The Laughing Maus

“When you travel you see a lot of this in the faces of middle-aged people in restaurants, people my age—at the end of middle age and the beginning of old age. You see this, or you feel it like a snail, this sort of chuckling along looking at the sights. It’s a feeling that the capacity for responding to things is being shut off in some way. I feel now that this is a possibility. I feel it like the possibility that you might get arthritis, so you exercise so you won’t. Now I am more conscious of the possibility that everything could be lost, that you could lose what had filled your life before.”

Alice Munro @ The Paris Review

By way of Whiskey River

We are the echo of the future

On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live

- W.S. Merwin
from his poem The River of Bees

"Each man's life represents a road towards himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimidation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that - one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best as he can."

- Hermann Hesse (Demian)

And this is all I could achieve in a prince's court. For either I would think different thoughts from the rest, and that would be as if I had no thoughts, or else I would agree with them and thus (as Terence's Mitio says) be an accessory to their madness. I do not understand what you mean by saying that a man should guide policy indirectly and strive to make the best of things, so that what is bad will at least be made as good as possible. In councils there is no place for silent and unwilling acquiescence. A man must openly approve of the worst plans and the most pernicious resolutions. One would pass for a spy or even a traitor, if he approved of such plans ony grudgingly. A man has no chance to do good when his colleagues are more likely to corrupt the best of men than be corrected themselves. He will either be corrupted himself by his collegues, or if he remains sound and innocent, he will be blamed for the folly and knavery of others. He is far from being able to mend matters by guiding policy indirectly!

-- Thomas More (Utopia)

He was vastly more inclined to learn than to be taught, ...

-- Page 260

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"Hour after hour the world pours itself into his deafness like a high waterfall that turns to mist before it can strike and make a sound."

Page 65

While surfing around this morning I wound up at the Freakonomics blog where someone is asking for modern proverbs for a book he is writing. This one was new to me.

“We have a wonderful arrangement. I do her sums, and she gives me cookies.”

— Albert Einstein when asked if an 8 year-old neighbor bothered him.

I ask you all honestly, would you share your cookies for better math scores?

The local Maus Pack is undecided. Some say: “Cookies for improved numbers? Better to have improved numbers of cookies.”

While others sit around nodding thier heads and saying: “Thanks to the rise of the internet, the cookies for equations exchange rate has improved to the point that this arrangement could be good for everyone.”

Most of them agree though: “Cookies make the world go round.” Ahem.

When you have found your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall."

C.S. Lewis

Remember that foul words or blows in themselves are no outrage, but your judgment that they are so. So when any one makes you angry, know that it is your own thought that has angered you. Wherefore make it your endeavor not to let your impressions carry you away.

--Epictetus

If I die, survive me with such sheer force
that you waken the furies of the pallid and the cold,
from south to south lift your indelible eyes,
from sun to sun dream through your singing mouth.
I don’t want your laughter or your steps to waver,
I don’t want my heritage of joy to die.
Don’t call up my person. I am absent.
Live in my absence as if in a house.
Absence is a house so vast that inside
you will pass through its walls
and hang pictures on the air
Absence is a house so transparent
that I, lifeless, will see you, living,
and if you suffer, my love, I will die again.

-Pablo Neruda

More Info:

Thanks to Whiskey River ::
Pablo Neruda – Biography

"Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being, between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality."

-- Thomas Merton