Thursday

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries. He may regard the general, impersonal foundations of his existence as definitely settled and taken for granted, and be as far from assuming a critical attitude towards them as our good Hans Castorp really was; yet it is quite conceivable that he may none the less be vaguely conscious of the deficiencies of his epoch and find them prejudicial to his own moral well-being. All sorts of personal aims, hopes, ends, prospects, hover before the eyes of the individual, and out of these he derives the impulse to ambition and achievement. Now, if the life about him, if his own time seems, however outwardly stimulating, to be at bottom empty of such food for his aspirations; if he privately recognises it to be hopeless, viewless, helpless, opposing only a hollow silence to all the questions man puts, consciously or unconsciously, yet somehow puts, as to the final, absolute, and abstract meaning in all his efforts and activities; then, in such a case, a certain laming of the personality is bound to occur, the more inevitably the more upright the character in question; a sort of palsy, as it were, which may extend from his spiritual and moral over into his physical and organic part. In an age that affords no satisfying answer to the eternal question of 'Why?' 'To what end?' a man who is capable of achievement over and above the expected modicum must be equipped either with a moral remoteness and single-mindedness which is rare indeed and of heroic mould, or else with an exceptionally robust vitality. Hans Castorp had neither one nor the other of these; and thus he must be considered mediocre, though in an entirely honorable sense.
--Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.
--Pat Conroy, Beach Music

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
--Jack Kerouac, On The Road

This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
--Marilynne Robinson, Gilead


Sudden Movements
My father's head has become a mystery to him.
We finally have something in common.
When he moves his head his eyes 
get big as roses filled 
with the commotion of spring. 
Not long ago he was a man 
who had tomato soup for lunch 
and dusted with the earnestness 
of a gun fight. Now he's a man 
who sits at the table trying to breathe 
in tiny bites. When they told him 
his spinal column is closing, I thought 
of all the branches he's cut 
with loppers and piled and burned 
in the fall, the pinch of the blades 
on the green and vital pulp. Surgeons 
can fuse vertebrae, a welders art, 
and scrape the ring through which 
the soul-wires flow as a dentist 
would clean your teeth. 
And still it could happen, one turn 
of his head toward a hummingbird, 
wings keeping that brittle life 
afloat, working hard against the fall, 
and he might freeze in that pose 
of astonishment, a man estranged 
from the neck down, who can only share 
with his body the silence 
he's pawned on his children as love.
--Bob Hicok