Main Body
January
January 1
No ache, love’s the way to start the New Year, —
chant then, “New Year” like “No ache” in your ear,
all the while I praise wind and love your face
above snow that melts over trees thru space:
carol “No ache” like “New Year” between trees
that removed still share a few centuries.
— Louis Zukofsky, Anew 40 (“Celia’s Birthday Poem”)
January 2
It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.
— Niccolo Machivalli, The Prince
January 3
The finest quality of this stone, these plants and animals, this desert landscape is the indifference manifest to our presence, our absence, our coming, our staying or our going. Whether we live or die is a matter of absolutely no concern whatsoever to the desert. Let men in their madness blast every city on earth into black rubble and envelope the entire planet in a cloud of lethal gas—the canyons and hills, the springs and rocks will still be here, the sunlight will filter through, water will form and warmth shall be upon the land and after sufficient time, no matter how long, somewhere, living thing will emerge and join and stand once again, this time perhaps to take a different and better course … On this bedrock of animal faith I take my stand, close by the old road that leads eventually out of the valley of paradox
— Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
January 4
the way we think about death is inseperable from the way we think about life. so i’m not calling myself morbid anymore, rather, a student of both sides of the same grand thing.
At my aunt’s funeral last week, her family released white doves at the graveside to symbolize the parts of them that are moving on with her spirit. to stand with my pillars in celebration of a glorious life, to watch those fragile solitary birds circle into a flock in the snapcold sky, to feel the flap of desire to go where they’re going but know that i’m ground-bound–
sometimes i’m stopped stilled by the texture of experience, how beautiful and complicated and simple and all it is.
— Catherine Curtis, writing on her blog she shall have music wherever she goes
January 5
As an antidote to pride man has been endowed with the capacity for prayer. … To pray is to pay attention or, shall we say, ‘to listen’ to someone or something other than oneself.
Whenever a man so concentrates his attention — be it on a landscape, or a poem or a geometrical problem or an idol or the True God — that he completely forgets his own ego and desires in listening to what the other has to say to him, he is praying. Choice of attention — to attend to this and ignore that — is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences. As Ortega y Gasset said: “Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are”
— W.H. Auden, “Pride and Prayer”
January 6
There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.
— Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
January 7
“Take cars,” I said. I said it in this very quiet voice. “Take most people, they’re crazy about cars. They worry if they get a little scratch on them, and they’re always talking about how many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand-new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that’s even newer. I don’t even like old cars. I mean they don’t even interest me. I’d rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God’s sake. A horse you can at least—”
— The teenage boy Holden Caulfield speaking in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
January 8
Impossible, rightly, to define these
conditions of
friendship, the wandering & inexhaustible wish to
be of use, somehow
to be helpful
when it isn’t simple, …
— opening lines of Robert Creeley’s poem “For Rainer Gerhardt”
January 9
Trying to read in Nature’s book
The pages (canyon forest landslide lake)
Turn as the road does, the stock characters
Come and (marmot mallard moose)
Go too quickly to believe in. Look,
I’m told, but many of the words have wings
Or run to type on small fleet herds
No question of retaining – what’s the use!
Coming meanwhile to believe in you,
Fluent and native. Only read aloud
Do the words stay with me, through
Whose roots those flat clear vowels flow
To mirror, surfacing, the things they mean:
Blue heron, mountain, antelope, spruce, cloud.
–from James Merrill’s “In Nine Sleep Valley”
January 10
There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other and the relation of people to land.
— Aldo Leopold, from an unpublished manuscript
January 11
What matters is the contact between us, the fact that we talk about trees losing their leaves, about objects we crush underfoot without realizing it, about that house dying gently, abandoned by its owner, even though it’s the house where he was born, where he learnt to cry and to laugh.
— Italian photographer Mario Giacomelli
January 12
Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.
And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love. We love him, because he first loved us. If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.
— 1 John 4:7-11, 16-21 from the King James Version of the Bible
January 13
Our artificial Science has relation to the forms of Nature, but yet that which is most important in Nature – Life – is above our science. The Astronomer vainly asserts the perfection of his Science because he is capable of determining the motions of 7 planets and 22 satellites; but comets & meteors which even move in our system are above his reach, & even this solar system is a speck in the immensity of space & suns and worlds are above our reach. Our Science refers to the globe only, & in this there is an endless field for investigation: the interior is unknown; the causes of Volcanoes. We have just learnt some truths with respect to the surface: but there is an immensity beneath us. – Geology in every sense of the word is a superficial science.”
