So let my hands and my face make their way in this world, let my hungry eyes see, my tongue taste.
Have you ever noticed when you look in a mirror, unless youre really depressed or something, the person in the mirror generally looks a little more competent, a little more curious, a little more intelligent than you actually feel yourself to be? They often look more interesting and more soulful.
I write because I admire the act of rationalization, of seeking clarity in one’s understanding of the complexities of life, and I’m bad at it. I’m slow. Writing, which is an arduous and slow process, proceeds at the same rate as my sloth-like mind.
Yet who can say how our souls have been stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostages to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at such indignity, don’t you agree?
The answer of course, is that the clock isn’t meant to measure earthly time, but the time of the soul. Redemption and condemnation time. For the soul, each instant is always a minute short of judgment.
In summer moonlight, she was dangerously, inebriatingly magnified.
I like to think Im a pretty good-natured guy and pretty civil and probably not ever truly guilty in any serious way of any legal infractions.
Notice, notice; let noticing take the place of screaming.
The real thing about evil,” said the Witch at the doorway, “isn’t any of what you said. You figure out one side of it – the human side, say – and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. It’s like the old saw: What does a dragon in its shell look like? Well no one can ever tell, for as soon as you break the shell to see, the dragon is no longer in its shell. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.
Old Flossie settle down on the other side of What-the-Dickens and dragged some handiwork out of a sack. She armed herself with two thorns shaped into knitting needles. A wodge of curlicued metallic scrubbing pad supplied the threat. ‘I knit handcuffs as a hobby,’ explained Old Flossie happily, and set to work. ‘Idle hands get up to no good, so I like to be prepared in case I meet up with any idle hands.
Think of egg and spoon. If there is an egg, well, fine. You eat. Unless you use your spoon to hold the egg out of my reach. Does being in possession of a spoon give you more right to the egg?
It may merely be apocryphal that when the Wizard saw the glass bottle he gasped, and clutched his heart. The story is told in so many ways, depending on who is doing the telling, and what needs to be heard at the time. It is a matter of history, however, that shortly thereafter, the Wizard absconded from the Palace. He left in the way he had first arrived – a hot-air balloon – just a few hours before seditious ministers were to lead a Palace revolt and to hold an execution without trial.
She would emerge. She always had before. The punishing political climate of Oz had beat her down, dried her up, tossed her away – like a seedling she had drifted, apparently too desiccated ever to take root. But surely the curse was on the land of Oz, not on her. Though Oz had given her a twisted life, hadn’t it also made her capable?
You might forget a story, but you can never unhear a story.
Now we’d help her if we could. We can’t. So we’re helping you. That’s all that most of us who are not Tsars or witches can manage to do.
All paths lead to the same place, and that place is whatever comes next.
Your life story is really about how the hands of history caught you up, played with you, and you with them. History plays for keeps; individuals play for time. When.
Perplexity isn’t as noble as conviction, but perhaps more good is done in the name of muddling through uncertainty than is done hacking away with the righteous sword of self-confidence.
The world pauses for royalty and deformity alike, and sometimes one can’t tell the difference.
As an old friend of mine once said when I brought him some interesting brownies, ‘You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes,’” she replied. “Haven’t you read your Maimonides?