Quotes 9-28-2015
by Miles Raymer
“Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.”
––Walden; or, Life in the Woods, by Henry David Thoreau, pg. 58-9
“He reached Allan Gardens Park, more or less the halfway point, and this was where he found himself blindsided by an unexpected joy. Arthur died, he told himself, you couldn’t save him, there’s nothing to be happy about. But there was, he was exhilarated, because he’d wondered all his life what his profession should be, and now he was certain, absolutely certain that he wanted to be a paramedic. At moments when other people could only stare, he wanted to be the one to step forward.”
––Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, pg. 11
[Obverse]
You were asleep. I wake you.
The vast morning brings the illusion of a beginning.
You had forgotten Virgil. Here are the hexameters.
I bring you many things—
the four Greek elements: earth, water, fire, air;
a single name of a woman;
the friendship of the moon;
the bright colors of the atlas;
forgetting, which purifies;
memory, which chooses and rediscovers;
the habits which help us feel we are immortal;
the sphere and the hands that measure elusive time;
the fragrance of sandalwood;
the doubts that we call, not without some vanity, metaphysics;
the curve of the walking stick the hand anticipates;
the taste of grapes and of honey.
[Reverse]
To wake someone from sleep
is a common day-to-day act
that can set us trembling.
To wake someone from sleep
is to impose on someone the interminable
prison of the universe
of his time, with neither sunset nor dawn.
It is to show him he is someone or something
subject to a name that lays claim to him
and to an accumulation of yesterdays.
It is to trouble his eternity.
It is to load him down with centuries and stars.
It is to restore to time another Lazarus,
burdened with memory.
It is to desecrate the waters of Lethe.
- Jorge Luis Borges
Dang! I especially like the [Reverse] part. Thoreau would dig this, I suspect.