All lit up with eternal rays
Le Guin, Rimbaud, Lewis, Harjo, Montessori, Stein, Wordsworth, Hafiz
Searoad by Ursula K. Le Guin
The foam women are billowy, rolling, tumbling, white and dirty white and yellowish and dun, scudding, heaving, flying, broken. They lie at the longest reach of the waves, rounded and curded, shaking and trembling, shivering hips and quivering buttocks, torn by the stiff, piercing wind, dispersed to nothing, gone. The long wave breaks again and they lie white and dirty white, yellowish and dun, billowing, trembling under the wind, flying, gone, till the long wave breaks again.
The rain women are very tall; their heads are in the clouds. Their gait is the pace of the storm-wind, swift and stately. They are tall presences of water and light walking the long sands against the darkness of the forest. They move northward, inland, upward to the hills. They enter the clefts of the hills unresisting, unresisted, light into darkness, mist into forest, rain into earth.
Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters trans. by Wallace Fowlie
O seasons, O castles,
What soul is without blame?
O seasons, O castles,
I carried out the magic study
Of happiness that no one eludes.
Oh! may it live long, each time
The Gallic cock grows.
But I will have no more desires,
It has taken charge of my life.
That charm! it took my soul and body,
And dispersed every effort.
What can be understood from my words?
It makes them escape and fly off!
O seasons, O castles!
The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis
Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. With this in view, we sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity. It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.
Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo
And whom do I call my enemy?
An enemy must be worthy of engagement.
I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.
It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind.
The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and knows everything.
It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing.
The door to the mind should open only from the heart.
An enemy who gets in risks the danger of becoming a friend.
Education and Peace by Maria Montessori
Directing our action toward mankind means, first and foremost, doing so with regard to the child. The child, that “forgotten citizen,” must be appreciated in accordance with his true value. His rights as a human being who shapes all of mankind must become sacred, and the secret laws of his normal psychic development must light the way for civilization.
Lucy Church Amiably by Gertrude Stein
It is very well to wish.
It is very well to wish on me.
It is very well to wish on me.
It is very well to wish it is very well to wish on me.
It is very well to wish on me.
The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals by Dorothy Wordsworth
William & I ate a Luncheon, then went on towards the Waterfall. It is a glorious wild solitude under that lofty purple crag. It stood upright by itself. Its own self & its shadow below, one mass—all else was sunshine. We went on further. A Bird at the top of the crags was flying round & round & looked in thinness & transparency, shape & motion, like a moth. We climbed the hill but looked in vain for a shade except at the foot of the great waterfall, & there we did not like to stay on account of the loose stones above our heads. We came down & rested upon a moss covered Rock, rising out of the bed of the River. There we lay at our dinner & stayed there till about 4 o clock or later—Wm & C1 repeated & read verses. I drank a little Brandy & water & was in Heaven.
The Gift by Hafiz
We are at
The Nile’s end.
We are carrying particles
From every continent, creature, and age.
It has been raining on the plains
Of our vision for millions of years
And our senses
Are so muddy compared to Yours—dear God,
But I only hear these words from You
Where we are all trying to embrace
The Clear Sky-Ocean,
“Dear one, come.
Please,
My dear ones,
Come.”
Coleridge