John Milton June: The world was all before them

LifeVol. 73, No. 25. 1972. via.

The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow
Through Eden took their solitary way.

The End.

(John Milton. Paradise Lost. Book XII, 646-49.)

I hope you enjoyed John Milton June, and sorry I was such a slug about regularly posting. Maybe next year we’ll try Milton May all over again. Thanks for coming on the ride and what willll Julyyyy beeeee….? (I’m open to ideas.)

Daily Batman: Bat Life With Batpecker

via.

If civilization is ever going to be anything but a grandiose pratfall, anything more than a can of deodorizer in the shithouse of existence, the people are going to have to concern themselves with magic and poetry. …

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.

(Tom Robbins. Still Life With Woodpecker. New York: Bantam, 1980.)

Really grok this. My estranged husband loaned me this book when we were dating. This part always stuck out to me. Do I feel like a Robbins month? I’ll need to think about it. Maybe June?

Vonnegut month: Welcome to Earth and ramblings about kids

via.

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — Goddamn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

(God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. p. 129.)

Everybody’s always preaching on about what the world is coming to and how everything’s changed and children aren’t being raised right anymore, and perhaps that’s so in more cases than it used to be, but, when I am with my kidlet and her friends or I’m in the classroom teaching and interacting with children, I don’t generally find these bell-ringing end-of-days declamations of “oh-kids-these-days!” too be true at all.

If “kids” seem as a group to behave in a way that runs counter to previous societal standards, that is not reflective of their motivations, but of their parents’ lack. If they act out in a way they did not do twenty years ago, it’s because they’re being allowed to be fed bullshit from the television and other media by people too lazy to lift a finger to defend their minds from rot.

Children are still people, and as long as we continue to try to teach them to be compassionate and to love, they will have the same things in common with the people of history (who were never any of them that great to begin with, don’t be fooled) that every other generation has done: love, sex, passion, greed, honor, and the whole scope of personal emotions. Kids cannot be cut off from the birthright that is human feelings by technology — only we, and our attitudes, can cut them off from that.

Dickens December: A line for the infamous day

via nsfworld on the tumblr.

There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.

(Charles Dickens.)

I believe with the highest respect in the good intentions and heroism of the Greatest Generation, but I do not think they are the only great ones. They exemplify what has always been true of the best part of human nature, what the cynics would have us believe does not exist any more and maybe never did at all.

I disagree with those cynics. I don’t think I could disagree more, in fact.

Every generation experiences cataclysm, and we always think we are living in the endtimes, but the world keeps on going.

via igor+andre on the blogger.

The generation that is not shocked by the cataclysm, that is not galvanized, the generation that stops helping one another, that ceases to attempt to steer humanity through the flotsam of all the garbage with which our lesser numbers have choked up the ocean of human experience — that is the generation who will see the end of the world. Or at least the end of a world with people in it.

Ibid..

So far, to my knowledge, no full population of any generation stricken by apocalyptic terror in the face of life-changing (or -ending) events has looked at the rising waters and jumped into the whirlpool instead of banding together and heading further up and further inland.

As long as we have hope, as long as we keep looking for that higher ground, we will be the strong light against the darkness.

Dickens December: Inaugural Edition featuring photographs by Alexey Titarenko

Photographed by Alexey Titarenko.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this.

(A Tale of Two Cities.)

Photo credit again to Mr. Titarenko.

I think of this whenever I crest a hill as I drive through a major city. All the houses along the side of the highway, spreading out in either direction further than I can see — there are people in each of them, and every one has their own story, both the public and the private. It’s so inestimable and mysterious and profound. It’s like a miracle: it makes you sure that with so many intricate personal realities intertwining, this world cannot be an accident, and no one is meant to walk through it alone.

Flashback Friday: Antisocial flutterby

This entry was posted in its original form October 4, 2009 at 3:30 pm. This was less than a week before Paolo and Miss D’s wedding. They have a wonderful relationship and a good marriage, and I want to point that out because I feel I’ve come off as down on the marriage thing lately. It is my own shit and observations and nothing to do with the good people who make a beautiful thing work.

Ah, then, I must have it all backward; do I, Anna Karina?

This is how antisocial I am, and this is the price I pay: just a bit ago, I called Thai House on Tully (best. I am sorry, best. — no, stop talking. best.) to see if they were open, and when someone picked up the phone, I simply hung up, because I felt my question had been adequately answered by the mere fact of a voice on the other end. Are there people at Thai House working? Yes, I deduced. And did not bother to speak, just hit “end.” That’s right, I wordlessly disconnected a call with the business I was planning to patronize purely for the purpose of limiting my level of interaction with other people.

I enjoy this restaurant and bear its employees nothing but good will, but did my actions remotely reflect this? No. I admit they did not.

So then. THEN. I go to Thai House, my mind teeming with satay and moo yang daydreams, and, as I likely deserved, it wound up they are closed until 4:30. Whoever answered the phone would probably happily have told me that, had I not hung up to avoid talking to a fellow human being.

I deserve the wait. To make up for what I’d done, when Gorgeous George hopped on to the yahoo chat and asked me to look over a recent draft of his toast for Paolo and Miss D’s wedding, I suggested that he join me at Thai House later. It is good to have a reason to comb your hair and act human. It’s important to do these things and not hole up in my cave. I’m sure of it. Otherwise I will fall out of practice at being talked to and I will lose whatever magic I might still have, and then how will I ever interact again, as I am striving to do because I have good reasons?

Daily Batman: The Courage of the Deed

via

If human beings had genuine courage, they’d wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.

— Doug Coupland