Blue

Blue

This has been a year of blue, at least for me.  It reminds me of that time right before dawn, when everything is monochromatic and looks almost the same.  We have battled the blues on every level– from missing out on important events, to losing friends and family and pretty much everything that makes life worth living.  We have looked out the windows, feeling like prisoners in our own homes and wondering if life will ever go back to the life we took for granted before.

Better days are coming, my friends.  As the old timers used to say, “It will pass– maybe like a kidney stone, but it will pass.”

In the meantime, here are some of what I consider the most beautiful things ever written– lines so lovely that they give you chills and seem to warm you all over with their richness, their clarity, their beauty.  In a world of monochromatic, a little sparkling color seems like just what the doctor ordered.

What are we waiting for?  Let’s do this.

“He would have told her – he would have said, it matters not if you are here or there, for I see you before me every moment. I see you in the light of the water, in the swaying of the young trees in the spring wind. I see you in the shadows of the great oaks, I hear your voice in the cry of the owl at night. You are the blood in my veins, and the beating of my heart. You are my first waking thought, and my last sigh before sleeping. You are – you are bone of my bone, and breath of my breath.” — Marillier

“Dear Milena,
I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: “Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.” Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”  — Franz Kafka

“So many orchards circled the village that on some crisp October afternoons the whole world smelled like pie.”– Hoffman

“My Easter smells are the cinnamon and mixed spices in the hot cross buns, and the rosemary and mint sauce with the roast lamb. The grassy tang of rhubarb and real muddy wet grass from the egg rolling. And of course, lots and lots of milk chocolate.” — Alderson

“Those of you who are more than casually familiar with books- those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles- understand that page riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book. It isn’t about reading the words; it’s about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-color prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, of literary weight or unsolved mysteries.” — Harrow

“Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

Describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty – describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. – And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

“I love you so much I’ll never be able to tell you; I’m frightened to tell you. I can always feel your heart. Dance tunes are always right: I love you body and soul: —and I suppose body means that I want to touch you and be in bed with you, and i suppose soul means that I can hear you and see you and love you in every single, single thing in the whole world asleep or awake” — Dylan Thomas

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” — Robert Frost

 

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