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Showing posts from September, 2018

The Art of Memory

  The Art of Memory When we can traverse the plains of memory, stopping at each fire to warm ourselves before we start again on our journey, there is a world inside a world that keeps going on to infinity.  If we are lucky enough to hear the eternal melody that is at work in these moments, many fine hours may come upon us.   But sometimes the solace and hospitality are too much and we live with our new found companions, taking them along wherever we go, as a shadow upon our eyes.  The memories of Thoreau, or the early frontier narratives of Indian captivity, are something that I have felt eternal and unchangeable in human nature, not for any piece of information they have given me, but because my melancholy has always found peace in their environment.  For some the world is old or the world is new, but the point is that we tend to look at it through memory.  One memorable event confounds all future celebrations; we remember so as not to forget, but we do not remember that we are able t
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A Poet's Journal: October 12th, 2013

October 12th, 2013 Morning and evening have such an effect on the mind that it is a great consternation to wonder if it is the incline of the sun or the opacity of thought that keeps us from experiencing the world the way we think it should be.  From the one we are ever ready to see the intimacy for which to set ourselves down in its presence; and from the other to feel that instant of appearance wherein the whole land shall embrace an ephemeral perspective. Douglas Thornton
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A Poet's Journal: October 9th, 2013

October 9th, 2013 The joys and contentment of this world provide us with such a meaningful place that it is rather lamentable to find out that the grounds for their existence are weighed by the ruling hand of man, and man is subject to fault, and that even his fault may be given the appearance of success.  If we are confined to his limits, we are all kept busy by his inventions and make no greater use of them than they of us and though we may submit or rebel to his idea, we cannot change it, but that we are the bearers of this idea as well proves that we are not slaves to its existence.  Perhaps the most worrisome thing about this is that we are driven to get out of life a maximum potential of gain and comfort--cultural perceptions that change with time--and by this pass up what it is that we are actually trying to understand: a reason to have faith in life itself.  But there is also a capacity for a minimum effort, where monetary value only becomes compensation for what is super
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A Poet's Journal: October 7th, 2013

October 7th, 2013 To peruse the pages of forgotten books is a pastime in which I shall always partake; and though it turns out that very few sentences are actually read, the mere fixture of the words, or the subject, create an affinity in the mind apt to deeper contemplation.  Hardly can such a book be opened before we feel exist a mystic relationship with what is old, and even more so to the obscure, and far from leading us into a clear path of understanding, that same awkward and unsettling sentiment transfixes us and our thoughts drift back and forth upon the page until it is no longer the story to which we are attached, but the power of our imagination.  It is only when we feel we need to know something that words become our greatest let down; they are but a means to the mysterious--for even among the driest of archaeological accounts there remains something so unilluminating, that were the greatest poet to take up their theme, he could not inspire a finer feeling than the de
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