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

Whitney’s comments from the Snippets That Inspire group.

An Excerpt from "Unbroken: by Laura Hillenbrand:

Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live. Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it.

Excerpts from The Whole Five Feet by Christopher Beha:

That “a limit of time is fixed for thee” seems to be an overwhelming message of The Harvard Classics. In Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, there is a great deal on the idea that “a limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind, it will go and thou wilt go, and it will never return…..” Marcus Aurelius seems to accept the fact in a rather large-hearted way: Lucilla saw Verus die, and then Lucilla died. Secunda saw Maximus die, and then Secundus died. Epitynchanus saw Diotimus die, and then Epitynchanus died. Antoninus saw Faustina die, and then Antoninus died. Such is everything.

Where are our dead? How can we visit them? Must they really be lost to us? If there is anything truly unknowable, it would seem to be this. And yet a substantial portion of the Shelf is set in the land of the dead. In The Frogs, Aristophanes sends Dionysus to Hades to retrieve Euripides and save Greek drama.

Montaigne writes a great deal about the infirmity of the body and the prospect of mortality." To philosophize," he states with beautiful bluntness in the title of one essay, "is to learn how to die."

Beha says, “For the first time in my life, I inhabited, from the inside out, the fact of my own mortality… The people I loved were going to suffer, and so was I. Then they would be gone, and eventually so would I. Reading these words that others had set down while they suffered and before they were gone made things easier for me. I thought: we are all retreating. I expected the idea to scare me, but it comforted me instead.”

From Under a Wing
By Reeve Lindbergh

“Write it down!” our mother had told us whenever we said something that particularly interested or touched her: write down that sharp insight, that funny story, that especially appealing turn of phrase. She taught us that any experience worth living was worth writing about, but beyond this, she made us feel that the act of writing about it significantly affected the experience itself. I did not know whether writing enhanced an event, transforming it into something more important than it would have been had it gone unrecorded, or whether writing simply made it more real, like the testimony of an observant bystander who can confirm that Yes, something has indeed happened here: I am a witness, and this is what I saw.

From a letter written by Emily Dickinson: “The sailor cannot see North, but the Needle can.”

From "Abba’s Child" by Brennan Manning:

In the rags of my sixty-plus years, either I escape into skepticism and intellectualism or with radical amazement I surrender in faith to the truth of my belovedness.

From Midnight’s Children by Salmon Rushdie

There are no photographs of my grandmother anywhere on the earth. She was not one to be trapped in anyone’s little black box.

From "The Life and Works of Beethoven" by John N. Burk:

Beethoven felt helpless in all things but music and unable to cope with ordinary contingencies. “If I were only in London,” he wrote in 1822, “what would I not compose for the Philharmonic Society? For Beethoven, thank God, can compose; of all else he is incapable.” His God-given function to compose was his service to the world, his one ability, his one loyalty.

From the 2016 Winter Issue of Lapham’s Quarterly (Page 30):


“Information networks straddle the world. Nothing remains concealed. But the sheer volume of information dissolves the information. We are unable to take it all in.”

- Gunter Grass, 1990

From "Joseph and His Brothers" by Thomas Mann
Pages 317-319 from translation by John E. Woods::

Joseph was seventeen years old and in the yes of all who beheld him the most beautiful among the children of men. To be frank, we do not like speaking of beauty. Does not the concept, the word, exude boredom? It’s said that it is based in laws; but laws speak to reason, not to emotion, which has no use for reason’s strictures. That is why perfect beauty, which needs no apology, is so dreary. For emotion actually wants to find something it can forgive, otherwise it turned away with a yawn. Enthusiastic admiration for what is merely perfect demands a devotion to pre-conceived, prototypical norms -- a pedant’s devotion. The law’s bonds are external and didactic; magic alone creates an inner bond. Beauty is magic worked upon the emotions -- always half-illusionary, extremely precarious, and fragile in its very efficacy. Place a loathsome head atop a beautiful body, and the body itself will no longer be beautiful in terms of any emotional effect -- or, at best, only in the dark, which is mere deception. Deceit, trickery, fraud -- how great a role they play in the realm of beauty! And why? Because at the same time it is suddenly the realm of love and desire; because sexuality becomes involved and defines the concept of beauty. The world of anecdotes is full of tales of how lads dressed as women have turned men’s heads, of how girls in trousers have ignited the passions of their own sex. But discovery sufficed to dampen such feelings, for with it beauty had become impractical. Perhaps human beauty in its effect upon the emotions is nothing more than the magic of sex, the illustration of the idea of sexuality, so that one would do better to speak of a consummate man, of a supremely womanly woman, than of a beautiful one and to say that it understandably demands a great deal of a women to speak of another woman’s beauty, or a man or another man’s. Cases in which beauty triumphs over the attribute of manifest impracticality and retain its unconditional effect upon the emotions are in the minority, but do demonstrably occur. The impulse of youth comes into play here, and with it a magic that emotion is very apt to confuse with beauty, so that youth, if some all too disconcerting flaw does not cripple its attraction, is usually simply perceived as beauty -- even by youth itself, as its own smile unmistakably reveals. Charm is inherent in youth, a manifestation of beauty by its very nature is suspended between masculinity and femininity. A lad of seventeen is not beautiful in the sense of consummate masculinity. Neither is he beautiful in the sense of purely impractical femininity -- that would attract only a few. But let us grant this much: Beauty as youthful charm always tends in both psychology and expression somewhat toward the feminine; that is part of nature, which has its basis in its tender relationship with the world and of the world with it -- it is painted in a youth’s smile. At seventeen, it is true, someone can be more beautiful than woman or man, beautiful both as woman and man, beautiful from both sides and in every way, handsome and beautiful enough to set any woman, any man gawking, tumbling head over heels in love.

