Friday, June 20, 2008

Things I'd Like to Write About

There just aren't enough hours in a day. Once you get your pump primed, and the flow flowing, there are so many directions you can go. Some of the things flitting across the skydome of my mind that I have been wanting to write about this week, if I had more time, include an exploration of the implications of our celebrity-enthralled culture, the miscellaneous fads that have exploded on the American pop scene over the past fifty years, unshared poems I have extracted from my journals, reflections on my experiences during the 1971 May Day protest in Washington, profiles of various inmates of Puerto Rico's Bayamon prison when I was doing ministry there once a week in 1979, and a few topics I find too controversial to even dare write about. Oh well. We do the best we can.

There are some truths we can't get away from. The more we run from them, the more we run into them.

Quotes from my Notes
"I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as "the masses." Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time." ~ Jorge Luis Borges

"A man's life is his image. At the hour of death we shall be reflected in the past and, leaning over the mirror of our acts, our souls will recognize what we are. Our whole life is spent sketching an ineradicable portrait of ourselves. The terrible thing is that we don't know this; we do not think of beautifying ourselves. ...We flatter ourselves, but later our terrible portrait will not flatter us. We recount our lives and lie to ourselves, but our life will not lie; it will recount our soul, which will stand before God in its usual posture." ~ Andre Gide, Journals, Jan 3, 1892

"It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn't the test of a man have been carried out in fewer years?" ~ Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

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