Food For Thought

[see also: ALPHA/OMEGA]

Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.

Body and soul are not two different things, but only two different ways of perceiving the same thing. Similarly, physics and psychology are only different attempts to link our experiences together by way of systematic thought.

Unity is plural and, at minimum, is two.

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.

To place one in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.

"You see, Micky...I can always see two sides of a question."

And his reply, blindingly swift, was: "Only two, Fran? What a frightfully narrow-minded person you must be!

Among men, it seems, historically at any rate, that processes of co-ordination and disintegration follow each other with great regularity, and the index of the co-ordination is the measure of the disintegration which follows. There is no mob like a group of well-drilled soldiers when they have thrown off their discipline. And there is no lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him. There is no hater like one who has greatly loved.

To reject the shadow side of life and pass it by with averted eyes, refusing our share of common sorrow while expecting our share of common joy, would cause the unlived, closed-off shadows in us to deepen into fear, including the fear of death.

...I think that whenever you run up against either/or formulations, you should try to replace it with both/and.

[see also: AGING, CHILDREN, MATURITY]

Ah! what would the world be to us
If the children were no more?
We should dread the desert behind us
Worse than the dark before.

Our children are not individuals whose rights and tastes are casually respected from infancy, as they are in some primitive societies.... They are fundamentally extensions of our own egos and give a special opportunity for the display of authority.

Young people are more hopeful at a certain age than adults, but I suspect that's glandular. As for children, I keep as far from them as possible. I don't like the sight of them. The scale is all wrong. The heads tend to be too big for the bodies, and the hands and feet are a disaster. They keep falling into things. The nakedness of their bad character! We adults have learned how to disguise our terrible character, but children, well, they are like grotesque drawings of us. They should be neither seen nor heard, and no one must make another one.

With the open eyes of their dead fathers
Toward other worlds they gaze ahead --
Children who, wide-eyed, become
Periscopes of the buried dead.

I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.

When I was baby, I kept a diary. Recently, I was rereading it. It said, "Day One: Still tired from the move." "Day Two: Everybody talks to me like I'm an idiot."

I think an embryo/fetus/baby becomes a "person" when it is smarter than a non-primate like a dog. By those standards, chimpanzees and gorillas are persons (although somewhat cognitively impaired -- kind of like Fundamentalist Christians), but human newborns are not.