The lie of progress

Change is not the lie of progress,
but the promise that we become more human, or less.

A tower of brass (Maugham)

Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house.

W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

On "nature"

There is no "nature," only tendencies.

Change (Maugham)

I pictured their lives, troubled by no untoward adventure, honest, decent, and, by reason of those two upstanding, pleasant children, so obviously destined to carry on the normal traditions of their race and station, not without significance. They would grow old insensibly; they would see their son and daughter come to years of reason, marry in due course—the one a pretty girl, future mother of healthy children; the other a handsome, manly fellow, obviously a soldier; and at last, propserous in their dignified retirement, beloved by their descendants, after a happy, not unuseful life, in the fullness of their age they would sink into the grave.

That must be the story of innumerable couples, and the pattern of life it offers has a homely grace. It reminds you of a placid rivulet, meandering smoothly through green pastures and shaded by pleasant trees, till at last it falls into the vasty sea; but the sea is so calm, so silent, so indifferent, that you are troubled suddenly by a vague uneasiness. Perhaps it is only by a kink in my nature, strong in me even in those days, that I felt in such an existence, the share of the great majority, something amiss. I recognized its social value. I saw its ordered happiness, but a fever in my blood asked for a wilder course. There seemed to me something alarming in such easy delights. In my heart was a desire to live more dangerously. I was not unprepared for jagged rocks and treacherous shoals if I could only have change—change and the excitement of the unforeseen.

W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

Only sometimes

Falling in love is always an error but only sometimes a mistake.

For aught but (Maugham)

Sometimes a man survives a considerable time from an era in which he had his place into one which is strange to him, and then the curious are offered one of the most singular spectacles in the human comedy. Who now, for example, thinks of George Crabbe? He was a famous poet in his day, and the world recognized his genius with a unanimity which the greater complexity of modern life has rendered infrequent. He had learnt his craft at the school of Alexander Pope, and he wrote moral stories in rhymed couplets. Then came the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and the poets sang new songs. Mr Crabbe continued to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. I think he must have read the verse of these young men who were making so great a stir in the world, and I fancy he found it poor stuff. Of course, much of it was. But the odes of Keats and of Wordsworth, a poem or two by Coleridge, a few more by Shelley, discovered vast realms of the spirit that none had explored before. Mr Crabbe was as dead as mutton, but Mr Crabbe continued to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. I have read desultorily the writings of the younger generation. It may be that among them a more fervid Keats, a more ethereal Shelley, has already published numbers the world will willingly remember. I cannot tell. I admire their polish—their youth is already so accomplished that it seems absurd to speak of promise—I marvel at the felicity of their style; but with all their copiousness (their vocabulary suggests that they fingered Roget's Thesaurus in their cradles) they say nothing to me: to my mind they know too much and feel too obviously; I cannot stomach the heartiness with which they slap me on the back or the emotion with which they hurl themselves on my bosom; their passion seems to me a little anaemic and their dreams a trifle dull. I do not like them. I am on the shelf. I will continue to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. But I should be thrice a fool if I did it for aught but my own entertainment.

W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

On hell

Hell does not reveal its flames;
it promotes its desperate illusions.

Faster and faster (Graedon)

Some say history is a forward march—a line advancing toward a target. Maybe this view was just a mirror of its time: the 19th century saw the rise of what we came to call linear thought, a way of processing the world that was made possible only by the medium of books. By accident, the bound codex taught us sustained focus, abstract thinking, logic. Our natural tendency is to be distracted—to scan the horizon constantly for predators and prospects. Books made us turn that attention inward, to build higher and higher castles within the quiet kingdoms of our minds. Through that process of reflection and deep thinking, we evolved. There was no going back—only ever forward.

Others say that history isn't straight but curved, a circle, constantly repeating; ouroboros, the eternal return. But ouroboros isn't just a circle; it's a serpent eating its own tail. What if, right now, as we're immolating language, we're doing away with ourselves? Maybe we've regressed. The skills we once used for survival—scattered attention, diffuse concentration—have been adapted to finding glowing dots on screens, skimming pop-ups, beams, emails, video streams. Our thinking has been flattened; our progress ceded to machines. It's happening faster and faster. Accelerated obsolescence accelerating.

Alena Graedon, The Word Exchange

No one should (Adams)

If you belong to an organized political group, don’t expect people to take your opinions seriously.  No one cares when a sheep burps.

Scott Adams

Idioverse

I was feeling a bit bummed when I posted about my publication yesterday, because it meant that for the first time in several years I didn't have any accepted poems out there waiting to be published.

Then, yesterday afternoon, I received notice that Broad River Review, the literary magazine put out by Gardner-Webb University, has accepted my poem "Idioverse" for publication in their upcoming 2015 issue. Feeling much better now!

Whiskey Island

I received my author's copy of Issue Sixty-Five of Whiskey Island, containing my poem "Borrowed." I'm looking forward to digging into some of the other work published in this issue.

Purpose of life?

Any examination of the evidence would force us to conclude that the intended purpose of life is to master frustration.

On expectation

We are surprised without expectation
but not disappointed.

On simplicity

Simplicity is just unacknowledged complexity.

New poems

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