Jim > Recent Status Updates

In the past several decades since the advent of the Internet, things are ever more swiftly flattening and thinning... You could acquire vast quantities of data but could not recall it after five minutes.

Robt Louis Stevenson: Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.

Mark Twain: Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on those accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

Should h try to help the stranger? Maybe. He probably had a concussion. A broken nose. Maybe the jaw, too. If he fully lost consciousness, he could choke on his own blood and phlegm. No. Fuck him. He's been going for his gun.

In fact, Guatemala is not a country for those who want the world to be neatly divisible into good and evil. Perhaps such countries do not exist. But to restore my confidence in my ability to recognize evil when I encountered it,

I begin to understand this Roman disdain for philosophy. Their world is an immediate one -- of cause and consequence, of rumor and fact, of advantage and deprivation. Even I, who have devoted my life to the pursuit of knowledge and truth, can have some sympathy for the state of the world which has occasioned this disdain.

Friends of the President: owners of house-property (forty or fifty houses); money lenders at nine, nine and a half, and ten per cent a month; officials holding seven or eight different public posts; exploiters of concessions, pensions, professional qualifications, gambling hells, cock-pits, Indians, brandy distilleries, brothels, bars and subsidized newspapers.

From the POPOL VUH: Our people will never be scattered. Our destiny will triumph over the ill-fated days which are coming at a time unknown. We will always be secure in the land we have occupied.

I'm a believer in the single bullet theory. You can fall in love and make love many times but there is only one bullet with your name etched on the side. And if you are lucky enough to be shot with that bullet then the wound never heals.

KING ARTHUR: Did you see what Lancelot did for me today? He was in a position to kill me but refused to touch me. In faith, today he has surpassed in goodness and courtesy all the knights I have ever seen; now I wish this war had never been begun, because today he has conquered my heart more with his gallantry than the whole world could have done by force.

Agravain was so observant that he discovered the whole truth, that Lancelot and the queen loved each other adulterously. The queen was so beautiful that everyone marvelled at her, for at that time she was at least fifty years old but was such a beautiful woman that her equal could not be found anywhere in the world.

As to the rain gods, the chacs, there are four of them, one for each of the sacred directions. They are old men, but dangerous in the way that the Maya underworld is dangerous. They are the sources of lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods, but since they are also the source of the earth's fertility, the world cold not survive without them. Therefore, they must be constantly managed, constantly placated.

The Maya landscape is a Swiss cheese of strange transformations, hostile forces, different spiritual planes. The Maya need constant vigilance simply to occupy the little niche of creation granted them. As a result, every action -- even something as simple as passing someone on a path -- is charged with significance.

The war had begun and they were being bombed and would probably die, but it was Washington that was dropping the bombs on them ... something had gone wrong with an automatic defense system out in space, and it was acting out its cycle this way—and no one could halt it either.

If one would live well, one must live completely, with the whole being—with the body and the instincts, as well as with the conscious mind. A life lived, as far as may be, exclusively from the consciousness and in accordance with the considered judgments of the intellect, is a stunted life, a half-dead life.

We felt suspended in a continuum of past and present and imagined dozens of cayucos [canoes] drifting aimlessly, boys and girls from Lacam-Tun coupling under the stars and farmers and fisherfolk all the way back to the Olmec standing on calm lake surfaces or agricultural canals, the heavens reflected in crystal clarity and the ongoing story of creation unfolding above and below.

[We drove through] small villages with minimalist tiendas, kids on mules, women carrying ollas on their heads, and evangelist churches with miniature steeples and names like the Holy Wounds, Church of the Crucified One, their perfectly incongruous sloping lawns mowed and trimmed like Church of Christ grounds in suburbs of Omaha or Hattiesburg.

Callipygian Euro-beauties in diaphanous shifts drifted around barefoot. They all seemed tattooed and pierced in their navels, nostrils, and quien sabe where else. They returned my greetings with studied sangfroid or silent, serene expressions.

Guatemala's democracy was not a popular democracy, the people were left out of it. It was a democracy of principals, not principles, of aspiration not inspiration. Democracy was simply a new game for the traditional power elites to play.

If you keep bogies and goblins away from children they would make them up for themselves. One small child in the dark can invent more hells than Swedenborg. One small child can imagine monsters too big and black to get into any picture, and give them names too unearthly and cacophonous to have occurred in the cries of any lunatic. The child, to begin with, commonly likes horrors, and he continues to indulge in them.

She saw herself in a solitude to which no words could do justice, deprived of the most innocent friendships. She had had no wish to do wrong -- merely to speak and to hear the sound of a voice answering hers -- merely not to be forced to return to her hotel without having broken the silence of a whole day save with "merci" and "bonjour."

She was in the grip of one of those nightmares where you are incapable of moving a muscle or uttering a cry. It seemed to her that she was filled with some power but could not use it.

It is impossible to describe the interest with which I explored [Copan]. The ground was entirely new; there were no guide-books or guides; the whole was a virgin soil. We could not see ten yards before us, and never knew what we should stumble upon next.

For, d'ye see there's no gammon about the ocean; it knocks the false keel right off a pretender's bows; it tells him just what he is, and makes him feel it, too. A sailor's life, I say, is the thing to bring us mortals out.

The Navy is the asylum for the perverse, the home of the unfortunate. Here the sons of adversity meet the children of calamity, and the children of calamity meet the offspring of sin.

Not that Flight had ever thought of the Lea as a "river." It was a place where supermarket trolleys came to die, a dank stretch of water bordered on one side by marshland and on the other by industrial sites and lo-rise housing.

I think it's a lot of nonsense -- exchanging one burning city for another burning city, switching from one lifeboat to another in the middle of the bottomless sea.

Perhaps the burrows in which our lives were spent really were dark and dirty, and perhaps we ourselves were well suited to these burrows, but in the blue sky above our heads, up among the thinly scattered stars, there were special, artificial points of gleaming light.

...crawling with bratbroods, constantly darting between your legs, commotion, stray junk, hoops, pots, racket, kids worming in everywhere, cheeping as they hop along on one foot, thumbing noses, somersaulting, boom! leapfrogging! girls, boys, head over heels! plunk! in the gutter! the sudden explosion of life sweeps you off your feet! splatters you with such lively joy!

Buy some time ... that was my one and only obsession! ... To make it to the end of the war without getting hanged or arrested... just a few days' time... one more!... one less!... I was counting them!... to escape from this hellhole!... Everything else will fall right into place by itself!... No more mushiness!... no more recklessness!... keep my nose clean, act sensible... No more complications in my life!