HAPPINESS April 24, 2006
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Willa Cather had words from her most famous novel, My Antonia, inscribed on her tombstone: “That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
SURVIVAL April 17, 2006
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Isak Dinesen offers two interesting tips on surviving the human condition:
“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.”
“When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.”
POETRY April 16, 2006
Posted by thenaturalist in Poetry.add a comment
Major Jackson, associate professor of English at the University of Vermont, has some interesting ideas about poetry. He says, “I’m attracted to the possibilities of the relationships between words. How they pun; how they illuminate each other; their etymological roots…. I value symmetry. I value sound. I value a certain kind of organic order….It’s a magical thing that happens when you hear two words that sound alike and you detect a relationship ….” In talking about poets, he says, “The best-case scenario is a poet who doesn’t define himself, but looks at poetry as a big room in which he can occupy himself at various times.” He goes on to talk about the virtues of formal poetry. For the formal poet, he says there is the benefit of “writing in a tradition and borrowing the accumulated power of that tradition…. The poet sees form and convention as generative. The blank page is just too daunting.”
I wonder what happened to my interest in poetry? Jackson reminds me that it’s still there somewhere ….
WORK AND PLAY April 14, 2006
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Arnold Toynbee said, “The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.”
CHANGE April 4, 2006
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Anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