And so it was with Rachel’s son, and that is why it is said that he was the most beautiful among the children of men. That was exaggerated praise, for there have been and are a great many like him; and ever since humankind ceased to play the role of amphibian or reptile and has, for the most part, followed a path toward a more divine physicality, it has hardly been unusual for a lad of seventeen with such trim legs and small hips, such a well-formed torso, such golden brown skin to be greeted with approving looks -- nothing unusual about being neither too tall nor too squat, but of just the right stature, about walking and standing in demigod-like fashion, about a form charmingly suspended between gentleness and power. It is also hardly extraordinary that no dog’s head sits atop such a body, but rather something very appealing, with a smiling human mouth that approaches the divine -- it happens every day. But in Joseph’s world and immediate circle it was precisely his person and presence that exercised beauty’s emotional effect, and people generally felt that the Eternal had poured out grace upon his lips -- which would certainly have been too full if not for the movement that came with speaking and smiling. This grace was challenged; there was resistance to it here and there, but that resistance denied none of all this, nor can one claim that it actually excluded itself from the reigning emotion. There is much to be said at any rate for the notion that his brothers’ hatred was essentially nothing other than that same universal infatuation, but with a negative prefix.

From "All the Light We Cannot See" by Anthony Doerr

The aging mollusk expert, Dr. Geggard said to her: "Now that shell belonged to a violet sea snail that lives its whole life on the surface of the sea. As soon as it is released into the ocean, it agitates bubbles, and binds those bubbles with mucus, and builds a raft. Then it blows around, feeding on whatever floating aquatic invertebrates it encounters. But if it ever loses its raft, it will sink and die."

From "There Were Two Trees in the Garden" by Rick Joyner

As the Passover was to be the archetypical prophecy of the sacrifice of Jesus, it is significant to note that Moses prepared Israel for the first Passover by rotating its calendar to a “first month.” This heralded a new beginning. After partaking of the Passover, the children of Israel were to leave the only place they had ever known, to travel through lands they had never seen, to possess a land about which they had only dreamed. Their life would never be the same after that one fateful day -- and neither is ours.

From The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

Grimly, she realized that clocks don’t make a sound that even remotely resembles ticking, tocking. It was more the sound of a hammer, upside down, hacking methodically at the earth. It was the sound of a grave.

From Daily Open Windows by T. Austin-Sparks (January 23)

Remember – "In Him was life" (John 1:4). Is He different in nature from other men? Everyone can see that He is different from other men in His very nature, and the difference is made by this Life that is in Him. This Life brings with it a new and different consciousness. Look at the Lord Jesus! What was His real consciousness? This was a thing about which He was always speaking, and it was so very evident in His case. He said: "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30); "I do always the things that are pleasing to Him" (the Father) (John 8:29); "The works that I do in My Father's name"(John 10:25). Oh, this word "Father" in John's Gospel!

The consciousness of Jesus Christ every day was of His union with His Father, the oneness that existed between them: "As Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee" (John 17:21). The consciousness of the Lord Jesus was of the very closest union with God as His Father, and that was because the very life of God was in Him. His life was a God-conscious life; but God-consciousness in the sense of perfect oneness. And that is what it means to have this Life. Man never had that. Jesus came to bring it in His own person: not to talk about union with God, but to live out a life of union with God and to bring His disciples into the same union. "I came that they might have life" – in other words: "I am come that they may have the same consciousness of God as Father that I have and that they may have the same Divine nature in them as I have."

From "Cat's Cradle" by Kurt Vonnegut

She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.

From "The Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman

So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and back-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens -- four dowager and three regnant -- and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together, they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.

From "House" by Tracy Kidder

Jim Locke sets gently on the undisturbed earth a mahogany box, opens it, and takes out his transit, which looks like a spyglass. It is a tool for imposing levelness on an irregular world.

From the Introduction to "Blue Like Jazz" by Donald Miller:

"I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside a theatre in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.

I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve. But that was before any of this happened."

Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

Source: "Royal Insignia" by Edwin and Lillian Harvey (from Reading 12: Frailty Clothes Omnipotence):

"In nature we see that all the grandest forces are best expressed through the frailest mediums. The awful energy known as electricity works most effectually through slender wires. The mighty magnetic stream is revealed in the trembling needle. Thought is not located in an organ like a man’s fist, all bone and muscle; its chosen seat is the delicate brain, and it best acts through fairy cells and attenuated films compared with which the gossamer is coarse. Life does not reside in the massive skeleton, but pulses along the silver cord of alarming delicacy."
Royal Insignia

Oh GOODIE, I'm glad it sounds worthwhile. I will post here about once a week just to see what (and if anything) happens. Thanks for the encouragement to go forward, even in this busy Christmas season. I will contribute items, very slowly -- I love stirring the pot!

Leslynn wrote: "Hi there, thanks for the invitation and the wonderful quote! I think this is a fantastic idea, and will be more involved in the new year -- am going on leave as of tomorrow.

I hope you ladies have..."