After great pain, a formal feeling comes —
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs —
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The feet, mechanical, go round —
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought —
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone —
This is the Hour of Lead —
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow —
First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go —
— Emily Dickinson
I think, consciously or not, what we readers do each time we open a book is to set off on a search for authenticity. We want to get closer to the heart of things, and sometimes even a few good sentences contained in an otherwise unexceptional book can crystallize vague feelings, fleeting physical sensations, or, sometimes, profound epiphanies.
— Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone: I’m Reading
I hate the idea of being asked
to bow down before
something in whose name
millions have been sacrificed.
I want nothing to do
with a soul. I hate
its crenulated edges
and bottomless pockets,
its guileless, eyeless stare.
I hate the idea of paradise,
where the souls of Socrates
and Machiavelli are made
to live side by side. If
I have to believe in something,
I believe in despair. In its
antique teeth and sour breath
and long memory. To it
I bequeath the masterpiece
of my conscience, the most
useless government of all.
The truth gets the table scraps
of my dignity. It can do
what it likes with the madman
of my desire and the conjurer
of my impotence. I prefer
to see myself as an anomaly
involuntarily joined to
an already obsolete
and transitory consciousness
that must constantly save
itself from itself,
as a peculiar instinct
for happiness that
sustained me for a brief
but interesting time.
— Philip Schultz, Failure
I turned sixty in Paris last year.
We stayed at the Lutetia,
where the Gestapo headquartered
during the war, my wife, two boys, and me,
and several old Vietnamese ladies
carrying poodles with diamond collars.
Once my father caught a man
stealing cigarettes out of one
of his vending machines.
He didn’t stop choking him
until the pool hall stunk of excrement
and the body dropped to the floor
like a judgment.
When I was last in Paris
I was dirt poor, hiding
from the Vietnam War.
One night, in an old chuch,
I considered taking my life.
I didn’t know how to be so young
and not belong anywhere, stuck
among so many perplexing melodies.
I loved the low white buildings,
the ingratiating colors, the ancient light.
We couldn’t afford such luxury.
It was a matter of pride.
My father died bankrupt one week
before his sixtieth birthday.
I didn’t expect to have a family;
I didn’t expect happiness.
At the Lutetia everyone
dressed themselves like specimens
they’d loved all their lives.
Everyone floated down
red velvet hallways
like scintillating music
you hear only once or twice.
Driving home, my father said,
“Let anyone steal from you
and you’re not fit to live.”
I sat there, sliced by traffic lights,
not belonging to what he said.
I belonged to a scintillating
and perplexing music
I didn’t expect to hear.
— Philip Schultz, Failure
None of our dads ever came to a game.
We swiped equipment, slid through mud and glass,
cajoled, cussed, and bullied our way through four seasons,
fleeing the darkness inside to the darkness outside,
until the park became a supermarket and all that yelling
a framed photo that said: “Outstanding Members of
the Community.” We got Brownie Automatics and learned
a few things: winning hurts less, nothing about yourself
has to be loved; never want anything out loud, or end up
out in left field where everyone is the son of a failure.
— Philip Schultz, from “Kodak Park Athletic Association, 1954,” Failure
It’s a beautiful January Sunday morning,
the first morning of the new year,
and my old dogs limp behind me up the beach
as my sons scour the ocher sand like archivists
seeking the days quota of mystery.
To them it’s all a magical kingdom,
their minds tiny oceans of good and evil strategies,
the hard traffic of dreams
enclosed by a flourishing expectation.
We came here for the ripening light,
the silence of the enormous sky; to exult
in the shy jewels of sea glass
polished by the tides of the wind,
in the forlorn shrieks and chortling cries of gulls
rising and falling between their world and ours.
To be where it was lush,
lonely and secret enough.
At the edge of things,
in the shimmering spray
and flawless sparkle of seashells,
under the lonely momentum of clouds
lugging their mysterious cargoes all the way
to the horizon and back,
each a wish, a gift
that must be returned.
I never thought I’d have so much to give up;
that the view from this side of my life
would be so precious. Bless
these filaments of sea grass,
this chorus of piping plovers
and bickering wrens, each mile
these arthritic animals tag behind,
sniffing tire ruts, frothy craters of rotting driftwood,
lacy seaweed and scuttling crabs,
after something deliciously foul . . .
Bless the plenitude of the suffering mind . . .
its endless parade of disgrace
and spider’s web of fear, the hunger
of the soul that expects to be despised
and cast out, the unforgiving ghosts
I visit late at night when only God is awake . . .
Bless this ice-glazed garden of bleached stones
strewn like tiny pieces of moonlight
in sand puddles,
the wind’s grievous sigh,
the singing light,
the salt, the salt!
Most of all bless these boys
shivering in the chill light ,
their fragile smallness and strange intransigence,
so curious and shining. Bless
their believing happiness will make them happy;
that the ocean is magical, a kingdom
where we go to be human,
and grateful.
— Philip Schultz, Failure
So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:
a dream once lost
among sorrow and songs.
— Rilke, From The Book of Hours I, 5
A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man!
— Jebediah Springfield.
You can hide it like a signature
or birthmark but it’s always there
in the greasy light of your dreams,
the knots your body makes at night,
the sad innuendos of your eyes,
whispering insidious asides in every
room you cannot remain inside. It’s
there in the unquiet ideas that drag and
plead one lonely argument at a time,
and those who own a little are contrite
and fearful of those who own too much,
but owning none takes up your life.
