Voices From Chernobyl - Svetlana Alexievich

"Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness in the world."

"Dying isn't hard, but it is scary."

"They advised us to work in our gardens in masks and rubber gloves. And then another big scientist came to the meeting hall and told us that we needed to wash our yards."

"I've already worked enough in my life, been sad enough. I've had enough of everything and I don't want anything more."

"My husband liked to say that people shoot, but it's God who delivers the bullet. Everyone has his own fate."

"No one knows what's in the other world. It's better here. More familiar."

"Even it it's poisoned with radiation, it's still my home. There's no place else they need us. Even a bird loves its nest."

"Only in evil is a man clever and refined. But how simple and sympathetic he is when speaking the honest words of love. Even when the philosophers use words they are only approximations of the thoughts they have felt. The word corresponds exactly to what is in the soul only in prayer, in the thought of prayer."

passing time

somewhere along the way work became insurmountable, or, at least, unbearable. But once removed from the trudgery of passing time unbearably occupied you are left unoccupied. If only you can count the moments each one as it passes do they seem worthy, bearable, even gratifying, but is this too, like romantic love, an illusion, the temporary flame of courtship? Is is really possible that being alone with your own experience can be gratifying and for how long? The greatest fear is that you won't be able to afford distractions. What a luxury it is to occupy your time with acquiring one thing or another, to travel from one place to the next at a whim, or purchase one experience and then another. To string them together so that time is not something hauntingly present, but passes anesthetized. Life accumulating as a series of Facebook posts. From all accounts it even suggests a purpose in life, experiencing life like an explorer or voyager. And perhaps it is true that there is a purpose to experience. Then, of course, life always demands to be experienced, even if you haven't the good fortune to afford a more cosmetic version of it. What makes you think that you will be better at experiencing life on the fly, than being left to your own crumbs of thought without the distractions?
 It seemed that if he could write a line, or think a thought that there would be some purpose worth living for, as if a thought were a life preserver. Perhaps it was more like a note that he felt contributed to some mystical symphony. Instinctively though, he knew that thoughts passed like meteor showers and all that was left of them were the dust blown by the wind. He tried to hang onto whatever youth remained as if youth was worn like faded blue jeans. He wasn't sure if he ever had it. If he did it must have been before he remembered for ever since he could remember he felt weighed down by the burden of self worth. Youth seemed to be more in the future than the past. It seemed like finally there might be a carefree time.

"If overcoming self centeredness was the goal, then why were we born into a selfish stew?"

"Could anyone, has anyone ever tried to, master his own mind using only that mind as tool? Did his brain contain a pack of selves like Musketeers, each smaller and farther back and waving a sword? And what might a stunt win, apart from peace of mind?"

Annie Dillard - The Maytrees.

defined momentarily through the consciousness of the being who observes them.

"A serene sense of the slow inevitability of the gradual changes in the earth’s crust comes over me; a consuming love, not of a god, but of the clean unbroken sense that the rocks, which are nameless, the waves which are nameless, the ragged grass, which is nameless, are all defined momentarily through the consciousness of the being who observes them. With the sun burning into rock and flesh, and the wind ruffling grass and hair, there is an awareness that the blind immense unconscious impersonal and neutral forces will endure, and that the fragile, miraculously knit organism which interprets them, endows them with meaning, will move about for a little, then falter, fail, and decompose at last into the anonymous soil, voiceless, faceless, without identity."

"From this experience also, a faith arises to carry back to a human world of small lusts and deceitful pettiness. A faith, naïve and child like perhaps, born as it is from the infinite simplicity of nature. It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles."

Sylvia Plath

it is enough be be on it.

the journey doesn't begin
with consciousness or the big bang,
that is only the start in time.
the path does not start from some unknown origin
leading to some specific destiny.
if there were a destination
one would surely fall short of it.
it is enough to be on it.

the journey does not to lead to new understandings
only recognition one never really has understood.
recognition does not come from within or out
instead like the morning dew it accumulates.
it is not an encounter but an abandonment.
If there is a voice it is not in words
but notes without rhythm or melody.
its song hangs in the air
and washes over without leaving a trace.
it is enough to be on it.

there is light but no darkness.
the light is not seen, nor does it illuminate
only reflections of a fading reality.
walking does not carry one farther along,
neither does sitting still.
instead one drifts along aimlessly.
there isn't a choice to make.
there isn't a question to ask.
there are no answers right or wrong.
it is enough be be on it.

