Quote Of The Day
Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are all vulnerable both to the storm without and to the storm within, and if ever we are to find true shelter, it is with the recognition of our tragic nakedness and need for true shelter that we have to start.
- Originally published in Telling the Truth
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BOREDOM OUGHT TO BE ONE of the seven deadly sins. It deserves the honor.
You can be bored by virtually anything if you put your mind to it, or choose not to. You can yawn your way through Don Giovanni or a trip to the Grand Canyon or an afternoon with your dearest friend or a sunset. There are doubtless those who nodded off at the coronation of Napoleon or the trial of Joan of Arc or when Shakespeare appeared at the Globe in Hamlet or when Lincoln delivered himself of a few remarks at Gettysburg. The odds are that the Sermon on the Mount had more than a few of the congregation twitchy and glassy-eyed.
To be bored is to turn down cold whatever life happens to be offering you at the moment. It is to cast a jaundiced eye at life in general, including most of all your own life. You feel nothing is worth getting excited about because you are yourself not worth getting excited about.
To be bored is a way of making the least of things you often have a sneaking suspicion you need the most.
To be bored to death is a form of suicide.
- Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words
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BOOKS ARE TO READ, but that is by no means the end of it.
The way they are bound, the paper they are printed on, the smell of them (especially if they are either very new or very old), the way the words are fitted to the page, the look of them in the bookcase—sometimes lined up straight as West Point cadets, sometimes leaning against each other for support or lying flat so you have to tip your head sideways to see them properly. Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, the Pléiade edition of Saint Simon, Chesterfield's letters, the Qur'an. Even though you suspect you will probably never get around to them, it is an honor just to have them on your shelves.
Something of what they contain gets into the air you breathe. They are like money in the bank, which is a comfort even though you never spend it. They are prepared to give you all they've got at a moment's notice, but are in no special hurry about it. In the meanwhile they are holding their tongues, even the most loquacious of them, even the most passionate.
They are giving you their eloquent and inexhaustible silence. They are giving you time to find your way to them. Maybe they are giving you time, with or without them, just to find your way.
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THE WORD blessing has come to mean more often than not a pious formality such as ministers are continually being roped into giving at high-school graduations, Rotarian wienie roasts, and the like, and to say "God bless you" to a person, unless that person happens to have just sneezed, is generally regarded as a pious eccentricity. It was not always so.
In the biblical sense, if you give me your blessing, you irreversibly convey into my life not just something of the beneficent power and vitality of who you are, but something also of the life-giving power of God, in whose name the blessing is given. Even after old, half-blind Isaac discovered that he had been hoodwinked into blessing the wrong twin, he could no more take the blessing back and give it to Esau than he could take the words of it out of the air and put them back into his mouth again.
Religious language has come to such a pass that perhaps "luck," of all words, suggests the reality of this better than "blessing." Everybody knows that luck has magic in it and that when you have it, you really have something. It may see you through hard times. It may win you the sweepstakes. A blessing, on the other hand, has come to seem something on the order of a Hallmark friendship card.
- Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words
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WHEELING THROUGH THE SUMMER SKY, perching in the treetops, feeding their young, birds go about their business as generally unconcerned with the human race as the human race is generally unconcerned with them. But every so often they do something that catches our attention. Canada geese heading south in the shape of a V. A white-throated sparrow grieving over poor Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody. A cardinal darting through the shrubbery like a flame. For a moment or two even the dullest of us dimly realizes the world would be a poorer place without them.
One wonders if from time to time birds feel the same way about us. A man with an umbrella walking in the rain. A woman in a bathing suit picking peas. The patter song of a two-year-old in the sandbox. Do birds every once in a while see us as we see them, as basically irrelevant but occasionally worth the cocking of a beady eye, the flicker of a wing, the first few notes of a song?
- Originally published in Beyond Words
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