To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear.
There are many ways to live a good life.
Meaningless would come as a terrible blow to most people. It would be full of significance for them. So it wouldn’t be meaningless. That’s where I always end up. Once you ask if there is meaning, the only answer is yes. You can’t get away from it.
After a while she said, “If you make a sound it’s just a sound, unless it belongs to a language, and then it’s a word. It means something. It can’t not mean something.
So many of earth’s grievances could be soothed by a little consideration.
Forever after, the thought of her would be painful, because it had been pleasant. Strange how that is.
I’m a simple man who was brought up by a complicated man. So I have mannerisms and so on. Vocabulary. People can be misled.
Why should a man with no other expectation of an afterlife than adding his bit of clay to verdant Iowa experience dread? His father told him once that the more scrupulous a conscience is, the heavier the burden it carries.
An intensely lonely man for whom life had not gone well – I believe this was your language.
Sometimes I feel like we’ve just been living on hints. Seeing the world through a keyhole. That’s how it would seem to us when we looked back.
That’s how the world is, touch anything, change everything. Caution is needed.
The sin most insistently called abhorrent to God is the failure of generosity, the neglect of widow and orphan, the oppression of strangers and the poor, the defrauding of the laborer.
There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time.
Embarrassment, relentless, punitive scorn, can wear away at a soul until it recedes into wordless loneliness.
And everything is vulnerable to harm, one way or another. Everybody is vulnerable. It’s kind of horrible when you think about it. All that breakage, without so much as an intention behind it half the time. All that tantalizing fragility.
You are not good for your own sake. That probably isn’t even possible. You are good as a courtesy to everyone around you. Keeping a promise or breaking it, telling the truth or lying, matters to those around you. So there is good you can do and always do again. You do not have to believe you are good in order to act well in any specific case. You never lose that option.
Perhaps, pious as they were, these ladies did not wish to see me pass into that sad and outcast state of revelation where one begins to feel superior to one’s neighbors.
I didn’t feel very much at home in the world, that was a fact. Now I do.
She had repaid his kindness with kindness. As she would not have done if she had known who he was. What he was. When defects of character are your character, you become a what. He had noticed this. No one ever says, A liar is who you are, or Who you are is a thief. He was a what, absolutely.
He would pick up eggshells, a bird’s wing, a jawbone, the ashy fragment of a wasp’s nest. He would peer at each of them with the most absolute attention, and then put them in his pockets, where he kept his jackknife and his loose change. He would peer at them as if he could read them, and pocket them as if he could own them. This is death in my hand, this is ruin in my breast pocket, where I keep my reading glasses.
I have been thinking lately how I have loved my physical life.