— March 1814 entry in Humphry Davy’s journal
January 14
To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar … this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
January 15
I used to think that the hardest struggle of doctoring is learning the skills. But it is not, although just when you begin to feel confident that you know what you are doing, a failure knocks you down. It is not the strain of the work, either, though sometimes you are worn to your ragged edge. No, the hardest part of being a doctor, I have found, is to know what you have power over and what you don’t.
— Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance
January 16
To get some information, I called up an old chum of mine who served his internship as a surgeon at Sinai and has been for some time a visiting surgeon there. He was somewhat sleepy, and all he would tell me of the doctor in question was “He is a son of a bitch.” This was not explicit enough, it seemed to me, and when I asked for details, he added that though diagnostic and surgical skill was good, the doctor would extract all the money he could reach. When I suggested writing “heartless as regards money,” after reiterating “son of a bitch” as the best expression, he added “heartless in treatment too.”
— Letter from Charles Reznikoff to Albert Lewin, June 22, 1930. Lewin had written Reznikoff asking if he knew anything about a particular doctor.
January 17
[On how to know] whether a man knows what he is talking about, whether what he says has some basis or not. And my trick that I use is very easy. If you ask him intelligent questions—that is, penetrating, interested, honest, frank, direct questions on the subject, and no trick questions—then he quickly gets stuck. It is like a child asking naïve questions. If you ask naïve but relevant questions, then almost immediately the person doesn’t know the answer, if he is an honest man. It is important to appreciate that.
— Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All
January 18
The work of art, Rilke said, says to us always: You must change your life. It demands of us that we too see things as ends, not as means—that we too know them and love them for their own sake. This change is beyond us, perhaps, during the active, greedy, and powerful hours of our lives; but during the contemplative and sympathetic hours of our reading, our listening, our looking, it is surely within our power, if we choose to make it so, if we choose to let one part of our nature to follow its natural desires. So I say to you, for a closing sentence, Read at whim! read at whim!
— Randall Jarrell, “Poets, Critics, and Readers”
January 19
And one of the company said unto him, Master, speak to my brother, that he divide the inheritance with me.
And he said unto him, Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you? And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.
And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully: And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?
And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.
But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided? So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.
And he said unto his disciples, Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat; neither for the body, what ye shall put on. The life is more than meat, and the body is more than raiment. Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor barn; and God feedeth them: how much more are ye better than the fowls? And which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit? If ye then be not able to do that thing which is least, why take ye thought for the rest? Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. If then God so clothe the grass, which is to day in the field, and to morrow is cast into the oven; how much more will he clothe you, O ye of little faith? And seek not ye what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful mind. For all these things do the nations of the world seek after: and your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things.
But rather seek ye the kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto you. Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
— Luke 12:13-34, from the King James Version of the Bible
January 20
I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better.
This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
— Charles Darwin, in his Autobiography.
January 21
Yes, our preferences are limited and always will be: we need not pretend, especially to ourselves, that our scope is greater than it actually is. No one takes pleasure in every kind of reading, and if we think we do lack self-knowledge or else have “no taste at all”—no genuine appreciation of anything. But to be satisfied with our own narrowness is just as bad: there is great value in the kind of “self-conquest” that Auden recommends because it is an expansion of being, an extension of our lives into realms of experience that we would not know if we did not make the effort to enjoy those works of which our detached critical self approves. … Our goal as adults is not to love all books alike, or as few as possible, but rather to love as widely and as well as our limited selves will allow.
— Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
January 22
To this day I still wonder at the astuteness of that Mr. Bickford, who gave me my final examination in Higher Algebra. The theory of quadratics was the particular subject which was hardest for me. … One by one the others in the class finished their work and left until I alone remained; the hour was up and I still hadn’t completed more than eight of the ten questions. But the time was up and I had done what I could. My heart was pretty sad realizing, as I did, that I had failed.
Mr. Bickford was older than some of the others and had the reputation of being the best man in his department. As I stood there watching him chewing his moustache—he wore a little black moustache—as he studied the paper I had turned in, the last one left in the room, I tried to brace myself as best I could for the verdict.
He looked up at me after a while with no expression on his face whatsoever.
“You’ll never be a mathematician, Williams,” he told me.
I agreed.
“But you show an understanding of the process.” He paused. “And I’m going to pass you!”
