23
" Says O'Sullivan to me, " Mr. Fay, I'll have a word wid yeh?" " Certainly," says I; " what can I do for you?" " Sell me your sea- boots, Mr. Fay," says O'Sullivan, polite as can be. " But what will you be wantin' of them?" says I. " 'Twill be a great favour," says O'Sullivan. " But it's my only pair," says I; " and you have a pair of your own," says I. " Mr. Fay, I'll be needin' me own in bad weather," says O'Sullivan. " Besides," says I, " you have no money." " I'll pay for them when we pay off in Seattle," says O'Sullivan. " I'll not do it," says I; " besides, you're not tellin' me what you'll be doin' with them." " But I will tell yeh," says O'Sullivan; " I'm wantin' to throw 'em over the side." And with that I turns to walk away, but O'Sullivan says, very polite and seducin'-like, still a-stroppin' the razor, " Mr. Fay," says he, " will you kindly step this way an' have your throat cut?" And with that I knew my life was in danger, and I have come to make report to you, sir, that the man is a violent lunatic. "
25
" In sum," Midlife said, giving the room his best you-the-jury baritone, " Our defense will be...?" He looked to Matt for the answer/" Blame the other guy," Matt said." Which other guy?" " Yes." " Huh?" " We blame whoever we can," Matt said. " The CFO, the COO, the C Choose-Your-Favorite-Two-Letter-Combination, the accounting firm, the banks, the board, the lower-level employees. We claim some of them are crooks. We claim some of them made honest mistakes that steamrolled." " Isn't that contradictory?" Midlife asked, folding his hands and lowering his eyebrows. " Claiming both malice and mistakes?" He stopped, looked up, smiled, nodded. Malice and mistakes. Midlife liked the way that sounded." We're looking to confuse," Matt said. " You blame enough people, nothing sticks. The jury end up knowing something went wrong but you don't know where to place the blame. We throw facts and figures at them. We bring up every possible mistake, every uncrossed t and dotted i. We act like discrepancy is a huge deal, even if it's not. We are skeptical of EVERYONE. "
27
" You are wrong about that, you know, Dr. Andersen replied calmly. This, right here—us talking, sitting in this overlit room, a bunch of shrinks watching us through the tinted windows—this is the dream. The peace you felt before, that is reality. It is the I. The only part of existence that does not change, that cannot change, that will not change. You may not be ready to understand this quite yet, but if you continue meditating, you will. "
― Gudjon Bergmann , The Meditating Psychiatrist Who Tried to Kill Himself
32
" I said, 'I have heard people talk about war as if it was a very fine thing.'
Ah!' said [Captain], 'I should think they never saw it. No doubt it is very fine when there is no enemy, when it is just exercise and parade, and sham-fight. Yes, it is very fine then; but when thousands of good brave men and horses are killed, or crippled for life, it has a very different look.'
Do you know what they fought about?' said I.
No,' he said, 'that is more than a horse can understand, but the enemy must have been awfully wicked people, if it was right to go all that way over the sea on purpose to kill them. "
― Anna Sewell , Black Beauty
36
" I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Say even that you are sitting across the kitchen table from me right now. Our eyes meet; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at least for starters, is: here we- so incontrovertibly- are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. In the meantime, in between time, we can see. The scales are fallen from our eyes, the cataracts are cut away, and we can work at making sense of the color-patches we see in an effort to discover where we so incontrovertibly are.
I am as passionately interested in where I am as is a lone sailor sans sextant in a ketch on an open ocean. I have at the moment a situation which allows me to devote considerable hunks of time to seeing what I can see, and trying to piece it together. Ive learned the name of some color-patches, but not the meanings. Ive read books; Ive gathered statistics feverishly: the average temperature of our planet is 57 degrees F…The average size of all living animals, including man, is almost that of a housefly. The earth is mostly granite, which is mostly oxygen…In these Appalachians we have found a coal bed with 120 seams, meaning 120 forests that just happened to fall into water…I would like to see it all, to understand it, but I must start somewhere, so I try to deal with the giant water bug in Tinker Creek and the flight of three hundred redwings from an Osage orange and let those who dare worry about the birthrate and population explosion among solar systems.
So I think about the valley. And it occurs to me more and more that everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous. The giant water bug’s predations, the frog’s croak, the tree with the lights in it are not in any real sense necessary per se to the world or its creator. Nor am I. The creation in the first place, being itself, is the only necessity for which I would die, and I shall. The point about that being, as I know it here and see it, is that as I think about it, it accumulates in my mind as an extravagance of minutiae. The sheer fringe and network of detail assumes primary importance. That there are so many details seems to be the most important and visible fact about creation. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, then look at the trees; when you’ve looked at enough trees, you’ve seen a forest, you’ve got it. If the world is gratuitous, then the fringe of a goldfish’s fin is a million times more so. The first question- the one crucial one- of the creation of the universe and the existence of something as a sign and an affront to nothing is a blank one…
The old Kabbalistic phrase is “the Mystery of the Splintering of the Vessels.” The words refer to the shrinking or imprisonment of essences within the various husk-covered forms of emanation or time. The Vessels splintered and solar systems spun; ciliated rotifers whirled in still water, and newts laid tracks in the silt-bottomed creek. Not only did the Vessels splinter; they splintered exceeding fine. Intricacy then is the subject, the intricacy of the created world. "
― Annie Dillard , Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
38
" And the centurion who stood by said:
Truly this was a son of God.
Not long ago but everywhere I go
There is a hill and a black windy sky.
Portent of hill, sky, day's eclipse I know;
Hill, sky, the shuddering darkness, these am I.
The dying at His right hand, at His left,
I am - the thief redeemed and the lost thief;
I am the careless folk; I those bereft,
The Well-Belov'd, the women bowed in grief.
The gathering Presence that in terror cried,
In earth's shock in the Temple's veil rent through,
I; and a watcher, ignorant, curious-eyed,
I the centurion who heard and knew "
― Adelaide Crapsey , Verse by Adelaide Crapsey