He is ever saying to our inmost spirit one deep unfathomable word and nothing else

"For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see," said Ruysbroeck, "and that is why He is ever saying to our inmost spirit one deep unfathomable word and nothing else." But what is the word? Is this mystery or coyness? A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn't make it out; I felt the voiced vowel like a sigh or a note but I couldn't catch the consonant that shaped it into sense"

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Today is the Winter Solstice

"Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helplessly, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last night Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready - for what?"

The death of the self

"The death of the self of which the great writers speak is no violent act. It is merely the joining of the great rock heart of the earth in its roll. It is merely the slow cessation of the will's sprints and the intellect's chatter: it is waiting like a hollow bell with stilled tongue. Fuge, tace, quiesce. The waiting itself is the thing"
"I have glutted on richness and welcome hyssop. This distant silver November sky, these sere branches of trees, shed and bearing their pure and secret colors - this is the real world, not the world gilded and pearled. I stand under wiped skies directly, naked, without intercessors. Frost winds have lofted my body's bones with all their restless sprints to an airborne raven's glide. I am buoyed by a calm and effortless longing, an angled pitch of the will, like the set of the wings of the monarch which climbed a hill by falling still."

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

I am prying into secrets again

"I am prying into secrets again, and taking my chances. I might see anything happen; I might see nothing but light on the water. I walked home exhilarated or becalmed, but always changed, alive. "It scatters and gathers," Heraclitus said, "it comes and goes." And I want to be in the way of its passage, and cooled by its invisible breath."

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me

"Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe. The words are simple, the concept clear - but you don't believe it, do you? Nor do I. How could I, when we're both so lovable? Are my values then so diametrically opposed to those than nature preserves? This is the key point....
 We value the individual supremely, and nature values him not a whit.... Any three-year old can see how unsatisfactory and clumsy is this whole business of reproducing and dying by the billions. We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet. There is not a people in the world who behaves as badly as praying mantises. But wait, you say, there is no right or wrong in nature; right and wrong is a human concept. Precisely, we are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world. The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die - does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only outwit it at every turn to save our skins...
 So much is amiss that I must consider the second fork in the road, that creation itself is blamelessly, benevolently askew by its very free nature, and that it is only human feeling that is freakishly amiss...
 Our excessive emotions are so patently painful and harmful to us as a species that I can hardly believe that they evolved...It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death - emotions that appear to have devolved upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence.
My rage and shock at the pain and death of individuals of my kind is the old, old mystery, as old as man, but forever fresh, and completely unanswerable.
The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which every thing, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death."

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

What is man, that thou art mindful of him

 "What is man, that thou art mindful of him? This is where the great modern religions are so unthinkably radical; the love of God! For we can see that we are as many as the leaves of trees. But it could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination. Certainly nature seems to exult in abounding  radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock of trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe...
 Sir James Jeans, British astronomer and physicist, suggested that the universe was beginning to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Humanists seized on the expression, but it was hardly news. We knew, looking around, that a thought branches and leafs, a tree comes to a conclusion. But the question of who is thinking the thought is more fruitful than the question of who made the machine, for a machinist can of course wipe his hands and leave, and his simple machine still hums; but if the thinker's attention strays for a minute, his simplest thought ceases altogether. And, as I have stressed, the place where we so incontrovertibly find ourselves, whether thought or machine, is at least not in any way simple."

