wordsperminute

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Words per minute #16: Harrison on Grief

May 16, 2009 in wordsperminute | No comments

Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn’t just drop in. You had to phone.
He’d put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn’t risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he’d hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she’d just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven’t both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there’s your name
and the disconnected number I still call.

- Tony Harrison, Long Distance II

Words per minute #14: Richardson on Rigour

March 8, 2009 in wordsperminute | 2 comments

Mathematical expressions have, however, their special tendencies to pervert thought: the definiteness maybe spurious, existing in the equations but not in the phenomena to be described; and the brevity maybe due to the omission of the more important things, simply because they cannot be mathematized. Against these faults we must constantly be on our guard. It will probably be impossible to avoid them entirely, and so they ought to be realized and admitted.

- Lewis Fry Richardson, The Mathematical Psychology of War

Words per minute #13: Miller on Creativity

January 22, 2009 in wordsperminute | No comments

Every day we slaughter our finest impulses.  That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty.  Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths… It was revealed to me that I could say what I wanted to say – if I thought of nothing else, if I concentrated upon that exclusively – and if 1 were willing to bear the consequences which a pure act always involves.

- Henry Miller, Sexus

Words per minute #12: Dürrenmatt on the Self

November 30, 2008 in wordsperminute | No comments

What one commonly called one’s self was merely a collective term for all the selves gathered up in the past, a great heap of selves perpetually growing under the constant rain of selves drifting down through the present from the future, an accumulation of shreds of experience and memory, comparable to a mound of leaves that grows higher and higher under a steady drift of other falling leaves.

- Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Assignment

Words per minute #11: Eisenhower on War

November 1, 2008 in wordsperminute | 1 comment

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

- Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953

Words per minute #10: Mill on Mortality

October 16, 2008 in religion, wordsperminute | 4 comments

The mere cessation of existence is no evil to any one: the idea is only formidable through the illusion of imagination which makes one conceive oneself as if one were alive and feeling oneself dead. What is odious in death is not death itself, but the act of dying, and its lugubrious accompaniments: all of which must be equally undergone by the believer in immortality. Nor can I perceive that the skeptic loses by his skepticism any real and valuable consolation except one; the hope of reunion with those dear to him who have ended their earthly life before him. That loss, indeed, is neither to be denied nor extenuated.

- J.S. Mill, The Utility of Religion

(HT: Adam Gopnik)

Also worth your time: You’re A Good Man, John Stuart Mill.

Words per Minute #9: Catullus on Crucifixion

October 2, 2008 in wordsperminute | No comments

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requires.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

- Catullus, Poem 85

I hate and love. You wonder, perhaps, why I’d do that?
I have no idea. I just feel it. I am crucified.

(Translation: Peter Green)

Words per minute #8: Yeats on Dying

September 16, 2008 in wordsperminute | 1 comment

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

- W.B. Yeats, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

(HT: Conor Foley)

Words per minute #7: Nagel on Image

August 10, 2008 in wordsperminute | No comments

One of the remarkable effects of a smoothly fitting public surface is that it protects one from the sense of exposure without having to be in any way dishonest or deceptive, just as clothing does not conceal the fact that one is naked underneath.

- Thomas Nagel, Concealment and Exposure

Words per Minute #6: Moore on Madness

July 23, 2008 in wordsperminute | 1 comment

Magic and language are practically the same thing, they would at least have been regarded as such in our distant past. I think it is wisest and safest to treat them as if they are the same thing. This stuff that you are dealing with – words, language, writing – this is dangerous, it is magical, treat it as if it was radioactive. Don’t doubt that for a moment. As far as I know, the last figures I heard quoted, nine out of every ten writers will have mental problems at some point during their life. Sixty percent of that ninety percent – which I think works out at roughly fifty percent of all writers – will have their lives altered and affected – seriously affected – by those mental problems. I think what that translates to is – nine out of ten crack up, five out of ten go mad. It’s like, miners get black lung, writers go bonkers. This is a real occupational hazard.

- Alan Moore, Interview

Words per minute #5: Abbs on Living

July 15, 2008 in wordsperminute | No comments

He lives well who lives lightly,
hoards nothing,
lets go the air he breathes—
to draw in more.

- Peter Abbs, The Flowering of Flint

Words per minute #4: Ramanujan on Sex

July 6, 2008 in wordsperminute | No comments

Her arms have the beauty
Of a gently moving bamboo.
Her eyes are full of peace.
She is faraway,
Her place not easy to reach.
My heart is frantic
With haste
A ploughman with a single ox
On land all wet
And ready for seed.

- AK Ramanujan, Poems of Love and War

(HT: William Dalrymple)

Words per minute #3: Keynes on Ideas

June 24, 2008 in wordsperminute

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

- J.M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

Words per minute #2: Szymborska on Love

June 17, 2008 in wordsperminute | 1 comment

True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life’s highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn’t populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there’s no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

(Wislawa Szymborska, True Love)

Words per minute #1: Horace on Autonomy

June 1, 2008 in wordsperminute | No comments

Ac ne forte roges, quo me duce, quo lare tuter,
Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri.

(Horace, Epistles 1:1:13-14)

You shall not ask for whom I fight
Nor in what school my peace I find;
I say no master has the right
To swear me to obedience blind.

(trans. C.T. Carr)