Category: My Commonplace Book

• Louise Gluck: “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”

• Mary Oliver: “Let me keep my mind on what matters…”

  “…which is my work which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.”

• Isak Denison: excerpt from “Out Of Africa”, on stillness in the wild.

  Out in the wild I had learned to be aware of abrupt movements. The creatures…shy and watchful…no domestic animal can be as still as a wild animal. Civilized people have lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence from the wild before they are accepted by it. The art of moving gently…

• David Wagoner: “Lost”

  Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are is called here and you must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers “I have made this place around you. If you leave it you may come back again , saying “here”. “…

• Dorothy Sayers: “…the neglect of dogma is the curse of nearly all religious plays.”

• Polonius and Hamlet discuss justice.

  Polonius: My lord, I will use them according to their desert. Hamlet: God’s bodkin, man, much better…use every man after his desert, and who’d escape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity. (bold mine).

• Thomas Merton: “…pierced through the surface and got beyond the shadow and the disguise.”

  From Sri Lanka, on his pilgrimage to Asia, days before his death.

• Elizabeth Bishop: “Insomnia”

  The moon in the bureau mirror looks out a million miles (and perhaps with pride, at herself but she never, never smiles) Far and away beyond sleep, or perhaps she’s a daytime sleeper. By the universe deserted, she’d tell it to go to hell,and she’d find a body of water, or a mirror on which…

• Josef Pieper: Leisure cannot be found when sought as a means to any end.

  — from “Leisure the Basis Of Culture”

• Josef Peiper: “In worship, a store of superfluous wealth is squandered.” 

  — from “Leisure the Basis Of Culture”