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

The recognition that love represents the highest morality

The recognition that love represents the highest morality was nowhere denied or contradicted, but this truth was so interwoven everywhere with all kinds of falsehoods which distorted it, that finally nothing of it remained but words. It was taught that this highest morality was only applicable to private life—for home use, as it were—but that in public life all forms of violence—such as imprisonment, executions, and wars—might be used for the protection of the majority against a minority of evildoers, though such means were diametrically opposed to any vestige of love. And though common sense indicated that if some men claim to decide who is to be subjected to violence of all kinds for the benefit of others, these men to whom violence is applied may, in turn, arrive at a similar conclusion with regard to those who have employed violence to them, and though the great religious teachers of Brahmanism, Buddhism, and above all of Christianity, foreseeing such a perversion of the law of love, have constantly drawn attention to the one invariable condition of love (namely, the enduring of injuries, insults, and violence of all kinds without resisting evil by evil) people continued—regardless of all that leads man forward—to try to unite the incompatibles: the virtue of love, and what is opposed to love, namely, the restraining of evil by violence. And such a teaching, despite its inner contradiction, was so firmly established that the very people who recognize love as a virtue accept as lawful at the same time an order of life based on violence and allowing men not merely to torture but even to kill one another.

Tolstoy, Graf Leo (2012-05-17). A Letter to a Hindu (Kindle Locations 100-102).  . Kindle Edition.

Sin and Hell

Somewhere, and I can't find where, I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Eskimo earnestly, "did you tell me?"

Annie Dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Present

"You don't run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled. You have fish left over...

 Here is the word from a subatomic physicist: "everything that is already happened is particles, everything in the future is waves."

Annie Dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

in these reckless conditions we live at all

" No, the point is that not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it...
Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
 Consciousness itself does not hinder living in the present. In fact, it is only to a heightened awareness that the great door to the present opens at all. Even a certain amount of interior verbalization is helpful to enforce the memory of whatever it is that is taking place...
 Self-consciousness, however, does hinder the experience of the present. It is the one instrument that unplugs all the rest. So long as I lose myself in a tree, say, I can scent its leafy breath or estimate it's board feet of lumber, I can draw its fruits or boil tea on its branches, and the tree stays tree. But the second I become aware of myself at any of these activities - looking over my own shoulder, as it were - the tree vanishes, uprooted from the spot and flung out of sight as if it had never grown...
 Self consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people - the novelists world not the poets. I've lived there. I remember what the city has to offer: human companionship, major-league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained. I remember how you bide your time in the city, and think, if you stop to think, "next year… I'll start living; next year… I'll start my life." Innocence is a better world.
 Innocence sees that this is it, and finds it world enough, and time. Innocence is not the prerogative of infants and puppies, and far less of mountains and fixed stars, which have no prerogatives at all. It is not lost to us; the world is a better place than that. Like any other of the spirit's good gifts, it is there if you want it, free for the asking, as has been stressed by stronger words than mine."

 Annie Dillard-Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator - our very self consciousness- is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends."
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Annie Dillard

"Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call
my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won't see it. 
It is, as Ruskin says, "not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear 
sense of the word, unseen...."
"But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. 
When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied... But I can't 
go out and try to see this way. I'll fail, I'll go mad. All I can do 
is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless 
interior babble…The effort is really a discipline requiring a 
lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints 
and monks of every order East and West… The world's spiritual 
geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy river, 
this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash cannot be dammed, and 
that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. 
Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the 
dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look 
along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and 
gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects 
act and rest purely, without utterance. "Launch into the deep," says 
Jacques Ellul, "and you shall see."

Annie Dillard ~ Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

 

"In the twentieth century about to end, the great civilizer on earth seems to have been doubt. Doubt, the constantly debated and flexible inner condition of theological uncertainty, the wish to believe in balance with rueful or nervous or grieving skepticism, seems to have held people in thrall to ethical behavior, while the true believers, of whatever stamp, religious or religious-statist, have done the murdering. The impulse to excommunicate, to satanize, to eradicate, to ethnically cleanse, is a religious impulse. In the practice and politics of religion, God has always been a license to kill. But to hold in abeyance and irresolution any firm conviction of God, or an afterlife with Him, warrants walking in His spirit, somehow. And among the doctrinaire religious, I find I trust those who gravitate toward symbolic comfort rather than those who reaffirm historic guarantees. It is just those uneasy promulgators of traditional established religion who are not in lockstep with its customs and practices, or who are chafing under doctrinal pronouncements, or losing their congregations to charismatics and stadium-filled conversion performers, who are the professional religious I trust. The faithful who read Scripture in the way Coleridge defined the act of reading poetry or fiction, i.e., with a "willing suspension of disbelief...."

