Twenty-One Gifts of the Magi for the New Year

Posted on January 1, 2003 in Reading Reflections

2002 ended in sadness for us. I make no prediction for 2003. It will happen and I just hope that I will remain here, uninterrupted in my tasks, enjoying Lynn’s company, until this moment next year and well beyond.

I keep a red book, cloth bound, in which I record snatches of reading that have inspired or made me laugh over the years. From it I take these thoughts, in no particular order, as a gift to these and all my other friends. Please accept them, with the contradictions and the ironies, as I have.

1. I am able to love my God because He gives me the freedom to deny Him. — Tagore
   
   
   

2. ....it is one thing to change one's mind,
   Another to eradicate it....  -- Marianne Moore

3. A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom — he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold. — E.B. White
   
   
   
4. “Silence!” said Don Quixote. “Where have you ever heard or read of a knight errant being brought before a judge, however many homicides he may have committed?” — Cervantes
   
   
   
5. The inhabitant or soul of the universe is never seen; its voice alone is heard. All we know is that it has a gentle voice, like a woman, a voice so fine and gentle that even children cannot be afraid. And what it says is: Sila ersinarsinivdluge, “Be not afraid of the universe.” — Najaqneq the Eskimo, as told to Knud Rasmussen
   
   
   
6. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. — Joan Didion
   
   
   
7. Leisure is what gives the scribe the opportunity to acquire wisdom; the man with few business affairs grows wise. — Ecclesiasticus 38:25
   
   
   
8. No human soul is like any other human soul, and therefore the love of God for any human soul is infinite, for no other soul can satisfy the same need in God. — W.B. Yeats
   
   
   
9. The seed must rot before it germinates. — Ashanti Proverb
   
   
   
10. Every cliché in the world once had its moment of truth. At some point, if you traced it back, it expressed the inexpressible. — Wright Morris
    
    
    
11. The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is always grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came. — Umberto Eco
    
    
    
12. Oh man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own! — Herman Melville
    
    
    
13. To believe that your impressions hold good for others is to be released from the cramp and confinement of personality. — Virginia Woolf
    
    
    
14. I am a part of all that I have met. — Alfred, Lord Tennyson
    
    
    

15.                             Merily
    The poore man, when he gooth by the waye
    Biforn the thieves he may singe and playe.    -- Chaucer

16. A day will come when men will discover an alphabet in the eyes of chalcedonies, in the markings of the moth, and will learn in astonishment that every spotted snail has always been a poem. — Alejo Carpentier
    
    
    
17. To the illumined one who hath known the Indweller all the sacred books are as useless as a reservoir in time of flood. — Commentary on the Bhagavad Gita
    
    
    
18. Work is meant to be the servant of the man, not the master. — Edmund Bordeaux Szekely
    
    
    
19. One can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns. — Graham Greene
    
    
    
20. Being humble ain’t the same as being wretched. — William Inge
    
    
21. The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space. — Italo Calvino

Special thanks to those who have been true friends in all this: my wife Lynn, Meagan Bailey, david, Gareth Fenley, Barry Smith, Partyhat, diede, blu, maryval, chari, Warpster93, Zeno, Grey Bird, Jennifer, Tuesday, rainbow, JimL, Teresa, Karen Z, Raye, Blaz, Boris, and Tanya. Thanks to Dr. Heidi Schouten and her staff for easing my poor little Ambrose’s sufferings. Thanks to my two remaining cats, Tracy and Virginia, for being here. Thanks to all I have forgotten, to those friends I have failed to see, to those friends in the making, to those friends who may yet be. Thanks to those who have signed my guest book and stuck a pin on my guest map. Thanks to my faithful, unseen readers. Thanks to my writing group. Thanks to my health care providers. Thanks to all the real teachers who have come my way. Thanks to the Universe for being a place where I can have a mind and think about things.

Sila ersinarsinivdluge.