That fruitful miracle

“I wish any two states could get together on a speed limit. Just about the time you get used to fifty miles an hour you cross a state line and it’s sixty-five. I wonder why they can’t settle down and agree. However, in one mater all states agree—each one admits it is the finest of all and announces that fact in huge letters as you cross the state line. Among nearly forty I didn’t see a single state that hadn’t a good word to say for itself. It seemed a little indelicate. It might be better to let visitors find out for themselves. But maybe we wouldn’t if it weren’t drawn to our attention.”

-From “Travels with Charley,” by John Steinbeck 

“I’m saying the structure of the entire culture is flawed,” Chip said. “I’m saying the bureaucracy has arrogated the right to define certain states of mind as ‘diseased.’ A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that’s free, which means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental ‘health’ is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you’re buying into buying. And I’m saying that I personally am losing the battle with a commercialized, medicalized, totalitarian modernity right this instant.”

-From “The Corrections,” by Jonathan Franzen 

“Do you live in the city?” Enid said. (You’re not cohabiting with our son, are you?) “And you work in the city, too?” (You are gainfaully employed? You’re not from an alien, snobbish, moneyed eastern family?) “Did you grow up here? (Or do you come from a trans-Appalachian state where people are warmhearted and down-to-earth and unlikely to be Jewish?) “Oh, and do you still have family in Ohio?” (Have your parents perhaps taken the morally dubious modern step of getting divorced?) “Do you have brothers or sisters?” (Are you a spoiled only child or a Catholic with a zillion siblings?)

-From “The Corrections,” by Jonathan Franzen 

“Only a fool humbles himself when the world is so full of men eager to do that job for him.”

“It seemed to the youth that he saw everything. Each blade of green grass was bold and clear. He thought that he was aware of every change in the thin, transparent vapor that floated idly in sheets. The brown or gray trunks of the trees showed each roughness of their surfaces. And the men of the regiment, with their starting eyes and sweating faces, running madly, or falling, as if thrown headlong, to queer, heaped-up corpses—all were comprehended. His mind took a mechanical. but firm impression, so that afterward everything was pictured and explained to him, save why he himself was there.”

“Presently he began to feel the effects of the war atmosphere—a blistering sweat, a sensation that his eyeballs were about to crack like hot stones. A burning roar filled his ears.

Following this came a red rage. He developed the acute exasperation of a pestered animal, a well-meaning cow worried by dogs. He had a mad feeling against his rifle, which could only be used against one life at a time. He wished to rush forward and strangle with his fingers. He craved a power that would enable him to make a world-sweeping gesture and brush all back. His impotency appeared to him, and made his rage into that of a driven beast.” 

“It inclosed him. And there were iron laws of tradition and law on four sides. He was in a moving box. As he perceived this fact it occurred to him that he had never wished to come to the war. He had not enlisted of his free will. He had been dragged by the merciless government. And now they were taking him out to be slaughtered.

SPRING omnipotent goddess Thou
dost stuff parks
with overgrown pimply
chevaliers and gumchewing giggly

damosels Thou dost
persuade to serenade
his lady the musical tom-cat
Thou dost inveigle

into crossing sidewalks the
unwary june-bug and the frivolous
angleworm
Thou dost hang canary birds in parlour windows

Spring slattern of seasons
you have soggy legs
and a muddy petticoat
drowsy

is your hair your
eyes are sticky with
dream and you have a sloppy body from

being brought to bed of crocuses
when you sing in your whisky voice
the grass rises on the head of the earth
and all the trees are put on edge

spring
of the excellent jostle of
thy hips
and the superior

slobber of your breasts i
am so very fond that my
soul inside of me hollers
for thou comest

and your hands are the snow and thy
fingers are the rain
and your
feet O your feet

freakish
feet feet incorrigible

ragging the world

-ee cummings

“I have a realistic grasp of my own strengths and weaknesses. My mind is my weapon. My brother has his sword, King Robert his his warhammer, and I have my mind…and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”

“Let me give you some counsel, bastard,’ Lannister said. “Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armor yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.”