Suppose then that in the context of a hallowed secularism, the idea of God could be recognized as Something Evolving, as civilization has evolved - that God can be redefined, and recast, as the human race trains itself to a greater degree of metaphysical and scientific sophistication. With the understanding, in other words, that human history does show a pattern at least of progressively sophisticated metaphors. So that we pursue a teleology thus far that, in the universe as vast as the perceivable cosmos, and as infinitesimal as a subatomic particle, has given us only the one substantive indication of itself - that we, as human beings, live in moral consequence.

In this view the supreme authority is not God, who is sacramentalized, prayed to, pleaded with, portrayed, textualized or given voice, choir, or temple walls, but God who is imperceptible, ineffable, except ... for our evolved moral sense of ourselves.  ~ Sarah Blumenthal's Address to the Conference of American Studies in Religion, Washington, D.C. -  City of God, E.L. Doctorow.

"No, you subject the tradition to your irreverence to get back to where it began, only that, back down to the ground of simple ... unmediated awe. It is there, which is necessarily the state of reverence, the sharp perception of God's presence in the fact of our consciousness ... and therefore everywhere and in everyone and everything - it is that constancy of awe we hope for, a pre-Scriptural state as alive to us as the contemporary moment, and which, of course, comes with absolutely no guarantees. That is where we begin ..."  E.L. Doctorow, City of God.

Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were life other people's songs.
They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the "blaze of passion" often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their head and the earth under their feet. Perhaps their surrounding world, the strangers they met in the street, the wide expanses they saw on their walks, the rooms in which they lived or met, took more delight in their love than they themselves did.
Ah, that was just what had united them and had made them so akin! Never, never, even in their moments of richest and wildest happiness, were they unaware of a sublime joy in the total design of the universe, a feeling that they themselves were a part of the whole, an element in the beauty of the cosmos.
This unity with the whole earth was the breath of life to them. And the elevation of man above the rest of nature, the modern coddling and worshipping of man, never appealed to them. A social system based on such a false premise, as well as its political application, struck them as pathetically amateurish and made no sense to them. - Larisa Feodorovna. Dr. Zhivago

“Resurrection. In the crude form in which it is preached to console the weak, it is alien to me. I have always understood Christ’s words about the living and the dead in a different sense. Where could you find room for all these hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn’t big enough for them; God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded out. They’d be crushed by these throngs greedy merely for animal life.
But, all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations and transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and didn’t notice it.”
“Consciousness is a light directed outward, it lights up the way ahead of us so that we don’t stumble. It’s like the headlights on a locomotive – turn them inward and you’d crash.”
“And now listen carefully. You in others – this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life – your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you – the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it.”

— Dr. Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak

"So many new thoughts come into your head when your hands are busy with hard physical work, when your mind has set you a task that can be achieved by physical effort and that brings its reward in joy and success, when for six hours on end you dig or hammer, scorched by the life-giving breath of the sky. And it isn't a loss but a gain that these transient thoughts, intuitions, analogies are not put down on paper, but forgotten. The town recluse whipping up his nerves and his imagination with strong black coffee and tobacco doesn't know the strongest drug of all - good health and real necessity."

“About dreams. It is usually taken for granted that you dream of something that has made a particularly strong impression on you during the day, but it seems to me it´s just the contrary. Often it´s something you paid no attention to at the time -- a vague thought that you didn't bother to think out to the end, words spoken without feeling and which passed unnoticed -- these are the things that return at night, clothed in flesh and blood, and they become the subjects of dreams, as if to make up for having been ignored during waking hours.” Yurii Andreievich. Dr. Zhivago.

"I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats - any kind of threat, whether of jail or of retribution after death-then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer in the circus with his whip, not the prophet who sacrificed himself."  Nikolai Nikolaevich, Dr. Zhivago.