Olympic yams

Sometimes you just have to talk back to the television.

Last night we watched a bit of the Olympics. We turned it on just in time to hear Bob Costas providing background information about Usain Bolt, the Jamaican winner and new world record holder of both the 100 and 200-meter races. Evidently, Bolt's father thinks his son's incredible speed comes from eating special yams grown in the Trelawny region of their country.

Costas added: "Those yams, and some long-striding gams."

Tammy: [groan].

J.D.: "I just lost so much respect for you."

A thought for today

"It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do a little." -Sydney Smith, writer and clergyman (1771-1845)

"We want to eat bonbons and be banal."

-F. Hessel, Pariser Romanze

Moore

"The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint."

"Futility"

Move him into the sun--
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it awoke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds--
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved,--still warm,--too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
--O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

-- Wilfred Owen

The world is too much with us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

--Wordsworth

Ecclesiastes

1 The words of the Teacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. 2 Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. 3 What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? 4 A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. 5 The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hurries to the place where it rises. 6 The wind blows to the south, and goes around to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. 7 All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they continue to flow. 8 All things are wearisome; more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing. 9 What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. 10 Is there a thing of which it is said, "See, this is new"? It has already been, in the ages before us. 11 The people of long ago are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by those who come after them. 12 I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, 13 applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with. 14 I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind. 15 What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted. 16 I said to myself, "I have acquired great wisdom, . . . and my mind has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge." 17 And I applied my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a chasing after wind. 18 For in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.

April

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Thought

“God’s love is ever with us, and naught can separate us from it.”

Bickering Philosophers

Schopenhauer in describing Hegel said he reached "the height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words such as had been previously known only in madhouses."He also called it "barefaced, general mystification," a "monument to German stupidity." Ouch. At least I haven't been thus denounced by a peer... yet.

Lilies

"...by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil -- widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower" (381). George Eliot, Middlemarch

These are the only lilies that survived long enough to bloom this year in my tiny 1 x 1 ft. square garden. People cut down or stepped on the others. It's difficult growing flowers here. But I keep trying.

Did I mention I love G.E.

"The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots" (Middlemarch, 298).


And later "Will" acts against his better judgement "Having silenced objection by force of unreason...." (Middlemarch, 456).