What’s life? Metabolism? That’s what it is for the bugs.
If a man disliked you, he would dislike you for all the reasons he could think of.
There’s nothing worse than being confused, too, in addition to being unlucky.
Just then his state of being was so curious that he was compelled, himself, to see it – eager, grieving, fantastic, dangerous, crazed and, to the point of death, “comical.” It was enough to make a man pray to God to remove this great, bone-breaking burden of selfhood and self-development, give himself, a failure, back to the species for a primitive cure.
That’s from the Middle Ages.’ My God! We have a name for everything except what we really think and feel.
But in the end I said, ‘It’s terribly serious, of course, but I think more people die of heartbreak than of radiation.
I know that I don’t have to be next year what I was last year. I’ve been at one end and I can get to the other. There’s no limit to what I can be. And even if I should miss being so dazzling, I know the idea of it is genuine.
He meditated on his weakness.
Without teaching, Jewry was an impossibility.
A white December sky overly the Atlantic gloom. The message of Nature seemed to be that conditions were severe, that things were tough, very tough, and that people should console one another.
Well, you are a privileged character. You’re the only man living whose mother lost her mind and died.
But I wasn’t inclined to go out of my way to defer to so many critics. I had a good grasp of reality and of my defects. I permanently kept in mind the approach of Death, who might at any time loom up before you.
Grielescu was a famous scholar, not exactly a follower of Jung – but not exactly not a Jungian. He was a hard one to place.
So deformity has overtaken love and love is a power that can’t let us alone. It can’t because we owe our existence to acts of love performed before us, because love is a standing debt of the soul.
More than human, can you have any use for life? Less than human, you don’t either.
On the simplest level he could tell you in detail what he felt – what effects an aspirin had on him, what it did to the back of his neck or the inside of his mouth. I was curious about this, because for the life of them most people can’t describe what goes on inside. Alcoholics or druggies are too confused, hypochondriacs are their own terrorists, and most of us are aware only of a metabolic uproar within.
That was nothing to get excited about, as it was one of the commoner human experiences – neither to give a damn nor be given a damn about.
She liked to give the example of Whistler the painter when he was taken to task by a woman who said, “I never see trees like that.” He told her, “No, ma’am, but don’t you wish you could?” This could be a variation on “Ye have eyes and see not,” an aesthete’s version of it.
But you find people who have their luck and take the credit for it, too – all brains and personality, when all that happened was that they were handed a bucket when it rained.
I believe Uncle’s intuition to have been that plants functioned as sense organs, collecting cosmic data for the earth itself.