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Reading over the weekend Geoff Mulgan’s book Good and Bad Power
Politics is ‘the art of swallowing toads without making a face’
Carlos Fuentes
HE first deceased; she for a little tried
To live without him, liked it not, and died.
Upon the death of Sir Albert Morton’s Wife
Sir Henry Wotton
You are doomed to happiness in wedlock.
Chinese fortune cookie
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Now playing: Michael Stipe & Chris Martin – In the Sun
via FoxyTunes
The Church is founded on Peter who denied Christ three times and couldn’t walk on the water by himself. All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. Priests resist it as well as others. To have the Church be what you want it to be would require the continuous miraculous meddling of God in human affairs, whereas it is our dignity that we are allowed more or less to get on with those graces that come through faith and the sacraments and which work through our human nature…Human nature is so faulty that it can resist any amount of grace and most of the time it does. The Church does well to hold her own; you are asking that she show a profit. When she shows a profit you have a saint, not necessarily a canonized one.
Flannery O’Connor to Cecil Dawkins 12/8/58.
Habit of Being, Letters
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Now playing: Jan Garbarek & The Hilliard En – Parce mihi domine
via FoxyTunes
[The story]..has a happy ending, but that’s because I insist on happy endings; I would insist on happy beginnings too, but that’s not necessary because all beginnings are instrinsically happy, in my opinion. What about middles, you may ask. Middles are a problem. Middles are perhaps the major problem of contemporary life.
Heartburn Nora Ephron
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.
Saint John’s Bible on tour in America
‘…cooking is either necessary, because you starve, or cooking is love, because you care’
Kitchen Congregation – Nora Seton
Jubilo was convinced that owning lots of clothing and furniture, far from bringing happiness, could turn people into slaves of their possessions. He thought it was important to think very carefully before buying anything, because things required a certain amount of attention and over time could become tyrants that demanded constant care. They had to be cleaned, protected, maintained; in short, he believed that possessions brought constraints, and he was too free-spirited to consider buying anything that would tie him down. He therefore also refrained from buying expensive gifts. First, because he didn’t think it was a necessary requirement for showing his affection, and second, because he was convinced that if he were to do so, he would also be giving enslavement, except for perishable gifts like flowers or chocolates. To his way of thinking, the true value of a present lay in what it meant to the donor, not in how much it cost. Money had no value for him and he would never dare compare it to a gesture of love.
For example, to Jubilo, arranging a serenade at three in the morning meant so much more than buying a diamond bracelet. It showed his willingness to forgo sleep, to withstand the cold, to run the risk of being mugged or getting drenched by irate neighbours. And that was certainly worth a lot more than simply a bought present. The value of things was so relative. And money, in his mind, was like a huge magnifying glass that only distorted reality and gave things a dimension they didn’t really possess.
Swift as Desire Laura Esquivel
Redemption is one of the central themes of Khaled Hosseini’s ‘The Kite Runner’.
Kite flying is a metaphor for friendship, childhood, freedom, innocence and the end of an Afghan way of life. Kite flying was banned by the Taliban as one of the measures of the excellently named Ministry to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice.
One of the characters in the book explains: ‘Afghans are an independent people. Afghans cherish custom but abhor rules. And so it was with kite fighting. The rules were simple: No rules. Fly your kite. Cut the opponents. Good luck.’
I read the book last year and was reminded of it this week with pictures taken in August in Dahyeh, Beirut:
More pictures on the artist’s site and what the kites mean :
Dahyeh, August 25, 2006. one of the most bombed out areas in Beirut. I was asked by local people to paint something happy, to reflect the spirit of the community. Consider that at the time of writing, there are still whole streets of indiscriminate wreckage. Shops, apartment blocks, houses:- rubble. The dust is thicker than a London fog and the machines have barely started to scratch the surface – under which there are still sure to be some of the dead. If I wasn’t invited to do this then I wouldn’t have. Before starting I banged up a piece of explanatory text on the wall, for which thanks go to Ghassan for the translation into Arabic. It reads: “When Ramallah, in Palestine, is put under curfew by the Israeli Army, nobody goes outside for days. The streets look completely deserted. But from a tall building, if you look out over the city, you can sometimes see hundreds of many-coloured kites, flown from the roof-terraces by the children of Ramallah. The children you can see here are flying kites to celebrate the spirit of the people of Dahyeh. Some kites you can see are flying away. These are for the children who are no longer here; they are no longer held down to the Earth”.
