Artists and Spectators

We gawk and stare as the painters slice off their ears and down the booze and act like clowns. But we rely on them to make up for our own timidity, on their courage to dignify our caution. We are spectators in the casino, placing bets; that’s the nature of the collaboration that brings us together, and we can sometimes convince ourselves that having looked is the same as having made, and that the stakes are the same for the ironic spectator and the would-be saint. But they’re not. We all make our wagers, and the cumulative lottery builds museums and lecture halls and revisionist biographies. But the artist does more. He bets his life. ♦

from "Van Gogh's Ear: The Christmas Eve that changed modern art." Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker Jan. 4, 2010

This passage is from a long, wonderful article about Van Gogh: his passion, his suffering, his revolutionary art. It is as true for writers as it is for painters, and it makes me proud to be, in my small way, an artist as well as a spectator.

Submitted by Jan Tarasovic

Belief Beyond Reason-Malcom Muggeridge

"A sense of how extraordinarily happy I have been., and of enormous gratitude to my creator,overwhelms me often. I believe with a passionate , unshakeable conviction that in all circumstances and at all times life is a blessed gift; that the spirit that animates it is one of love, not hate or indifference, of light, not darkness, of creativity ,not destruction of order, not chaos. Since all life-men, women, creatures, plants, as well as insentate matter- and all that is known about, is, has been benelovently , not malevolently, conceived; when the eyes no more see and the mind thinks no more, and this hand now writing is inert, I believe that whatever lies beyond will similarly be benelovently, not malevolently or indifferently conceived. If it is nothing, then it is nothingness I offer thanks; if it's another mode of existence with this worn out husk of a body left behind, like a butterfly extricating itself from a chrysalis; and this floundering , muddled mind, now at best seeing through a glass darkly, given longer range and new precision, then for that likewise I offer thanks."

From "anyone lived in a pretty how-town" - e.e. cummings

women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

From The Gettysburg Address - Abraham Lincoln

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.


But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The Meditation of the Old Fisherman - W. B. Yeats

"You waves, though you dance by my feet like children at play,
Though you glow and you glance, though you purr and you dart;
In the Junes that were warmer than these are, the waves were more gay,
When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart."

We Shall Find Peace - Anton Chekhov

"We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds."

From Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan

I fell in loe with my brother-in-law the way you fall asleepin the car when someone you trust is driving--gradually, by imperceptible degrees, letting the motion lull your eyes closed. Letting, that's the keyword.

Look to the Day - Sanskrit

Yesterday is already a dream, tomorrow is only a vision, but today ,well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, every tomorrow a vision of hope.

- Contributed by Don Warner

So Small A Thing - Matthew Arnold

It is so small a thing
to have enjoyed the sun
to have lived with the light
to have loved, to have felt and thought,
to have done.

- Contributed by Don Warner

Time is the Mercy of Eternity- Kenneth Rexroth

The long sunlight is golden
On the deep green grass and bright
Red flowers of the meadow.
I stop where I meander,
The brook forms a deep pool.
The water is greenish brown
But perfectly transparent
A small dense cloud of hundreds
Of midges, no bigger than my head,
hovers over it,
On the bank two small frogs.
In the water are beetles
Hydras, waterbugs, larvae
of several insects
It is like peering into an inkspot
and finding yourself staring
Out into the Milky Way
The deep vibration of my identity
With all this plentitude of life
Leaves me shaken and giddy.
I step softly across the meadow.

Little Gidding- by T.S.Eliot

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown , remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning,
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall.

The Sea- By Donald Hall

The drunken waves argue
the same sentences
over and over, as if
no one will understand them.