From the complications of loving you
I think there is no end or return.
No answer, no coming out of it.

Repin’s ‘Tolstoy Ploughing’

Beethoven on Beethoven

Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.

Courtesy Ally, an excerpt from the commencement address David Foster Wallace (RIP) gave in 2005 at Kenyon College:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I only wish more people in my life knew that.

It is not the fire
we hunger for and not the ash. It is the still hour,
a deer come slowly to the creek at dusk,
the table set for abstinence, windows
full of flowers like summer in the provinces
vanishing when the moon’s half-face pallor
rises on the dark flax line of hills.

correction

Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul.

— Emerson, “An Address Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday evening, 15 July, 1838″, epigraph to Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason

Love’s the obstinate boy, the ship,
even the swimming sailors