Big Thoughts, Human-sized Canvas
“Why, you only touched it a tiny bit, but it is quite another thing.” Bryullóv replied: “Art begins where the tiny bit begins.”
That saying is strikingly true not only of art but of all…
I used to say over and over that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. There is no reciprocity. Hate is always gratuitous, sterile. It is a powerful, insurmountable barrier that permits no intrusion. In other words, nothing good…
Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farmworkers…
Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate,
Whose table once a
Guest, but not
The second time, is set….
We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to…
I swear by the one who never says tomorrow,
as the circle of the moon never agrees
sell installments of light
It gives all it has…
Would you think I was joking if I said that you can put the clock back, and that if the clock is wrong it is often a very sensible thing to do? But I would rather get away from that whole idea of clocks. We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the…
You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence. It is futile for the doctor to shield himself from the influence of the patient and to surround himself with a smokescreen of fatherly and professional authority. If he does so he merely forbids himself the…
They don’t make ‘em like they used to. Lowell’s poem “The Present Crisis” is an 18 stanza argument against slavery. This is poetic editorial, crammed with passionate pleading, laced with two-dollar words and high-minded symbolism. Can you imagine Khrushchev writing a poem instead of…
You would measure time the measureless and the immeasurable.
You would adjust your conduct and even direct the course of your spirit according to hours and…
…poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into…
Their sense of community had come apart long before Kathy’s death, but for him, Kathy’s dying had been the final stage of the story collection they’d started when they all first came together in the early seventies.
Most of them still…
