Surprised by Grace

Like Flowers, that heard the news of Dews,
But never deemed the dripping prize
Awaited their - low brows -

Or Bees - that thought the Summer's name
Some rumor of Delirium,
No Summer - could - for Them -

Or Arctic Creatures, dimly stirred -
By Tropic Hint - some Traveled Bird
Imported to the Wood -

Or Wind's bright signal to the Ear -
Making that homely and severe,
Contented, known, before -

The Heaven - unexpected come,
To lives that thought the Worshipping
A too pretentious Psalm.


Emily Dickinson
The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Franklin), 361

Tending the Springs

"Look within.  Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig."

Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

Mortality III - operating under the veil

"Thus is man alienated from Being, but precisely because of this he is seared by longing for its integrity (which he understands as meaningfulness), by a desire to merge with it and thus to transcend himself totally.  As such, however, he is also alienated from the world in which he finds himself, a world that captivates and imprisons him.  He is an alien in the world because he is still somehow bound up in Being, and he is alienated from Being because he has been thrown into the world.  His drama unfolds in the rupture between his orientation 'upward' and 'backward' and a constant falling 'downward' and into 'now.'  He is surrounded by the horizon of the world. from which there is no escape, and at the same time, consumed by a longing to break through this horizon and step beyond it.

"The absurdity of being at the intersection of this dual state of 'throwness,' or rather this dual expulsion, can understandably give a person a reason (or rather an excuse) for giving up.  He may also, however, accept it as a unique challenge enjoined upon his freedom, a challenge to set out - by virtue of all his thrownesses - on a multisignificational journey between Being and the world (and thus, at the same time, to establish the outlines of his identity); to undertake it, aware that his goal lies beyond his field of vision, but also that precisely and only that fact can reveal the journey, make it possible and ultimately give it meaning; to fulfill uniquely the enigmatic mission of humanity in the history of Being by submitting to his destiny in an authentic, thoughtful way, a way that is faithful to everything originally good and therefore effective, and to make this entirely lucid acceptance of his entirely obscure task a source of sage delight to him."

Vaclav Havel
Letters From Olga

Mortality - II

"This inner echo of a home or a paradise forever lost to us - as a constitutive part of our "I" - defines the extent of what we are destined to lack and what we therefore cannot help but reach toward: for does not the hunger for meaning, for an answer to the question of what - in the process of becoming ourselves - we have become, derive from the recollection of a separated being for its state of primordial being in Being?  From the other side, the alien world into which we are thrown beckons to us and tempts us.  On the one hand we are constantly exposed to the temptation to stop asking questions and to adapt ourselves to the world as it presents itself to us, to sink into it, to forget ourselves in it, to lie our way out of ourselves and our 'otherness' and thus to simplify our existence-in-the-world.  At the same time we are persuaded over and over again that we can only reach toward meaning within the dimensions of this world, as it lies before us, by being open to the opening out of meaning within the world."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Havel's sentence on temptation brings to my mind a passage from Emerson that has been haunting me of late.  The passage is from his essay, History -

"...near and proper to us is also that old fable of the Sphinx, who was said to sit in the road-side and put riddles to every passenger. If the man could not answer, she swallowed him alive. If he could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was slain. What is our life but an endless flight of winged facts or events! In splendid variety these changes come, all putting questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a superior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts encumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine the men of sense, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished every spark of that light by which man is truly man. But if the man is true to his better instincts or sentiments, and refuses the dominion of facts, as one that comes of a higher race, remains fast by the soul and sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly and supple into their places; they know their master, and the meanest of them glorifies him."

The Conditions of Mortaility

"Birth from the maternal womb - as the moment one sets out on one's journey through life - presents a telling image of the initial condition of humanity: a state of separation....The miracle of the subject is born.  The secret of the 'I.'  The awareness of self.  The awareness of the world.  The mystery of freedom and responsibility.  Man as a being that has fallen out of Being and therefore continually reaches towards it, as the only entity by which and to which Being has revealed itself as a question, as a secret and as meaning.
     It seems to me that the notion of separation as humanity's starting point helps us establish our bearings when we explore the stage on which human existence is constituted and its drama unfolded.
     Separation creates a deeply contradictory situation: mans is not what he has set out into, or rather, he is not his experience of what he has set out into.  To him, this terrain - the world - is an alien land.  Every step of the way, he comes up against his own "otherness" in the world and his otherness vis-à-vis himself.  This terrain is essentially unintelligible to man.  He feels unsettled and threatened by it.  We experience the world as something not our own, something from which meaning must first be wrested and which, on the contrary, is constantly taking meaning away from us....it is in fact a part of what we have been thrown into or what we have fallen into and what drives us - in the alienness of the world - into situations we do not fully understand, which we suffer but cannot avoid."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Attention

"In discourse thou must attend to what is said, and in every movement thou must observe what is doing.  And in the one thou shouldst see immediately to what end it refers, but in the other watch carefully what is the thing signified."

Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

How to Listen

"Accustom thyself to attend carefully to what is said by another, and as much as it is possible, be in the speaker's mind."

Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

Small Things

It was only a little thing to do, and no trouble; and it’s the little things that smooths people’s roads the most, down here below;

Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn