It’s not the idle who move us but the few
Often confused with the idle, who define
Their project in life in terms so ample
Nothing they ever do is a digression.
Each episode contributes its own rare gift
As a chapter in Moby-Dick on squid or hardtack
Is just as important to Ishmael as a fight with a whale.
The few who refuse to live for the plot’s sake,
Major or minor, but for texture and tone and hue.
For them weeding a garden all afternoon
Can’t be construed as a detour from the road of live.
The road narrows to a garden path that turns
And circles to show that traveling goes only so far
As a metaphor. The day rests on the grass.
And at night the books of these few,
Lined up on their desks, don’t look like drinks
Lined up on a bar to help them evade their troubles.
They look like an escort of mountain guides
Come to conduct the climber to a lofty outlook
Rising serene above the fog. For them the view
Is no digression though it won’t last long
And they won’t remember even the vivid details.
The supper with friends back in the village
In a dining room brightened with flowers and paintings
No digression for them, though the talk leads
To no breakthrough. The topic they happen to hit on
Isn’t a ferry to carry them over the interval
Between soup and salad. It’s a raft drifting downstream
Where the banks widen to embrace a lake
And birds rise from the reeds in many colors.
Everyone tries to name them and fails
For an hour no one considers idle.
—Carl Dennis, Practical Gods
The honest preachers had energy and go. They fought the devil, no holds barred, boots and eye-gouging permitted. You might get the idea that they howled truth and beauty the way a seal bites out the National Anthem on a row of circus horns. But some of the truth and beauty remained, and the anthem was recognizable.
—John Steinbeck
You know, it’s like that thing that people said about U2, that most bands start off writing about girls and end up writing about God, but we started off writing about God and ended up writing about girls. But we found the God in the girls, that would be my retort.
—Bono
It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies … in be[ing] willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I’m scared about how sappy this’ll look in print, saying this. And the effort to actually to do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don’t seem to have yet.
—David Foster Wallace
here
The first steady, sizzling beats occur when the garlic or ginger strikes the hot oil. Then the loud, thunderous bang as a big handful of vegetables is added. The metal spatula strokes the carbun-steel sides, its sharp, fast rhythms marking time against the beat of the vegetables crackling in oil. A more muted splashing bang as the sauce ingredients are swirled in. Sometimes the clang of the lid being popped on for a beat or two. It ends with a hushed silence once the wok is pulled off the heat.
In the old days, some chefs would finish a stirfry with a pao motion, tossing the ingredients in the air, then catching the food with a large ladle. After quickly transferring the food to a serving plate, the chef would knock several times on the wok’s metal handle with the ladle. This signaled the waiter that the dish was ready to be served.
—Grace Young and Alan Richardson
St. Francis was above all things a great giver; and he c ared chiefly for the best kind of giving which is called thanksgiving. if another great man wrote a rammar of assent, he may well be said to have written a grammar of acceptance; a grammar of gratitude. He understood down to its very depths the theory of thanks; and its depths are a bottomless abyss. He knew that the praise of God stands on its strongest ground when it stands on nothing. He knew that we can best measure the towering miracle of the mere fact of existence if we realise that but for some strange mercy we should not even exist.
—G. K. Chesterton
As he saw all things dramatically, so he himself was always dramatic. We have to assume throughout, needless to say, that he was a poet and can only be understood as a poet. But he had one poetic privilege denied to most poets. In that respect indeed he might be called the one happy poet among all the unhappy poets of the world. He was a poet whose whole life was a poem. He was not so much a minstrel merely singing his own songs as a dramatist capable of acting the whole of his own play. The things he said were more imaginative than the things he wrote. The things he did were more imaginative than the things he said. His whole course through life was a series of scenes in which he had a sort of perpetual luck in bringing things to a beautiful crisis.
—G. K. Chesterton
All true joy in life comes ultimately from knowing and being known by another. Everything else is either a means to this end or a poor substitute for it. Because the heart of reality is one who is love, the good news is that if we have the courage to pursue this mutuality, we will find it.
—Fred Gilham
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
—W. B. Yeats
Sing and dance together and be joyous,
but let each one of you be alone.
Even as the strings of a lute are alone
though they quiver with the same music.
Stand together yet not too near together.
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
and the oak tree and the cypress
grow not in each other’s shadow.
—Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
via Reaching Out by Henri Nouwen
