the night before). He lit the burner and shook out the match. As he waited for the coffee to brew, he did thirty squats and thirty stretches and took thirty deep breaths. From the little cupboard in the corner, he took a small pitcher of cream, a pair of English biscuits, and a piece of fruit (today an apple). Then having poured the coffee, he began to enjoy the morning’s sensations to the fullest:

The crisp tartness of the apple…
The hot bitterness of the coffee…
The savory sweetness of the biscuit with its hint of spoiled butter…

So perfect was the combination that upon finishing, the Count was tempted to crank the crank, quarter the apple, dole out the biscuits, and enjoy his breakfast all over again.

From "The Shack" by William P. Young (an excerpt based on Pages 177-179):

Mack (the book’s main character) is talking with Jesus, who is calling the Church His bride. Jesus says that He came to birth a Church, not a religion, explaining that “The Church is a people, not an institution, individuals who together form a spiritual city with a living river flowing through the middle and on both shores trees growing with fruit that will heal the hurt and sorrows of the nations. And this city is always open, and each gate into it is made of a single pearl….” And Jesus opened one eye and looked at Mack. “That would be me!”

Jesus saw Mack’s questioning face and explained, “Pearls, Mack. The only precious stone made by pain, suffering, and finally, death.”

Mack paused, searching for the right words. “You’re talking about the church as this woman You’re in love with; I’m pretty sure I haven’t met her.” He turned away slightly. “She’s not the place I go on Sundays,” he said more to himself, unsure if that was safe to say that out loud.

“Mack, that’s because you’re only seeing the institution, a man-made system. That’s not what I came to accomplish. What I see are people and their lives, a living breathing community of all those who love Me, not buildings and programs.”

Mack was a little taken aback to hear Jesus talking about “church” this way, but then again, it didn’t really surprise him. It was a relief. “So how do I become part of that church?” he asked. “This woman You seem to be so gaga over?”

“It’s simple, Mack. It’s all about relationships and simply sharing life. What we are doing right now -- just doing this -- and being open and available to others around us. My church is all about people, and life is all about relationships. You can’t build it. It’s My job, and I’m actually pretty good at it,” Jesus said with a chuckle.

For Mack, these words were like a breath of fresh air. Simple. Not a bunch of exhausting work and long list of demands, and not the sitting in endless meetings staring at the backs of people’s heads, people he really didn’t even know. Just sharing life.

“But wait,” Mack said as a jumble of questions began to surface. Then he thought this seemed too simple. So he thought twice about messing with his jumbled mess of questions and turned to Jesus. “Never mind.” he said.

Jesus replied, “Mack, you don’t need to have it all figured out. Just be with Me. An awful lot of what is done in My name has nothing to do with Me and is, often, even if unintentional, very contrary to My purposes.”

“You’re not too fond of religion and institutions,” Mack said, not sure if he was asking a question or making an observation.

“I don’t create institutions -- never have, never will,” Jesus said.

“What about the institution of marriage?” Mack asked.

“Marriage is not an institution. It’s a relationship,” Jesus answered.

James Bamford quoted in the Winter 2016 Issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, Page 30:

“Yottabytes and exaflops, septillions and undecillions -- the race for computing speed and data storage forges on. In his 1941 story “The Library of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges imagined a collection of information where the entire world’s information is stored but barely a single word is understood. In Bluffdale, the NSA is constructing a library on a scale that even Borges might not have contemplated. And to hear the masters of the agency tell it, it’s only a matter of time until every word is illuminated.”

From “The Hero” by Somerset Maugham:

"Cause? Every cause is righteous. I can think of no war in which right has not been fairly equal on both sides; in every question there is about as much to be said on either part, and in none more than in war. Each country is necessarily convinced of the justice of its own cause."

From "The Art of Cruelty" by Maggie Nelson on Simone Weil:

Her ruminations were saturated with the desire to dispense with subjectivity altogether, and to become completely emptied out, effaced, thing-like, in order to get closer to God … “to become nothing” she wrote. “My heart is to do the will of Him who sent me.”

A quote from From Aristotle Onassis who said, “It is during the darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.”

A quote from Simone Weil:

“Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.”

From "The Art of Cruelty -- A Reckoning" by Maggie Nelson, who writes:

“I know I generally feel very alive and emancipated when I choose to walk out of something.”

Thoughts about death from "The Satanic Verses" by Salmon Rushdie:

When the bad news telegram arrived… the tone was pretty unvarnished: FATHER GOING FAST + IF DESIROUS OF SEEING BETTER MOVE IT. He discovered to his surprise that, after a lifetime of tangled relationships with his father, after long years of crossed wires and “irrevocable sunderings,” he was once again capable of an uncomplicated reaction. Simply, overwhelmingly, it was imperative that he reach Bombay before Changez left it for good.

This had always been a weighty man, but now he was a living lunch for the advancing cancer cells…

After his father’s death and seeing “a pair of emptied shoes” Salahuddin says, Yes, this looked like the start of a new phase in which the world would be solid and real and in which there was no longer the broad figure of a parent standing between himself and the inevitability of the grave. An orphaned life, like Muhammad’s; like everyone’s…

Today's quotation is from Albert Einstein who said, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used creating them."

Aeschylus said, “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”