Friday, April 22, 2022

Readings: Three Essential Quotes

 

What  follows are three quotes from recent readings, all of which struck to the very core of my being:

 

For people of my age, the places that they truly loved and to which they once belonged are no longer there. The places of their childhood and youth have ceased to exist, the villages where they went on holiday, the parks with uncomfortable benches where their first loves blossomed, the cities, cafés and houses of their past. And if their outer form has been preserved, it’s all the more painful, like a shell with nothing inside it anymore. I have nowhere to return to. It’s like a state of imprisonment. The walls of the cell are the horizon of what I can see. Beyond them exists a world that’s alien to me and doesn’t belong to me. So for people like me the only thing possible is here and now, for every future is doubtful, everything yet to come is barely sketched and uncertain, like a mirage that can be destroyed by the slightest twitch of the air.  ~  Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

 

****  ****

 

Lad of Athens, faithful be

To Thyself,

And Mystery --

All the rest is Perjury --

   ~ Emily Dickinson

 

****  ****

 

[A book] is the voice of a person that needs me. I am there to help him speak.  ~ Martin Buber, I and Thou

Monday, September 6, 2021

Rodak's Writings: Curtain Call - a poem

 

Curtain Call

 

Revealed

at the end

as a piece of shit –

worthless.

‘Buked and scorned

by a succession of three

lovely wives.

I would not be

lying now

if I told you –

it’s tough

to make a poem

out of that.



Monday, August 9, 2021

Wuhan Flu? Who Knew?

 Covid? It seems probable that the world's corporate oligarchs, via their conservative political minions, want to eliminate excess human population as more economically-efficient robots come on line to do the profitable work. Thus the anti-vax, anti-mask propaganda and the ever-recurring waves of new viral variants.

As we use to say on the playground back in the day: "Kill 'em before they multiply!"
There is nothing new about genocide-for-profit, other than the means of perpetrating it.
"Wuhan Flu?" Who knew?

Tuesday, August 11, 2020

Reflections: Yearning for the Tao

 

Clock time is not soul time. Clock time measures and chops. Soul time nourishes and awakens. Clock time makes lists of mandatory facts. Soul time allows for forgetfulness of all that has been imposed by rote, so that the Inner and the Outer may recognize their Unity and finally approach the Wisdom of Eternal Truth.

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Readings: The Second Shoe Falls


"There is no second such example of inevitability as that offered by a gifted young man narrowing himself down into an ordinary young man, not as a result of any blow of fate but through a kind of preordained shrinkage."

~ Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities


Monday, July 27, 2020

Readings: The Shoe Fits



"One has only to consider how cold and desolate the fairest face of nature can seem to a man left utterly alone, willing to exchange the whole sum of natural beauty for a single human face."

~ Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman


Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Rodak's Writings: The Interview: the Conclusion - a Flash Fiction


INTERVIEW: the Conclusion -- a flash fiction

Interviewer: Ivanka, I want to thank you for your candor in submitting to this interview and close by asking the question that's on the minds of people the world over: It is clear that your father has spun out of control. That being so obviously the case, why are not his wife, his sons, or you--his cherished daughter--doing some kind of intervention to save your father from himself, and our nation from further humiliation on the global stage in the process?

Ivanka: That's easy. Because he would have us all killed.

Interviewer: Oh my God! You can't mean that! Melania and Eric, sure. Don Jr. maybe. But surely not you, Ivanka!

Ivanka: [long pause] You don't get it. Especially me.