Author: Tim

• Walt Whitman: “I think I will do nothing for a long time…”

  “…but listen,and accrue what I hear unto myself…and let sounds contribute toward me…” — quoted by Mary Ruefle in “Madness, Rack and Honey”

• Mary Ruefle: “I used to think I wrote…”

  “…because I had something to say…but now I know I continue to write because I have yet heard what I have been listening to.”

• Kant: Either a price or a dignity

  In the kingdom of ends, everything has a price or a dignity. If it has a price then something else can be substituted for it. If it has no price then it has a dignity. — Quoted by Roger Scruton in “Fools, Frauds and Firebrands”

• Writing in your journal is for “a future me who is assumed to have forgotten.”

• J.I. Packer: “Live slowly enough…”

  “Live slowly enough to be able to think deeply about God.”

• Pentecostal Geese

  (February 2000) The Ohio river is up in the fields. Geese are gathered at the waters edges, like old Pentecostal women at a baptism. As if the flood itself spawned flocks and flocks, the way ancient bearded thinkers thought garbage spontaneously spawned mice. The standing water stains the black corn stalks left from the autumn…

• Brandon Marsalis: “There is no freedom in freedom, my man…”

  “…there is only freedom in structure.”

• Hesychia is a gentle gaze on the metaphors, neither dividing nor confusing their terms.

• Thomas Merton: “To seek to solve the problem of God is to seek to see one’s own eyes.”

  Thomas Merton

• Charles Williams: “To know a thing is to recognize its first cause.”

  Charles Williams (Preface to History in English Words?)