In all the major traditions, the iron rule of religious experience is that it be integrated successfully with daily life. A disorderly spirituality that makes the practitioner dreamy, eccentric or uncontrolled is a very bad sign indeed.
Karen Armstrong, “The Case for God” (2009: 113)
Your unique and individual mission will most likely turn out to be a mission of Love, acted out in one or all of three arenas: either in the Kingdom of the Mind, whose goal is to bring more Truth into the world; or in the Kingdom of the Heart, whose goal is to bring more Beauty into the world; or in the Kingdom of the Will, whose goal is to bring more Perfection into the world, through Service.
Richard Nelson Bolles, What Color is Your Parachute? (2007 edition: 339)
You’re Watership Down!
by Richard Adams
Though many think of you as a bit young, even childish, you’re actually incredibly deep and complex. You show people the need to rethink their assumptions, and confront them on everything from how they think to where they build their houses. You might be one of the greatest people of all time. You’d be recognized as such if you weren’t always talking about talking rabbits.
Health warning: thinks if you’re not focused on America then you’re a bit weird. Possibly just not American…
Hypomania (mild mania) and cyclothymia (mild manic-depression) are the best states for creativity because they increase both the quantity of created work and its quality. These milder states can allow the individual to be more disciplined and less impulsive than do the severer stages, thus improving the chances of carrying the work to completion. They induce less of the impatience and distractibility that interfere with work. The person who fluctuates between mild depression and mild mania profits from the best of both states. He or she is imaginative, original, insightful, conscientious, and willing to keep working until no further improvement can be made.
Ioan James, “Psychologists look at Mathematicians” in Mathematics Today 45(1)
Simple motion strikes us as banal. The time element must be eliminated. Yesterday and tomorrow as simultaneous. In music, polyphony helped to some extent to satisfy this need. A quintet in Don Giovanni is closer to us than the epic motion in Tristan. Mozart and Bach are more modern than the nineteenth century. If, in music, the time element could be overcome by a retrograde motion that would permeate consciousness, then a renaissance might still be thinkable.
[...]
Polyphonic painting is superior to music in that, here, the time element becomes a spatial element. The notion of simultaneity stands out even more richly.
Paul Klee, diary entry for July 1917
Like sausage-making and the crafting of legislation in a democracy, creed revision is a process that is upsetting to watch too closely, so it is no wonder that the fog of mystery descends so gracefully over it.
Daniel Dennett, “Breaking the Spell”
I cut in two
A long November night, and
Place half under the coverlet,
Sweet-scented as a spring breeze.
And when he comes, I shall take it out,
Unroll it inch by inch, to stretch the night.
Hwang-Chin-i (translated by Peter Lee)
When you came, you were like red wine and honey
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savor,
But I am completely nourished.
Amy Lowell, “A Decade”
Daily life is also full of the time-sense. We think one event occurs after or before another, the thought is often in our minds, and much of our talk and action proceeds on the assumption. Much of our talk and action, but not all; there seems something else in life besides time, something which may conveniently be called “value”, something which is measured not by minutes or hours, but by intensity, so that when we look at our past it does not stretch back evenly but piles up into a few notable pinnacles, and when we look at the future it seems sometimes a wall, sometimes a cloud, sometimes a sun, but never a chronological chart.
E. M. Forster, “Aspects of the Novel”
Starting tomorrow, I am going to be unspeakably fatal.
Spoken by Millie Dillmount in “Thoroughly Modern Millie”
