Some thoughts and excerpts that I like to return to from time to time. (Painting by Monet.)
"My hope has returned! My heart pounds at the thought of standing up; at the thought of breathing and speaking. It's like a light has come bursting on in my chest, forcing me to spread my arms to the world. For a while, I thought that it never would. I wept and couldn't eat. I became angry easily and destroyed things I cared about to make myself feel worse. But a vision came to me. A stone building, surrounded by lawns and hedges. People stood outside of it and talked softly and thoughtfully. There was a small marketplace nearby. Some of the vendors sold bread and fruit, and others sold antiques, books and wine. The sea was not far away, just beyond the edge of the building I could see it on the horizon – the soft wind smelled faintly like salt and sand. I could hear music in the distance: a violin, a guitar and a stand-up bass, playing a quiet song that complemented the air and the pinkish edges of the sky. Happiness is verdant and bright. The past has left me."
The sun set and the doomed man stared at the blank wall, thinking on death. It would be soon, he thought. There must be something before then, things they should remember after he passed. What was important? What would they need? He clicked out a list on his typewriter.
To think quietly. To seek simplicity. To love openly and without regret. To speak clearly and with feeling. To paint what came naturally to the hand. To hear revealing melodies without distraction. To smile and laugh at the patterns of mortality. To see the sunrise with an uncluttered mind.
He remembered falling in love in a shady park, in the afternoon when the light was beginning to yellow -- they held hands. It was beyond sex, attraction. It was a feeling of momentary, absolute peace, solidified in time. She glowed in her white dress and he in his dark jacket. They gazed at each other through the grass and they could hear the waves rolling into the beach down below.
Think seek love speak, paint hear smile see.
They lowered the casket and their heads. And the sun rose again.
(This is unrelated to the text, but also hopeful somehow.)
And so the jolly beggarman came tripping o'er the plain He came unto a farmer's door, a lodging for to gain The farmer's daughter, she came down and viewed him cheek and chin She says, "He is a handsome man, I pray you take him in."
We'll go no more a-roving, a-roving in the night We'll go no more a-roving, let the moon shine so bright We'll go no more a-roving
He would not lie within the barn nor yet within the byre But he would in the corner lie, down by the kitchen fire Oh, then the beggar's bed was made of good clean sheets and hay And down beside the kitchen fire the jolly beggar lay
The farmer's daughter she got up to bolt the kitchen door And there she saw the beggar standing naked on the floor He took the daughter in his arms and to the bed he ran "Kind sir," she says, "Be easy now, you'll waken our good man."
"Now you are no beggar, you are some gentleman, For you have stole my maidenhead and I am quite undone." "I am no lord, I am no squire, of beggar's I be one, and beggars they are robbers all, so you are quite undone."
She took the bed in both her hands and threw it at the wall Says "Go you with the beggarman, my maidenhead and all."
Man is but a leaf, Floating on the ocean of time and space Meaningless and alone in an absurd universe Certain of himself only because of the echo of his thoughts And the patterns of reason he so brilliantly discerns
If he is ever so clever. He fancies himself an overmannish boy, Unbound by the chains of his instinctual habits His head skimming above the mundane smog of the everyday Pulled up by the invisible hand of a objectively subjective god
Buried in a book. By the light of day pacing Endless lines along the campus way, Unable to read a single word without expounding, So moved by his own capability and intelligence as a thinker:
Man is but a leaf! Write it with feeling into your copybook, For ours is not to walk among the herd as diddlers But to set proverbial caldrons bubbling upon the burners of reason; And string words in comparative knots until all isms become one.
