“WHAT CAN I DO, RIGHT now, to better myself?”
Spectrum
AS SOUND IS SLOWLY-VIBRATING light, ambition is slowly-vibrating desperation.
Windstorm Stylist
Scary loud gusts brush
From the trees’ green-flowing hair
Stray twigs and branches.
First Graf: Silverlock
TAKE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS, STAR A grumpy Chicagoan, people the landscape with characters and places from the world’s literature and you have Silverlock — a fable of the human spirit no less great or more complex a story than a man discovering the world of letters and how it changes him. I have read it twice now, once from the depths of a great spiritual crisis, and the effect is almost electric. Half the fun is spotting the references; another half is author John Myers Myers’ love of language; a third half is how it makes you feel. Silverlock may or may not change your life, but it will certainly change your view of storytelling — and isn’t that sometimes the same thing?
If I had cared to live, I would have died.
A storm had come up. While not sick, I found my bunk the most comfortable place, leaving it only to take my meals. Dozing after supper, I learned of disaster when a wave bashed in the door of my deck cabin. The backwash sluiced me out of it and stranded me by a stowage locker.
The Other Secret
WHEN IN DOUBT, SHOOT FROM the heart.
Litmus
A SURE TEST OF ANY theology is to ask, “Does God exist before human beings?”
Among other things, the answer can shed light on one’s grasp of science. For if you allow for a God who watched over the dinosaurs, who saw the primordial soup trend toward consciousness on a billion planets, who was delighted by the Big Bang — in short, One who doesn’t need humans to survive and Whom humans can only love fiercely but dimly — you may well be on to something.
Pithyism #65b
MATURITY IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN we choose to be fascinated by something other than ourselves.