I couldn’t move for joy. It was the most intelligent verdict, and from a teacher, that I have ever encountered. It is hard to realize how important such a moment can be in a man’s life. That single piece of intelligence had more to do in straightening my difficulties, in putting me on a correct course than any single thing that I can remember. He saw my mind, and realized what it was not intended to perform. And he acted accordingly. That’s what it means, at best, to be a teacher.
— William Carlos Williams, Autobiography
January 23
May that virtue that I have acquired by doing all this relieve every suffering of sentient beings. May I be the medicine and the physician for the sick. May I be their nurse until their illness never recurs. With showers of food and drink may I overcome the afflictions of hunger and thirst. May I become food and drink during times of famine. May I be an inexhaustible treasure for the destitute. With various forms of assistance may I reamin in their presence. For the sake of accomplishing the welfare of all sentient beings, I freely give up my body, enjoyments, and all my virtues of the three times. Surrending everything is nirvana, and my mind seeks nirvana. If I must surrender everything, it is better that I give it to sentient beings. For the sake of all beings I have made this body pleasureless. Let them continually beat it, revile it, and cover it with filth. Let them play with my body. Let them laugh at it and ridicule it. What does it matter to me? I have given my body to them. May those who falsely accuse me, who harm me, and who ridicule me all partake of Awakening. May I be a protector for those who are without protectors, a guide for travelers, and a boat, a bridge, and a ship for those who wish to cross over. May I be a lamp for those who seek light, a bed for those who seek rest, and may I be a servant for all beings who desire a servant. To all sentient beings may I be a wish-fulfilling gem, a vase of good fortune, an efficacious mantra, a great medication, a wish-fulfilling tree, and a wish-granting cow. Just as earth and other elements are useful in various ways to innumerable sentient beings dwelling throughout infinite space, so may I be in various ways a source of life for the sentient beings present throughout space until they are all liberated.
— Santideva, A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life
January 24
Homelessness rarely happens by choice. I know there are people in the street who say they choose not to work, who say they would rather panhandle or steal, whom some might call bums. these are people who are content, apparently, with doing nothing culturally or socially meaningful, who seem satisfied to stand in soup kitchen lines, and who by anyone’s standards seem to be “useless individuals.” But it has been my experience that this is rare. The vast majority of homeless people are poor and vulnerable, struggling desperately and suffering helplessly and hopelessly. They don’t know how to or just can’t get out from under.
Working on this project, and having these experiences have profoundly changed me. I never used to believe in luck. I used to think, glibly, that “luck is when opportunity meets preparation,” or “you make your own luck.” I now understand the arrogance and ignorance of such aphorisms. Those things that allow us to become prepared and to cause opportunities to present themselves are themselves the result of a complicated set of positive circumstances, many genetic or developmental, and many over which we have little or no control. I was born with a reasonably good mind, into a loving home with two parents who provided an emotionally stable environment with structure. They taught me to be respectful, to revere education, and to work hard. And I was born white in the United States of America. I can take no credit for any of this. From such circumstances, it is much easier to build a life in which hard work brings success and living has dimension beyond the struggle for day-to-day survival.
— Howard Schatz, Introduction to Homeless: Portraits of Americans in Hard Times
January 25
Learn to like what doesn’t cost much.
Learn to like reading, conversation, music.
Learn to like plain food, plain service, plain cooking.
Learn to like fields, trees, brooks, hiking, rowing, climbing hills.
Learn to like people, even though some of them may be different…different from you.
Learn to like to work and enjoy the satisfaction doing your job as well as it can be done.
Learn to like the song of birds, the companionship of dogs.
Learn to like gardening, puttering around the house, and fixing things.
Learn to like the sunrise and sunset, the beating of rain on the roof and windows, and the gentle fall of snow on a winter day.
Learn to keep your wants simple and refuse to be controlled by the likes and dislikes of others.
— Lowell Bennion, founder of the LDS Institute for Religion at the University of Utah (as well as the first food bank and homeless shelter in Utah)
January 26
Perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself. But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and raiment let us be therewith content. But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. But thou, O man of God, flee these things; and follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, meekness.
Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not highminded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy; That they do good, that they be rich in good works, ready to distribute, willing to communicate; Laying up in store for themselves a good foundation against the time to come, that they may lay hold on eternal life.
— 1 Timothy 6:5-11, 17-19 from the King James Version of the Bible
January 27
Now it happened that the next day destiny reserved for me a different and unique gift: the encounter with a woman, young and made of flesh and blood, warm against my side through our overcoats, gay in the humid mist of the avenues, patient, wise and sure as we were walking down streets still bordered with ruins. In a few hours we knew that we belonged to each other, not for one meeting but for life, as in fact has been the case. In a few hours I felt reborn and replete with new powers, washed clean and cured of a long sickness, finally ready to enter life with joy and vigor; equally cured was suddenly the world around me, and exorcised the name and face of the woman who had gone down into the lower depths with me and had not returned. My very writing became a different adventure, no longer the dolorous itinerary of a convalescent, no longer a begging for compassion and friendly faces, but a lucid building, which now was no longer solitary: the work of a chemist who weighs and divides, measure and judges on the basis of assured proofs, and strives to answer questions. Alongside the liberating relief of the veteran who tells his story, I now felt in the writing a complex, intense, and new pleasure, similar to that I felt as a student when penetrating the solemn order of differential calculus. It was exalting to search and find, or create, the write word, that is, commensurate, concise and strong; to dredge up events from my memory and describe them with the greatest rigor and the least clutter. Paradoxically, my baggage of atrocious memories became a wealth, a seed; it seemed to me that, by writing, I was growing like a plant.
— Primo Levi, describing his first meeting with Lucio Morpugo, the woman he would marry in 1947 in “Chromium,” a story in his book The Periodic Table.
January 28
There are things for each of us around which meaning gathers . . The mission is to hold them, to be able to keep them in his mind, to try again and again to find the word, the syntax, the cadence of unfolding – I don’t mean to promise redemption of course. A matter of being able to say what one is and where one is. And what matters.
— George Oppen, in a letter to Frederic Will
January 29
When I remember how utterly different my children are from each other, and how delightful each of them is, and when I stop trying to order the world and everyone in it according to my imagining, when I quit thinking that I CAN’T SLEEP BECAUSE SOMEONE ON THE INTERNET IS WRONG and desperately in need of the knowledge I can impart, it gets a whole lot easier to like people. Truly acknowledging the simple fact that people are different actually relieves me of the burden of making sense of those differences, explaining them to myself with a million “if only she …” Liking people requires first and most of all allowing them to exist as themselves, utterly distinct from me except in their worthiness and value.
I know this comes easily to some people, but I think it’s also a skill that can be developed. There’s a beautiful little book by the philosopher Philip Hallie, called In the Eye of the Hurricane, in which he studies, mostly through narrative, the subtle features of character that seem to distinguish people who help others in heroic ways, like rescuing them from shipwrecks in the 1790s, or from the crack epidemic of the 1980s. One of his principal areas of study was Le Chambon, a little village in France that had sheltered and saved hundreds of Jewish children during WWII, at great risk to the whole town. In describing the woman who had organized and energized the complicated and dangerous project, he concludes that she simply got in the habit of welcoming others.
For Magda and for many of the other villagers, helping was automatic. They weren’t conscious of it, let alone proud of it. Helping and receiving help were like breathing out and breathing in to Magda. She expected the women of the village to help her as matter-of-factly as she expected herself to open a door and invite a refugee into the middle of her busy, dangerous life.
Habit is by definition not inborn. It takes upbringing to create it and to make it firm enough to resist the temptations of fear and greed and cynicism. Magda raised her four children…in such a way that danger-provoking, food-consuming foreigners were accepted affectionately into the very center of their lives. She bade them enter the lucid mystery when she opened the heavy presbytery door to dangerous strangers with an “Of course. Come in, come in.”
It’s this habit of welcoming that I long to develop. I recognize it in other people–a word, a look, a smile that breathes “come in, come in.”
— Kristine Haglund, Learn to Like (V)
January 30
The painter “takes his body with him,” says Valéry. Indeed we cannot imagine how a mind could paint. It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To understand these transubstantiations we must go back to the working, actual body—not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement.
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind” in The Primacy of Perception
January 31
The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, ‘It is only the trade entering his body.’ The art must enter the body, too. A painter cannot use paint like glue or screws to fasten down the world. The tubes of paint are like fingers; they work only if, inside the painter, the neural pathways are wide and clear to the brain. Cell by cell, molecule by molecule, atom by atom, part of the brain changes physical shape to accommodate and fit paint.
You adapt yourself, Paul Klee said, to the contents of a paintbox. Adapting yourself to the contents of the paintbox, he said, is more important than nature and its study. The painter, in other words, does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life