Notebook Transcription 58
transcribed February 15, 2007
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"his mind was full of terrible inquiry" on Lincoln (a penetrating observer)
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I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,/ the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. >Hosea 6:6
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The nostalgia is a measure of the feeling of spiritual elation which the observant Jew experiences on the Sabbath: the sense of being transported from the flawed world of everyday struggle into a realm of transcendental perfection. Jewish literature tries to convey something of this mysterious power and beauty of the Sabbath by describing it as the choicest of days, a royal bride, a garland of glory, a crown of salvation, a divine gift, conferring peace and tranquility, quietness and safety, light and rejoicing, endowing those who faithfully obscure it with an "extra soul" (neshamah yeterah); according to one interpretation of the hadalach spices, their fragrance is a fond farewell-gift offered to this soul as it it takes its leave and giving them "a foretaste" of the world to come. >from "The Jewish People" 344
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Bach's B Minor Mass
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It's not everybody can eat their mistakes, I can tell him. >Faulkner
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It was not the resistance heroes that fascinated me, as a youth in Holland during the war, but "the frightened man who betrayed to save his life, who looked the other way, who grasped the wrong horn of a hideous moral dilemma." >Ian Buruma
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The course of world history and world culture shows us that there are, and should be, moral authorities...In the twentieth century, the universal tendency, not only in the west but everywhere, was to destroy any hierarchies so that everyone could act just as he or she wants without regarding any moral authority...The level of world culture has been lowered as a result. >Solzhenitsyn
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What is life? A frenzy.
What is life? An illusion.
A shadow, a fiction,
And the greatest good is nothing,
For life is a dream (La vida es sueno)
And dreams are only reams. >Pedro Calderon de La Barca
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Noli me tangere (do not want to touch me) -- words spoken by Jesus to Mary Magdalene.
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"wonder rather that doubt is the root of all knowledge." >Abraham Joshua Heschel
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...our liberty will not be secured at sword's point...we must secure it by making ourselves worthy of it. And then when a people reaches that height God will provide a weapon, the idols will be shattered, tyranny will crumble like a house of cards and liberty will shine out like the first dawn. >Jose Rizal
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His eyes look like piece of burnt-out cinder fixed in his face, looking out over the land. >As I lay dying
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The sun, an hour above the horizon, is posed like a cloody(?) egg upon the crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the rose sulfurous, smelling of lightening. When Peabody comes, they will have to use the rope. He has pussel-gutted himself eating cold greens. With the rope they will haul him up the path, balloon-like on the sulfurous airs. >As I lay dying
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That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image. >38
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300 years in a convent and 40 years in Hollywood have left the Philippines culturally dispossessed. "at this point and time we are not yet fully Filipino" (1986)
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he did not particularly like him; rather, as do so many, he likes power.
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Augustine rejected biblical literalism in the early 5th Century.
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When I was about to achieve the spontaneous combustion of all this corruption, this loathsome accumulation of garbage, and when frenzied greed, taken unawares, was rushing about to seize whatever was at hand like an old woman surprised by fire, you showed up with your slogans of pro-Hispanism, with your calls for faith in the government and faith in what will never come!...You ask for parity rights, the Spanish way of life, and you do not realize that what you are asking for is death, the destruction of your national identity, the disappearance of your homeland, the ratification of Tyranny. What is to become of you? A people without a soul? >Jose Rizal, excerpted from El Filibusterismo
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"Mahorlika" a pre-hispanic term "chief" or literally "big phallus" was Marco's nom de guerre as a guerrilla soldier fighting against the Japanese.
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We are to treat rational beings as ends, and never as means only >Scruton on "Morality"
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I went to the furrow and picked up a clod. It was warm and moist.
Hilda was lying on the sled. I sat beside her and told her to raise the hem of her dress up to the navel. She turned to me, half-rising, and said angrily, "I will do no such thin."
I told her the, "I wantyou to belong to Carmay, to be free from the sickness of other earths. I will rub this on your stomach" -- I held the clod before her eyes -- "and just as grandfather said, you will never get sick, not while you are here." ...She finally raised her dress, "You are like an old man," she said, shaking her head. "You believe in spirits."
I did not speak. her legs were white and clean and her skin was smooth. I crushed the clod and let particles trickle on her skin. The grains fell on her navel and rolled down her sides. With my palm, I spread the clod on her belly, slowly, softly, and when this was done, she snapped her dress down and pinched by hand.
"Foolish!" she said, laughing. >Don Vincente F. Sionil Jose
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Words so delicate they seemed more sighed then said.
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...hovers over us like a dance of unearthly figures.
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The constitution is about more than efficiency, and more than democracy; it is a collective commitment to the equal worth and dignity of all human beings.
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"It is, therefore, a source of great virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about invisible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether: the man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the storng man has extened his love to all places; the perfect man has extinegursled (?) this." >Hugo St. Victor Saxony the monk, from Edward Said -- "Reflections on Exile"
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The familiar ethical/moral septet: wisdom, temperance, courage, justice, faith, hope, love (charity)
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Cicero's two virtues: humility, greatness of spirit