New poems

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On reality (Woolf)

What is meant by "reality"? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

On art (Sontag)

A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something, it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.

Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation

The difference is

Villains believe; heroes think.

What we make

What we make of the world
goes a long way toward determining
what we make of ourselves.

On digging

You can only dig deep near your feet.

On heroes

Heroes always walk on the periphery.

On forgiveness

Contention may be forgiven but destruction cannot.

Not enough (Basho)

even a long day
is not enough for the singing
of a skylark

Matsuo Basho

Yet another reason

God is an illogical concept, for without limits there is no identity.

The biggest problem

The biggest problem with all human societies is the tolerance of bullies.

New poems

+12