…there are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet.
– Mary Oliver, Upstream
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No hurt I did not feel, no death
That was not mine; mine each last breath
That, crying, met an answering cry
From the compassion that was I.
All suffering mine, and mine its rod;
Mine, pity like the pity of God.
*
Ah, awful weight! Infinity
Pressed own upon the finite Me!
– Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Renascence”
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There is gonna be a day,
Winding roads gonna be made straight.
Comfort, comfort, comfort, comfort;
It’s hard to wait,
So hard to wait.
– Rain for Roots, “Every Valley (It’s Hard to Wait),” Waiting Songs
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I didn’t taste what my father tasted. This knowledge made me both happy and sad. It was a relief to know that I might not be such an anhedonic stick-in-the-mud after all. I wished I’d met Dr. Utermohlen and Dr. Marks years ago. I would have felt, if not completely exonerated, at least less convinced that my inability to appreciate wine was a character flaw. …What if the sense that had given my father more pleasure than any other was wired differently in his daughter, in which case there was no way she could like exactly what he liked? Maybe wine was a blind spot not because I was morally, emotionally, intellectually, or aesthetically deficient but because I was biologically deficient. That would get me off the hook, wouldn’t it? I’d be like someone who doesn’t enjoy reading not because she’s uncultivated but because she’s dyslexic.
– Anne Fadiman, The Wine Lover’s Daughter
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Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote. More hours in every twenty-four will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images – distant and concocted. In sufficient accumulation, radio sounds and television sights may become more familiar to us than their originals. A door closing, heard over the air; a face contorted, seen in a panel of light – these will emerge as the real and the true; and when we bang the door of our own cell or look into another’s face the impression will be of mere artifice.
– E.B. White, “Removal” (1938), One Man’s Meat
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what is so excellent in the Japanese artist? but that they have seen their fish, their fowls, their horses in intimate completeness.
– William Carlos Williams, excerpt from personal notebook, Afterword, The Doctor Stories
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Henrietta, at heart a contemplative person, enjoyed alarums and excursions for a short while only. For her a background of quiet was essential to happiness. …She found herself listening only to the lovely silence and it seemed to her that in it she came right way up again and her dreams…came flocking back, so that with joy she flung open the doors of her mind and welcomed them in. Never again, she vowed, would she live a noisy life that killed her dreams.. They were…the only thing that she had to give the world, and she must life in the way that suited them best.
– Elizabeth Goudge, A City of Bells
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It’s like this. If God’s loving, redeeming, and timeless nature could be expressed by a single Word, but that Word was so deep and complex and uncontainable that to hear it would shatter our eardrums (and our brains), how might He express it to us? How might the Creator reveal the vast mystery of Himself to a created thing? I think the answer is Time. By moving us from one place of understanding to another, then another, then another, He takes that infinite Word and stretches it out across time so that temporal beings can know by coming to know what that Word is saying. If you were to play all the notes in a symphony at once, it would be overwhelming; our minds wouldn’t know what to do with it. But if you stretch out the notes over time, so that you have movements and themes; a beginning, a middle, and an end; changes of key and texture—then and only then do we experience what the composer intended. We are creatures of time. A timeless God wants us to know His love. Story, in a philosophical sense, is timeless truth, stretched over time; it is uncontainable love, contained in time. We learn it only by moving forward, like a needle on a record player.
– Andrew Peterson, interview with Lancia Smith for The Cultivating Project
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The community of Black immigrants opened and fitted me into their lives as if they had been saving my place.
– Maya Angelou, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes
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There’s going to be a great joy river.
– Rain for Roots, Waiting Songs