Of Quotes and Blogs

A typical quote

As some would know I am always happy with a few quotes. They tend to concentrate the mind, set it off at a tangent from its current grooves - and given many of my own grooves this is not a bad thing all in all. 

Recently I suffered what can only be called a cyber-disaster when my Notebook App disappeared into cyberspace never to be found again. One of my Kindles died on me and took the quotes with it and not even the Cloud could rescue me. The App was incompatible with the latest generation of Kindle. About 40 odd pages of various quotes from two years or so of reading matter became lost to me. 

I must say that there does seem to be progress as far as my life of no calculation is concerned, inasmuch as the tragedy flew by without resort to thoughts of suicide. I downloaded a new Notebook to my new kindle and began again, undaunted.

No shortage of choice

 Anyway, one purpose of these notes and quotes was/is to provide additions to past Blogs. Often, when reading and contemplating I will fall upon a new quote that, at least for me, illuminates the meanderings of a past Blog. I then find the blog and edit it, adding the quote. More often than not they do not so much illuminate or clarify, more that they drift off at a tangent. Not a bad thing at all. Others may think otherwise. Yet I do think that the grooves of our mind can gradually congeal, become part of a persona that is "us". As time passes, we become set in stone. Emptiness, the very heart of compassion, of wisdom, of potentiality, has become lost to us.

I  think of the ending of a poem by Ronald Stuart Thomas, called "Here":- 

It is too late to start

For destinations not of the heart

I must stay here with my hurt

Alas, many seem happy to do so, identifying themselves with "truth", not knowing the hurt at all. 

Well, that is it really, but in order to make this Blog just a little longer, here is the whole poem that I quoted from above, asking what does the short excerpt/quote above add to the poem as a whole - which may seem a funny sort of question. But there you go - there are "quotes" and there is the whole thing.

I am a man now

Pass your hand over my brow. 
You can feel the place where the brains grow. 

I am like a tree, 
From my top boughs I can see 
The footprints that led up to me. 

There is blood in my veins 
That has run clear of the stain 
Contracted in so many loins. 

Why, then, are my hands red 
With the blood of so many dead? 
Is this where I was misled? 

Why are my hands this way 
That they will not do as I say? 
Does no God hear when I pray? 

I have no where to go 
The swift satellites show 
The clock of my whole being is slow, 

It is too late to start 
For destinations not of the heart. 
I must stay here with my hurt.

And so below, a related illustration with quote:-

The ocean with its vastness, its blue green,
Its ships, its rocks, its caves, its hopes, its fears,
Its voice mysterious, which whoso hears
Must think on what will be, and what has been. 

(John Keats, in a poem to his brother George, on first seeing the sea)