Listen to Malcolm Guite quote C. S. Lewis in discussing the significance of poetry in times of crisis:
Fiddling whilst Rome burns? CS Lewis speaks into our crisis!
Category Archives: Quote
Hell is empty, And all the devils are here
Act 1, Scene 2, The Tempest,
William Shakespeare
ARIEL
Not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad, and played
Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners
Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel,
Then all afire with me. The King’s son, Ferdinand,
With hair up-staring—then like reeds, not hair—
Was the first man that leaped; cried “Hell is empty,
And all the devils are here.”
Litany for Dictatorships
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.”
Image: Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms
We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong.
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
We thought the long train would run to the end of Time.
We thought the light would increase.
Now the long train stands derailed and the bandits loot it.
Now the boar and the asp have power in our time.
Now the night rolls back on the West and the night is solid.
Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon’s teeth.
Our children know and suffer the armed men.
Existential Therapy from the Universe: Physicist Sean Carroll on How Poetic Naturalism Illuminates Our Human Search for Meaning
BY MARIA POPOVA
“We are — as far as we know — the only part of the universe that’s self-conscious,” the poet Mark Strand marveled in his beautiful meditation on the artist’s task to bear witness to existence, adding: “We could even be the universe’s form of consciousness. We might have come along so that the universe could look at itself… It’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.” Susan Sontag, at the end of her fully lived and intensely meaningful life, articulated the same idea in considering what it means to be a good human being: “To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.”
Filed under Philosophy, Quote, Study
Bukowski on Writing, True Art, and the Courage to Create Outside Society’s Forms of Approval
In a letter to [] friend, Bukowski laments the something-elseness of most of what tries to pass for Art:
“Almost all poetry written, past and present, is a failure because the intent, the slant and accent, is not a carving like stone or eating a good sandwich or drinking a good drink, but more like somebody saying, “Look, I have written a poem … see my POEM!”
Filed under Quote
Wisdom from the Poets
“The most happy marriage I can imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
Filed under Quote
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