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My tyrant sister has driven me here to complete the prescribed reading, as tomorrow there is an examination. I loathe examinations. They prove simply nothing, only that it is possible, after all, to mould another into the shape of one’s whims.
‘Anne Ashton, you have been gifted with intelligence. Do not presume that this is sufficient for a successful life. Sloth can bring it all tumbling down!’
“My religion?” she replied. “I don’t really know what it is, except to say it’s a listening very closely to growing things, to beautiful things, to true things. I try to understand if there’s something they’re telling me.”
In time of crisis it is better to do any intelligent thing quickly than to hesitate, searching for the ideal.
What if we are to greater beings what the fish in the river is to us? When it is hooked on a lure and hauled through the upper limits of its world into a higher realm, does it wonder at the naïveté of its brief sojourn in the water?
The universe is not flat. It is deep, multilayered, complex, always astonishing. Therefore, the principle that drives the cycles of biological life may be connected to dimensions that we cannot see. There is a male and female principle in biology. Thus, there may be a male and female principle in all existence, reaching far beyond the limits of matter, high above the surface of the river of life. On every level the unifying principle would seem to be love.
It seemed more an invasion of my imagination than an incarnation of the true story of that little shepherd, the lad who slew a giant against all odds and through the transmutations of art became another kind of giant.
Is it not true that the female principle rules in its own unique way? It creates the flesh of new men, moderates men into tamer pursuits, guides their confused drives, determines their desperate plunge up so many streams. It controls, without the visible apparatus of domination.
Let us suppose that a man and woman, understanding their limitations and their greatness, were to choose to give life to each other by giving away their very selves. Then both would be defeated, and both would win. In the process, both in the end would become a new kind of being, something they could not understand in the beginning and would never choose if they could foresee the struggle involved. If they were to persist, however, both would eventually become free, because neither would be dominated by the will to power. Only by the will to love.
It is a habit of human beings to crystallize around themselves a lens through which they may safely view the experiences of life.”
The valley teemed with life, breeding, killing, and eating undisturbed by man. He passed sow bears standing erect and protective of their cubs, woodpeckers and flickers knocking, bull moose rearing their ponderous lips and rack of bone from which water roots dangled slovenly. Geese, too, passed high overhead, northbound and honking. The man began to assume again life’s benevolence, of which he had recently entertained some doubts.
His parables were gleaned from the trees and the wind, the tending of sheep and the struggle against predators.
“Civilization is Reason!” she declared once, angrily. “Reason without love makes a dead civilization”,
If the wind from the promised land is at times cruel, it is to remind me that my journey is not yet complete.
It’s just that . . . well, I can smell lies, and there is a very strong smell whenever I hear that old institution being hated and feared. Usually what is hated and feared is in the imagination of the beholder.”
“What is a soul?” “A soul . . . ,” he said in a low voice, “a soul is a word spoken into the void. It pushes back the darkness. It defies the night.”
A desk teetered with old letters, tracts, magazines, open books, the disarray of a full but scattered interior life. There were two easy chairs flanking a wood heater. A cell really, the home of the kind of soul who had made a certain truce with the demands of the flesh. Clothes, food, objects were only tools—functional, uninspired, necessary, and good. She suspected that somehow they were important to him only as the vehicles of his search.
“I am a patriot”, she went on. “But my country is an invisible one, populated by poets and painters, novelists and thinkers who are interested, above all, in truth.”
the healing begins when you abandon your demands for love and choose instead to give love, no matter what the cost. Madness, isn’t it? But a madness that works.”
Why do they hate? Why do they despise? Is it because they know the helplessness of their creaturehood, know that a random virus or a bullet can snuff out in a moment all the securities they have worshipped? So we find, each in our fashion, a way to transcend life. And those who cannot transcend through creating will eventually discover that one can also transcend it by destroying. To kill is to be above life, is it not?
Two things, and two things only, can come from fear: courage or hatred.
“Everyone is molded”, said his mother. “We choose what to mold our children with. Nothing grows in a vacuum. If you think you’re making a free human being just by letting him grow spontaneously, you won’t end up with a free human being. You’ll have a patchwork boy composed of whatever is prowling about in his culture. He’ll be about as far from freedom as you can get.”
“I think he’s been teaching you for a long time not to make a god of knowledge. He’s been teaching you to believe in things you haven’t seen.”
I got rights on your attention. I got automatic credibility because I was born in a body that fought my ambition from the start. You never learned a child’s wisdom. You hear me, you spoiled denizens of Greenwich Village lofts and fashionable colleges. I got degrees coming out my ears. I got degrees in Chicken Breeding. I got my Masters in Human Suffering. I earned a thousand credits on a thousand sleepless nights. I got a doctorate in Unrequited Love. I can spot a high-class Ph.D. Harlequin Romance a mile off and the wind blowing the other way. Just get this straight. Your ambition is gonna
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“Well, it wasn’t always serene. But many questions do resolve themselves without words. You stand side by side for so long and have other things to fight than each other.”
He was empty, and he was full. He was alone. Yes, he was alone among men. He was an alien, a stranger and sojourner like all his fathers before him. He knew now the anguish of exiles, the depth of their loneliness. And he saw that this was a gift, for it was the state of pilgrims journeying toward their own true home.
