Quote of the Week

"The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it."
-19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire

Quote of the Week

(Marie on the beach in Morocco 2007.)

"Surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy."
-Louis Bogen

Quote of the Week

“In my hotel room that night, I thought - as I still do - of the moral principles she instilled in me: never to harm a living creature; throughout my life, to place the poor, the humble, the meek of this world above all others; never to forget those who were slighted or neglected or who had suffered injustice, because it was they who, above all others, deserved our love and respect, in Iceland or anywhere in the world. I spent my entire childhood in an environment in which the mighty of the earth had no place outside story books and dreams. Love of, and respect for, the humble routine of everyday life and its creatures was the only moral commandment which carried conviction when I was a child.”

-Halldór Laxness, Nobel Lecture 1955

Quote of the Week

“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.”

-Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931)

Quote of the Week

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
-Milan Kundera

Quote for the Week

(Houman at Cap de Trois Fourches, Morocco 2008).

"We don’t have to live great lives, we just have to understand and survive the ones we got."
-Andre Debus

Quote of the Week

"The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one’s own home."
-Theodor Adorno

Quote of the Week

"The women have been a very dominant factor in Iran throughout the ages. It sounds counterintuitive because in some instances, in the court of law, no matter what law we’re talking about – criminal, divorce, inheritance, child custody, etc. – women count for only half of a man. But in society women have been very strong, and women have had a much more vibrant, participatory role in Iran than in any other of the countries around that region, including so many of the countries the United States calls friends and allies. And ever since the beginning, 30 years ago during the revolution, women were out on the streets en masse. Because it then became an Islamic society, traditional men could not keep the women out of the public sphere anymore, couldn’t keep their girls from going to school, because now it was an Islamic society and there was no reason to do that. So now 65 percent of university students are women. Women are in all sorts of spheres of professional endeavor. Women drive, they vote, they can hold a public position. Now, 34 million women are in Iran right now, out of a population of 70 million."

This from the excellent Christiane Amanpour in a worthy interview. The green shoots of a revolution in Iran have been captivating from Amman (although developments, public rallies, and the international reporting on such events has subsided in the last week) and the reports of women leading street protests in many instances have been moving, although few are talking about the situation here. One explanation "The Palestinian issue takes up all our time."

Quote of the Week

"..this is why I value that little phrase 'I don't know' so highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended."

Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel Lecture 1996

I'd like to think I could live off that idea- "I don't know" for the rest of my days. I find it immeasurably motivating and a better ailment (if you want to call it that) to obsess over then vanity, power, material wealth, etc. Hedging, pacing, and second guessing is one thing, but an overly generous level of curiosity, humility, and dialectical thought is one way by which to achieve a life well lived.

Symborska is not the first to talk about the idea of not knowing. Socrates, Kierkegaard, and others have discussed it in the context of strengthening an argument.

Quote of the Week

"Seven blunders of the world that lead to violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principle."
-Mahatma Gandhi

Quote of the Week

Nothing can happen to any human being outside the experience which is natural to humans -- an ox too experiences nothing foreign to the nature of oxen, a vine nothing foreign to the nature of vines, a stone nothing outside the property of a stone. So if each thing experiences what is usual and natural for it, why should you complain? Universal nature has brought you nothing you can't endure.
-from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations

(Stone writings at Volubilis)

Quote of the Week

“One of the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road. Then one of the masked executioners said to them, "Any Catholics among you, step out here". As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don't move, we'll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA.”
-from the 1995 Nobel Lecture of poet Seamus Heaney, found here.

Heaney ends the next paragraph with the following salient words, which seem timely in the current zeitgeist of fear and moat building.

“The birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of what happens.”

Quote of the Week

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more
uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what
is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals,
has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral
values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to
enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and
tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am
not too sure.'"
-Early 20th century critic H. L. Mencken.

Quote of the Week

“Once in a while [in opera], when everything is just right, there is a moment of magic. People can live on moments of magic.”

-Opera director Sarah Caldwell, who also once said “If you can sell green toothpaste in this country, you can sell opera.”

Quote of the Week

"As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth.They go back to the Neolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe."
-poet Gary Snider

Snider has an interesting story. He started out as one of the Beat writers of the 1950s in San Fransico, then left in '56 and went to Japan where he spent the next twelve years in a monastery, studying Buddhism.

I've haven't posted anything for over a month. Sorry, I've been extremely busy, maybe becoming a little schizophrenic from work. For the most part, I enjoy the energy that comes from multitasking in the states; doing several jobs at once and getting more work done. Resources and materials are more readily available, transportation is easy, and a protestant work ethic means people better understand a busy face. Multitasking does not transfer to Morocco as easily, but maybe its better. We work too much and don't allow ourselves to enjoy life daily. I believe it was Heinrich Heine who said that he thought a blaspheming Frenchman was a more pleasant object to God than a praying Englishman.

People here do a good job of living in the moment, this coming in most part from a fatalistic paradigm. I need to absorb more of the latter. I'll post more shortly.

Quote of the week

"It is not growing like a tree
in bulk, doth make man better be,
or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
to fall a log at last, dry, bald and sere:
a lily of a day,
is fairer far in May,
although it fall and die that night;
it was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauties see,
and in short measures, life may perfect be."

-poet Benjamin Jonson

Quote of the week

“Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.”

-Czech author Milan Kundera, who is too easy to quote. Some more:

“Happiness is the longing for repetition.”
“The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.”
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
“Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”

Kundera's metaphors are beautiful and his existentialism shines throughout his writing.

(Note: New photos under "my photos.")

Quote of the Week

"I think that Jesus would be disappointed in our ignoring the plight of those around us who are suffering and our focus on our own selfish short-term needs. I think he would be appalled, actually."

-2008 presidentail candidate John Edwards in a recent interview. Edwards seems to be running an updated, populist campaign based on admitting mistakes, promoting universal healthcare, and making U.S. poverty a platform issue. Some might call it brave or gutsy and its sad to think such things would be considered so.

Quote of the Week

“The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint . . . it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”

C. S. Lewis in “The Screwtape Letters”

Quote of the Week

"History says, don't hope on this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime the longed for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme."

-author Seamus Heaney, from "The Cure at Troy"