life

I’ve come across a few things that I want to share. They’re dealing with life in various ways, and offer wider perspectives than that which we typically experience. It’s good to step back once in a while …it gives you an appreciation for the details, and hopefully sheds new light on the staleness we all seem to encounter. The first is a quote from the eighteenth century Japanese Zen poet Ryokan. I came across this in the book Gods after God: An Introduction to Contemporary Radical Theologies, by Richard Grigg. The quote is from page 98…

“In all ten directions of the universe,
there is only one truth.
When we see clearly, the great teachings are the same.
What can ever be lost? What can be attained?
If we attain something, it was there from the beginning of
time.
If we lose something, it is hiding somewhere near us.
Look: this ball in my pocket:
can you see how priceless it is?”

The second is a passage is from a book that I picked up when I was in Vancouver a few weeks ago. It’s titled The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil. I’ve yet to get too far in, but the book so far offers more of a psychological breakdown/revealing than a strict story-telling …kinda along the lines of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s ‘Notes from Underground. Some of Musil’s observations are simply profound - and I’m looking forward to further reading. This quote is from page 60…

“Mankind produces Bibles and guns, tuberculosis and tuberculin. It is democratic, with kings and nobility; builds churches, and universities against the churches; it turns monasteries into barracks, but allots chaplains to the barracks. Of course it also provides hooligans with rubber tubing filled with lead to beat a fellow human being’s body black and blue, and afterwards it has featherbeds waiting to receive the solitary, man-handled body” …”This is the well known matter of the contradictions, the inconsistency and imperfections of life. One smiles or sighs over it.” …”there was desperately little use in doing away with the guns here and the kings there, and in diminishing stupidity and knavery by any greater or lesser piece of progress; for the measure of all that is disagreeable and bad is instantly made up again by new forms of the same thing, as though the world were always sliding back with one foot while it takes a step forward with the other.”

My final offering is a poem from Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I found this poem amongst an online collection of poetry from the University of Toronto Library. There are many poets/poems to discover in this database, and although lacking of a diverse offering of modern poets, there are a few Canadian ones that you can easily access.

“Think thou and act; to-morrow thou shalt die
Outstretch’d in the sun’s warmth upon the shore,
Thou say’st: “Man’s measur’d path is all gone o’er:
Up all his years, steeply, with strain and sigh,
Man clomb until he touch’d the truth; and I,
Even I, am he whom it was destin’d for.”
How should this be? Art thou then so much more
Than they who sow’d, that thou shouldst reap thereby?

Nay, come up hither. From this wave-wash’d mound
Unto the furthest flood-brim look with me;
Then reach on with thy thought till it be drown’d.
Miles and miles distant though the last line be,
And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond,–
Still, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more sea.