#MelvilleMonday What we call Fate is even, heartless, and impartial; not a fiend to kindle bigot flames, nor a philanthropist to espouse the cause of Greece. We may fret, fume, and fight; but the thing called Fate everlastingly sustains an armed neutrality. - Melville, White-Jacket (c. 1850)

It seems extraordinary to him to be in such close proximity to a creature which is so emphatically from another element, from wind or sky or perhaps even myth. - Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

They all belonged to each other: the lament of those who yearn, the laughter of the wise, the cry of indignation and the groan of the dying. - Hermann Hesse, c. 1922

"We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment." - C. S. Lewis, preface to The Screwtape Letters

Born on this day in 1890... "First I was going to tell her that unless she meant to be a novelist, there was no excuse for her having so much imagination." - Katherine Anne Porter

"The Latin verbs roll on and on, around him, like a fenland fog, through his feet, up and over his shoulders, past his ears, to seep out of the cracks in the window lead." - Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

#WhitmanWednesday 🌾 From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines... Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me. - Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

#WhitmanWednesday 🌾 Here, take this gift ! I was reserving it for some hero, orator, or general, One who should serve the good old cause, the great Idea, the progress and freedom of the race ; But I see that what I was reserving belongs to you just as much as to any. - Walt Whitman

"He is, he prides himself, adept at dissembling, at reading the thoughts of others, at guessing which way they will jump, what they will do next. Life with a quick-tempered parent will hone these skills at an early age." - Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

He now regarded people in a different light than he had previously: not very clever, not very proud and therefore all the more warm, curious and sympathetic. - Hermann Hesse, c. 1922

#MelvilleMonday 🎻 He who has a hundred times been crowned with laurels, now wears, as you see, a bunged beaver...To-day, from house to house, he hies, teaching fiddling for a living...With genius and without fame, he is happier than a king. - Herman Melville, c. 1854

#MelvilleMonday Sitting there on the old stool, his rusty hat sideways cocked on his head, one foot dangling adrift, he plied the bow of an enchanter. All my moody discontent, every vestige of peevishness fled. My whole splenetic soul capitulated to the magical fiddle. - Melville, c. 1854 [+]

From my wife's walk this Mother's Day (fuzzy goslings are visible in the foreground):

#SundaySentence "Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns." - Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

Mother's Day🕊️ Clasped to your heart in a loving embrace, With your light lashes just sweeping my face, Never hereafter to wake or to weep;— Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep. - Elizabeth Akers Allen (Florence Percy ), c. 1859.

#haiku -ish Some bold Others shy But why 📷From my wife's walk today:

"For humor involves a sense of proportion and a power of seeing yourself from the outside. Whatever else we attribute to beings who sinned through pride, we must not attribute this." - C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942)

#WhitmanWednesday 🌾 ~ Thought ~ Of Justice—as if Justice could be any thing but the same ample law, expounded by natural judges and saviors, As if it might be this thing or that thing, according to decisions. - Walt Whitman, c. 1860–61

#WhitmanWednesday 🌾 "I meet new Walt Whitmans every day. There are a dozen of me afloat. I don't know which Walt Whitman I am." - Walt Whitman, c. 1890 +

From my wife's colorful walk today:

It was true that he had never fully lost himself in another person to such an extent as to forget himself; he had never undergone the follies of love for another person. - Hermann Hesse, c. 1922

Some woolly critters on my wife's walk today...

#MelvilleMonday (not daay☺️)

#MelvilleMondaay "My young friends, just fancy yourselves, for the first time in an open boat...some 12 or 15 miles from your ship and about a hundred times as far from the nearest land, giving chase to one of the oleaginous monsters. 'Pull, Pull, you lubberly hay-makers!' cries the boat-header..."

#SundaySentence "The work into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch." - C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Magnolia: the big floppy hat of the spring blooms.☺️ 📷From my wife's walk:

🌾May Day🌾 The true gravitation-hold of liberalism in the United States will be a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comfort—a vast, intertwining reticulation of wealth. - Walt Whitman

~ May Day ~ How limitless and how profound Is the nature of the ground... - John Hall Wheelock 📷From my wife's walk:

"I have often thought about it. But how will he, who is so hard-hearted, go on in this world?" - Hermann Hesse, c. 1922 [+]

#WhitmanWednesday 🌾 I too have sought, and ever seek, the brilliant sun, and make my songs according. But as I grow old, the half-lights of evening are far more to me. - Walt Whitman, c. 1882

#WhitmanWednesday 🌾 At its best, poetic lore is like what may be heard of conversation in the dusk, from speakers far or hid, of which we get only a few broken murmurs. - Walt Whitman, c. 1882

"Of course, sales do not always mean what authors hope. If you gauged the amount of Bible reading in England by the number of Bibles sold, you would go far astray." - C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters [+]

Spring weather might finally be here.🤞 From my wife's recent walks...doing her Dr. Doolittle thing:

#MelvilleMonday & BOTD in 1822 A quiet Man, and plain in garb— Briefly he looks his fill, Then drops his gray eye on the ground, Like a loaded mortar he is still: Meekness and grimness meet in him— The silent General...of a heart as calm As the Cyclone's core. - Melville, c. 1863 [+]

#SundaySentence "A wolf of the Steppes that had lost its way and strayed into the towns and the life of the herd, a more striking image could not be found for his shy loneliness, his savagery, his restlessness, his homesickness, his homelessness." Steppenwolf

#DailyHaikuPrompt (evening) On a ghostly eve — Luminous, diffuse, silent Adrift in final flight

"And it seemed to him that was just why he was previously so ill — because he could love nothing and nobody." - Hermann Hesse, c. 1922

👐 They flutter With nowhere to go Magnolia lepidoptera 📷From my wife's walk on this blustery day:

#WhitmanWednesday 🌾 Earth Day 🌾 And who art thou! said I to the soft-falling shower, Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated: I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain, Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea... - Walt Whitman

He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false", but as "academic" or "practical", "outworn" or "contemporary", "conventional" or "ruthless". Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. - C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942)

Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. - Hermann Hesse, c. 1922

#MelvilleMonday Give ear, now, all ye shore-disdaining, ocean-enamored youths, who labor under the lamentable delusion, that the sea—the "glorious sea" is always and in reality "the blue, the fresh, the ever free!" - Herman Melville

#MelvilleMonday ✍️E. Tietjens, Horizon at Sea Hard and blue hangs the horizon In its perfect circle curled, While we teeter, swing and stagger, Shifting in a shifting world. One would think it had existence, This horizon firm and stable, Lying like the sharp-cut edges Of a blue and cosmic table.

#SundaySentence But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is “the results of modern investigation”. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942)

~ A City Garden in April ~ by May Swenson In the shade each tight cone untwists to a goblet. Under light the rim widens, splits like silk. Seven spatulate white flakes float open, purple dregs at the nape. 📷From my wife's walk.

It seemed to him that he had spent his life in a worthless and senseless manner; he retained nothing vital, nothing in any way precious or worth while. He stood alone, like a shipwrecked man on the shore. - Hermann Hesse, c. 1922

I will look at cliffs and clouds With quiet eyes, Watch the wind bow down the grass, And the grass rise. - Edna St. Vincent Millay

Never had it been so strangely clear to Siddhartha how closely related passion was to death. - Hermann Hesse, c. 1922