"If any of us knew what we were doing, or where we are going, then when we think we best know! We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterward discovered that much was accomplished and much was begun in us. All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that 'tis wonderful where or when we every got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar day. . . . Our life looks trivial, and we shun to record it . . . So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of our genius contracts itself to a very few hours. . . . The years teach much which the days never know. . . . We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life."
American Essayist, 1803 - 1882
from the essay "Experience"
Similarly:
"The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree.
The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much,
sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all (115)"
Julian Barnes
British Novelist (b. 1946)
from the novel Flaubert's Parrot
P.S.
Supermoon
Unfortunately, it was so cloudy
that we could see only
the bottom half of the moonrise.
Later that night ~ still hazy.
Jason Dufair writes: "The pith of our genius". Love that. Where would be be without poets? Marching a straight line from here to our graves I suppose."
ReplyDeleteAs Thornton Wilder says in "Our Town": “We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal . . . . All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it . . . [except for the] Saints and poets maybe. . . ."