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Showing posts from August, 2013
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I will not be reduced to false clarity or deductive explanations of a leaf, falling. - Jack Mueller

DHL

The great desire to-day is to deny the religious impulse altogether, or else to assert its absolute alienity from the sexual impulse. The orthodox religious world says faugh! to sex. Whereupon we thank Freud for giving them tit for tat. But the orthodox scientific world says fie! to the religious impulse. The scientist wants to discover a cause for everything. And there is no cause for the religious impulse. Freud is with the scientists. Jung dodges from his university gown into a priest's surplice till we don't know where we are. We prefer Freud's Sex to Jung's Libido or Bergson's Elan Vital . Sex has at least some definite reference, though when Freud makes sex accountable for everything he as good as makes it accountable for nothing . --  DHL

Forget the Map; Follow Your Nose

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'That's what I love about reading:  one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book.  It's geometrically progressive -- all with no end in sight ...or perhaps there is a some secret sort of homing instinct in books themselves, that brings them to their perfect readers.  How delightful if that were true'.   -- Annie Barrows

Words, words, words

18 Sadly Obsolete Words
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Great ideas are rare creatures indeed.   I thought I spotted one in the  high grasses near the lake yesterday. 
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For months I've been thinking of my son's going away as some kind of ending ...my husband reminds me it this not an ending, but simply a new chapter in what he calls The Book of Sam.  Nonetheless, as we said our goodbyes on that campus on Saturday, we were all terribly choked up, and the drive home was a tearful one.  We have been a very, very close family these many years, so I'm not sure why I've been surprised to have felt in essence, ripped in two. "This is going to be much more difficult than I thought it would be" admits the father, the father who has given his life, his time, and his heart, to these little ones.   Those who expect moments of change to be comfortable and free of conflict have not learned their history.... Buena fortuna to my beautiful boy as he embarks on this new adventure.  
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A Short Review of the Gnu: The Gnu
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--------- The other night the husband and I found ourselves in Moab, Utha, on a barge on the river at dusk, with a boatload of tourists, primarily from Europe.   As night fell,  the chatter ceased, and the show began.  A recording listed the creation myths from all over the world, as great shafts of light were cast on the magnificent towering cliffs.  Shadows awoke.  Bats, too. The river murmured of movement and range.  The Ute stirred from the deep.   There we were, gnawing at the hems of the gods.  It is only in the dark the stars blink, link to link.   All the universe was dark, beautiful, mysterious.  And suddenly, in the midst of this strange and extraordinary production, patriotic music began to play, patriotic music of the Broadway musical variety.  This transition was so deeply and unintentionally funny, so unintentionally vainglorious, we glanced at one another in the dark, and began laughing. ...