Let Noble Thoughts Come to Us from All Sides

• Shakespeare’s Cleopatra through the eyes of Enobarbus: ‘Age cannot wither her/nor custom stale/Her infinite variety’
• Leonard Cohen
• Nine o’clock, and we’ve had several lives already today
• And that’s what a human is: a gathering around a perplexity
• I feel, we’re in a very shabby moment, and neither the literary nor the musical experience really has its finger on the pulse of our crisis. From my point of view, we’re in the midst of a Flood: a Flood of biblical proportions. Its both exterior and interior – at this point its more devastating on the interior level – but its leaking into the real world. And this Flood is of such enormous and biblical proportions that I see everybody holding on in their individual wasy to an orange crate, to a piece of wood, and we’re passing each other in this swollen river that has pretty well taken down all the landmarks, and pretty well overturned everything we’ve got. And people insist, under the circumstances, on describing themselves as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’. It seems to me to be completely mad
  I don’t really think anybody knows why they’re doing anything. If you stop someone on the subway and say, ‘Where are you going – in the deepest sense of the word?’ you can't really expect an answer. I really don’t know why I’m here. It’s a matter of ‘What else would I be doing?’
• Nature is a Haunted House. Art – a House that tries to be Haunted: Emily Dickinson
• Pico Iyer
• ….he was brashly courting success by pretending to ignore it
• Utterly in the dark, he searches and searches the small print of the world around him for clues as to how to act