It cannot be replaced with a house or a car,
a husband or wife, but can be ignored,
denied, and betrayed, until the last day,
when you pass yourself on the street
and recognize the agreeable life you
were afraid to lead, and turn away.
— Philip Schultz, Failure
and there are a lot of leaves already.
I could rake and get a head start.
The boys’ summer toys need to be put
in the basement. I could clean it out
or fix the broken storm window.
When Eli gets home from Sunday school,
I could take him fishing. I don’t fish
but I could learn to. I could show him
how fun it is. We don’t do as much
as we used to do. And my wife, there’s
so much I haven’t told her lately,
about how quickly my soul is aging,
how it feels like a basement I keep filling
with everything I’m tired of surviving.
I could take a walk with my wife and try
to explain the ghosts I can’t stop speaking to.
Or I could read all those books piling up
about the beginning of the end of understanding…
Meanwhile, it’s such a beautiful morning,
the changing colors, the hypnotic light.
I could sit by the window watching the leaves,
which seem to know exactly how to fall
from one moment to the next. Or I could lose
everything and have to begin over again.
— Philip Schultz, Failure
Even the next era has no right to judge anything if it lacks the ability to contemplate the past without hatred or envy. But even that judgment would be one-sided, for every subsequent era is the fruit of previous periods and carries much of the past with it. It is fortunate if something of the ancestors lives on in it and continues to be loved and protected; only then does the past become fruitful and effective.
— Rilke, Early Journals
Researchers found that suicide rates drop after U.S. presidential elections in states that support the winning candidate, and that suicides drop even further in states that support the loser. It was determined that stock-market returns in predominantly Muslim countries are nine times higher during the holy month of Ramadan than they are the rest of the year. Girls with younger brothers lose their virginity later, and girls with older brothers experience menarche later. Women who drink regular beer are at increased risk for psoriasis, but women who drink light beer are not. A man’s likelihood of picking up a female hitchhiker was correlated with her breast size, and a man’s likelihood of infidelity to a female partner was correlated with his financial dependence on her. A new species of titi monkey, which has a bushy red beard and mates for life, was discovered in Colombia. American students exhibit an inferior understanding of the “equals” sign. At Stonehenge, archeologists discovered a second henge; in the Sistine Chapel, a brain stem and spinal cord were discovered in God’s neck; and on Bulgaria’s Sveti Ivan island, the bones of John the Baptist were unearthed. It was revealed that the human buttocks tan poorly.
Three liger cubs were born in a Taiwanese zoo whose keepers had allowed an African lion and a Bengal tigress to cohabitate. Previous attempts to separate the couple, said the zoo’s owner, had made the lion “very angry.” Beavers reintroduced to Scotland through the Scottish Beaver Trial had produced offspring, the first beavers to be born in the country in 400 years. Polar bears were eating the eggs of barnacle geese, and both Greenlandic polar bears and Svalbardian glaucous gulls were suffering from industrial contamination. Moose malnourished in childhood are at greater risk of developing arthritis in old age. Female mongooses were found to coordinate their litters in order to keep other mongoose mothers too busy to kill rivals’ pups. Adult moongooses were seen teaching their children how to open plastic Easter eggs filled with rice and fish. Neurologists identified the regions of the brain responsible for baby talk. Scientists concluded that the female ancestor of all human beings lived 200,000 years ago and that frogs learned to leap before they learned to land.
In Nevada, Christians prayed for the relocation of Bubba, a 700-pound black bear with a bulletproof skull who steals peanut butter from the poor. Ethnoprimatologists recommended ways for villagers in Guinea to avoid or defuse chimpanzee attacks. “Keep calm,” advised Kimberley Hockings of the New University of Lisbon. “Try not to scream.” Five hundred people were attacked and four children were killed by Peruvian vampire bats. The brains of gregarious locusts are 30 percent larger than those of solitarious locusts of the same species, according to neuroscientists who bred the insects over three generations. Aphids living on plants that produce the same pheromone whereby the insects announce that ladybugs are eating them become inured to the smell and are themselves likelier to be eaten by ladybugs. Pea aphids will drop to the ground in the presence of a lamb’s breath. Optimism was observed among happy pigs.
The philosopher may sometimes love the infinite; the poet always loves the finite. For him the great moment is not the creation of light, but the creation of the sun and moon.
— G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
With minds still hovering above their testicles
Certain poets here and in France
Still sigh over established and natural fact
Long since fully discussed by Ovid.
They howl. They complain in delicate and exhausted metres
That the twitching of three abdominal nerves
Is incapable of producing a lasting Nirvana.
— Ezra Pound, Poems from Blast
October 13. “There she blows,” was sung out from the mast-head.
“Where away?” demanded the captain.
“Three points off the lee bow, sir.”
“Raise up your wheel. Steady!”
“Steady, sir.”
“Mast-head ahoy! Do you see that whale now?”
“Ay ay, sir! A shoal of Sperm Whales! There she blows! There she breaches!”
“Sing out! sing out every time!”
“Ay ay, sir! There she blows! there — there — thar she blows — bowes — bo-o-o-s!”
“How far off?”
“Two miles and a half.”
“Thunder and lightning! so near! Call all hands!”
— J. Ross Browne’s Etchings of a Whale Cruize. 1846
“Extracts,” Moby-Dick
The Floating Library 