dual personalities

Tag: quotes

May 25, 2012

Knights and squires

by chuckofish

The boy (right) and the boyfriend (left) helped daughter #2 move her big stuff out of her college apartment yesterday.

“Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes, Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commoners; bear me out in it, O God!” (Moby-Dick, of course)

Thanks, guys! (For a more detailed post on the day see the boy’s blog.)

3 Comments
May 15, 2012

Reading Moby-Dick

by chuckofish

“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling–a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.”

Ishmael, “The Chapel”

6 Comments
May 11, 2012

Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry

by chuckofish

“We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste–sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill,–and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry.”

–Henry David Thoreau

3 Comments
April 17, 2012

The slob is loved

by chuckofish

The Gospel is bad news before it is good news. It is the news that man is a sinner, to use the old word, that he is evil in the imagination of his heart, that when he looks in the mirror all in a lather what he sees is at least eight parts chicken, phony, slob. That is the tragedy. But it is also the news that he is loved anyway, cherished, forgiven, bleeding to be sure, but also bled for. That is the comedy. And yet, so what? So what if even in his sin the slob is loved and forgiven when the very mark and substance of his sin and of his slobbery is that he keeps turning down the love and forgiveness because he either doesn’t believe them or doesn’t want them or just doesn’t give a damn? In answer, the news of the Gospel is that extraordinary things happen to him just as in fairy tales extraordinary things happen. Henry Ward Beecher cheats on his wife, his God, himself, but manages to keep on bringing the Gospel to life for people anyway, maybe even for himself. Lear goes beserk on a heath but comes out of it for a few brief hours every inch a king. Zaccheus climbs up a sycamore tree a crook and climbs down a saint. Paul sets out a hatchet man for the Pharisees and comes back a fool for Christ. It is impossible for anybody to leave behind the darkness of the world he carries on his back like a snail, but for God all things are possible. That is the fairy tale. All together they are the truth.

Frederick Buechner, “Telling the Truth”

2 Comments
April 16, 2012

Tout va bien

by chuckofish

“Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.”
Arthur Schopenhauer

4 Comments
April 6, 2012

It ain’t no easy thing

by chuckofish

“Ever’one here think it easy for me. I be this good little church boy from Mississippi with my good little church-goin’ Mammy, and since I be this stupid country n**ger with the big faith, I don’t have no troubles. Well, it just don’t work that way. He paused. Jermain said nothing. “I see my friend Williams get ate by a tiger,” Cortell continued. “I see my friend Broyer get his face ripped off by a mine. What you think I do all night, sit around thankin’ Sweet Jesus? Raise my palms to sweet heaven and cry hallelujah? You know what I do? You know what I do? I lose my heart.” Cortell’s throat suddenly tightened, strangling his words. “I lose my heart.” He took a deep breath, trying to regain his composure. He exhaled and went on quietly, back in control. “I sit there and I don’t see any hope. Hope gone.” Cortell was seeing his dead friends. “Then, the sky turn gray again in the east, and you know what I do? I choose all over to keep believen’. All along I know Jesus could maybe be just some fairy tale, and I could be just this one big fool. I choose anyway.” He turned away from his inward images and returned to the blackness of the world around him. “It ain’t no easy thing.”

Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn

A blessed Good Friday to all who “choose anyway”.

5 Comments
April 4, 2012

Be that as it may

by chuckofish

Today we take note of the birthday of our pater familias, who would be 90 today.

Wind on the Hill
by A.A. Milne

No one can tell me,
Nobody knows,
Where the wind comes from,
Where the wind goes.

It’s flying from somewhere
As fast as it can,
I couldn’t keep up with it,
Not if I ran.

But if I stopped holding
The string of my kite,
It would blow with the wind
For a day and a night.

And then when I found it,
Wherever it blew,
I should know that the wind
Had been going there too.

So then I could tell them
Where the wind goes…
But where the wind comes from
Nobody knows.

8 Comments
April 2, 2012

They call you lady luck

by chuckofish

But there is room for doubt
At times you have a very unladylike way of running out!

Oh I do love Guys and Dolls. All this talk of the lottery and mega-millions reminded me of the classic Frank Loesser show. I have seen it many, many times–it is a perennial favorite in high schools and college (I even tried out for a production at Williams College in 1977!)–but I particularly love those Kirkwood productions that the boy was in–twice: in seventh grade and as a junior in high school–both times playing the ever-popular Benny Southstreet!

Here he is with Nicely-Nicely Johnson: What’s in the daily news? I’ll tell you what’s in the daily news. Story about a guy who bought his wife a small ruby with what otherwise would have been his union dues. That’s what’s in the daily news.

And here he is basking in the after-show glow of middle school stardom.

I was unable to find any pictures from the Kirkwood HS production. Darn it. “I plead the fifth commandment.”

I also always loved the 1955 movie of Guys and Dolls with Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra. I mean, Marlon Brando singing? Irresistible! Johnny Silver played Benny Southstreet and he was pretty good. But the boy–he had that special “je ne sais quoi”. At least his mother thinks so.

6 Comments
March 27, 2012

Imperatives

by chuckofish

Imperatives, Part 2 of Mysteries of the Incarnation

by Kathleen Norris

Look at the birds 1

Consider the lilies 2

Drink ye all of it 3

Ask 4

Seek

Knock

Enter by the narrow gate 5

Do not be anxious 6

Judge not; 7 do not give dogs what is holy 8

Go: be it done for you 9

Do not be afraid 10

Maiden, arise 11

Young man, I say, arise 12

Stretch out your hand 13

Stand up, 14 be still 15

Rise, let us be going …14

Love 15

Forgive 16

Remember me

1 Matthew 6:26. See also Luke 12:24, “Consider the ravens.” 2 Matthew 6:28; Luke 12:27. 3 “Drink from it, all of you” (Matthew 26:27). Norris uses the King James translation here. 4 This stanza is a series of Jesus’s commands from the Sermon on the Mount: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you” (Matthew 7:7, King James; also Luke 11:9). 5 Matthew 7:13-14; also Luke 13:23-24. 6 Matthew 6:25, 31; Luke 12:22, 29. 7 Matthew 7:1; Mark 4:24; Luke 6:37-38. 8 Matthew 7:6. 9 Matthew 8:13. 10 “Do not be afraid” – a frequent command by Jesus; for example, Matthew 10:31; 14:27; 17:7; 28:10. 11 The healing of Jairus’s daughter: “Little girl, get up!” (Mark 5:41; also Luke 8:54). 12 The healing the widow’s only son; Luke 7:14. 13 The healing of the man with the withered hand: Matthew 12:13; Mark 3:1-6; Luke 6:6-11. 14 Jesus’s healing the paralyzed man: Matthew 9:2-8; Mark 2:1-12; Luke 5:17-26. 15 Jesus’s command to the ocean: Mark 5:39; also Matthew 8:26; Luke 8:24. 14 Jesus to his disciples in Gethsemane: “Rise, let us be going: behold, he is at hand that doth betray me” (Matthew 26:46; Mark 14:42). 15 Jesus’s two great commandments: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. … You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39; also Mark 12:28-31; Luke 10:25-28). 16 Matthew 18:21-22; Luke 17:4.

Leave a comment
March 22, 2012

On the road again

by chuckofish

What should I bring?

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac

Daughter #1 is just coming home for the weekend, but travel is travel…Can’t wait to see her!

3 Comments