More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 1 - March 17, 2021
Ascent is natural to children; it is their instinctive hunger for transcendence.
alerted me to the hidden dangers of complexification: a lack of focus, compartmentalization of thought, the loss of attention, an indifference to the illuminating moment.
My grandfather Stiofain saying to me, “Tanny, our hearts are like stone, and only suffering carves them into bowls big enough to catch the joy.” Incomprehensible to me at the time, but unforgotten.
That world seized a child’s imagination and fed on its life, sapping vital energies and replacing them with an addict’s appetite for visceral stimuli.
“Even hobbits have to sleep”, I tell her.
All right, Tan, it’s time. No more treading water. You’d better do some fast paddling, because something cruising out there in the abyss doesn’t like you. It wants to eat you.
“I hate your country”, said another. “There, they kill us, but here they kill the heart. You are already dead. You are a dead people!”
The modern North American simply has no time, inclination, or apparatus to read correctly the face of reality.
I’m boogeying around the living room, when it hits me that her tiny body is so packed full of codes that maybe she’s a kind of word. Maybe a word from God. Maybe this is the only liturgy I can handle right now. She’s so strong and so happy, despite her world crumbling around her, that I can only gaze in awe. She leaps into the air, giving shape to the music that reposes in all matter, just waiting to be released. She lands solidly on her fat little feet, then leaps again. She liberates the music and, in her innocence, cannot know what she has done and thereby is all the stronger.
rock some more. O bad Catholic me. Stupid me. An ache bursts inside. I try not to cry. I hold the carving in my hands and gaze at it. It’s a word uttered across the centuries, connecting the one who spoke it and the one who now hears. How many generations have looked upon this object, held it, blessed it, blessed with it, worshipped before it, or made promises before it?
The hart intercepts it, though his white hide is now raked with red. He is bleeding heavily. His eyes are golden. They are full of fire. He rears his rack of antlers and strikes an unexpected blow in return. The beast reels backward, and its malice smolders.
“Nothing is yours”, replies the hart, fending it off with thrusts of its horn. “Nothing is yours because you wanted to possess all, to be master of all, to destroy what you willed.”
Bad, not because I am an outrageous profligate whose sins are scarlet, but bad because I’m a hypocrite.
This Lilliputian tells a strange tale on the deck of a ridiculous ark, beached on the edge of a frozen lake in a cold northern land, on the far, far edges of a cruel century. Just before the very end of an age, I have found a true man.
Like my life. Shards of many conversations fall across the screen of consciousness and coalesce into an impressionistic work. But what is the work about? What does it mean? I know that one must stand back and be still before an impressionist painting, in order for its essential word to sharpen into focus.
Daedalus in Traumaland is now Icarus Ascending.
I ferret my pipe and tabaccy from the bottom of my rucksack. I light it and puff merrily. “Bad for the health”, I tell the children somberly. They grin and sniff the sweet smoke. “A mobile hearth”, I add sagely. “Very useful in emergency situations.” They know smoking’s a dirty habit—substance abuse—they’ve heard all about it at school. But they can’t help liking the smell, and they lean back on their sleeping bags just watching me, smiling. Strange children! What a terrible example to set for them. I feel a trickle of guilt go down my throat, along with the soothing effect of nicotine. I’m a
...more
“I really liked today. It was hard.”
Is this the word I have waited for all of my life? Did it take a lifetime of preparation? If it had come too early, would I have held it in my heart the way I do now?
Pain just isn’t fun; helplessness is scary. But suffering finds us all sooner or later. There is no hiding place, and, when raising a family, you are especially exposed to the dangers of human existence.
I didn’t know it then, but the cost of a happy family is the death of selfishness. The father must die if he is to give life to his spouse and children. Not a pleasant thought but a true one.
But at least, I reminded myself, at least I have my will. I can choose to give the last dregs of whatever is down there in the bottom of this empty barrel of myself. And then I’ll scrape the barrel’s bottom and keep scraping, if necessary.
“when everything’s taken away from you, maybe they leave you a few little things like this: the only kind of power that means something. A warm hand and a song.”
If I have to, I thought, I’ll rock this baby till morning. I was strangely content to do so. If she needed me, I could carry this little beloved throughout the night. “Yes,” I thought, “I’ve nothing left to give you, Zöe. That’s what I give you. Yes.”
I heard again the music I hadn’t suspected was there: the song of poverty, a child breathing easily at last, the cry of a night bird, the poetry of wind, and the whispering of snow. And in the depths of night a train’s horn echoing across the wall of darkness.
I’ll sit by the void where no voice is heard, no word, where only an absurd wind contradicts the bad news that men now call good.
I assure you that smoking and drinking are definitely going to shorten your life. But they’re definitely better than the obsessive pursuit of health.” “Spoken like a true addict.”
I have been frantically busy getting my life accomplished, and in the process I have failed to live. I have rushed past the abundant beauty that surrounds me. I have been so anxious about my children that I’ve not really looked at them.
the present generation, the brave new man, is a strangely homogenized creature, rushing, rushing, rushing toward an undefined end.
You should try being a loser once in a while. It’s good for the soul, and you learn so much in the process. One of the things you learn is that reality, on a human scale, is never final. Evil is not absolute. You must never lose hope. There is a more complete reality that exists beyond the clutching fingers of our senses and our proud intellects.
O my brave and blind words, O my unknown name, O my dazed mind, waiting in darkness for words to shatter my unhearing! Plying my power, singing loud the great, sharp bark of my humanity, am I a child becoming a form of man?
Is Daedalus at last ascending, bearing the weight of beloved Icarus? As we fly, I hear my children laughing, and we are rising, rising, rising fearless in our fear. For an instant, in the liberty of the mind’s imagination, I gaze on trees burning with green fire and an expanse of water freed.
Because the body’s not just an old bag we slough off when we’ve finished with it. It’s holy, like a house full of love, or a shrine. It’s a home, and there’s nothing like it ever existed before or will ever be like it again. It’s a word spoken into the void. It pushes back the darkness by just . . . by just being.
