The Beginning and The End Do your duty and live well--hard to understand yet easy to do. Live with your duty and do well--easy to understand yet hard to do. We are often presented with this conundrum. The search of a whole lifetime comes down to what is right, but what is right changes infinitely over a lifetime. When I finish my day, sometimes there is a noble aspect that looms over what I have done, giving me a confidence to carry on in my endeavors, then at other times everything seems worthless, things happen and I am just a part of some growing confusion. 'The rain, Once the light has restored Its nature to the leaves, Forgets the joy of its burden To leave the rest of us in peace...' (Excerpt from Day-Keepers published in The Uninitiated ) Light and dark, rain and sun, good and bad, the extremes of everything that is imaginable take place here on this earth; their consequences, their moral aspect, take place in us; we are at once a part of the earth and of th
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 description of some ancient object but newly unearthed.
Douglas Thornton
Comments
Post a Comment