A smattering of quotation, digested en aqueous route from Juneau AK to Bellingham WA, along rocky green Canadian coastline:
God
Are they all just talking about the same thing?
Many moons before Aldous Huxley said Yes in The Perennial Philosophy (1945), Lydia Maria Child, American transcendentalist abolitionist women- and Native American-rights activist opponent of American expansion ETC!, said Yes, too. She published Aspirations of the World: A Chain of Opals in 1878, her final work. (🐐.) Here it is:
In this book I have collected some specimens of the moral and religious utterances of various ages and nations; from the remotest known records down to the present time. In doing this, my motive is simply to show that there is much in which all mankind agree. I have, therefore, avoided presenting the theological aspects of any religion. Sentiments unite men; opinions separate them. The fundamental rules of Morality are the same with good men of all ages and countries; the idea of Immortality has been present with them all; and all have manifested similar aspirations toward an infinitely wise and good Being, by whom they were created and sustained… I merely attempt to show that the primeval impulses of the human soul have been essentially the same everywhere; and my impelling motive is to do all I can to enlarge and strengthen the bond of human brotherhood.
And more biting:
If Christianity had been true to its professions, the whole world would have been attracted by it, as bees are by sweet flowers. But the mournful truth is that its practice has been the reverse of its theories. It does great harm to the souls of men to make noble professions which they do not manifest in actions; and as the tallest mountain casts the deepest shadow in the water, so the higher the assumed standard the lower is the state of morals produced by a practical disregard of it. It will require many generations for Americans to recover from the demoralizing effects of reading the Declaration of Independence, year after year, with loud vaultings and ringing of bells, while they held millions of the people in abject slavery. And a similar effect is produced by repeating every Christmas day the angels’ song of “peace on earth and good-will to men,” while we cheat in trade, and break treaties with weaker tribes, and exterminate Seminole Indians because they refuse to give up their wives and children to become slaves, and massacre friendly Mexican neighbors because we covet their land, and fill our pockets with money by selling a deadly article [!] that “steals away the brains of men.”
And Anais Nin, in her diaries-as-art, in the next century (great seducer of fathers and creator of the Self):
I, myself, concentrated so much on my sixth sense that I developed this vision which sees beyond facts, the better to find sensations and divinations. It is possible I never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire. It is possible I avoided learning the names of composers and their music the better to close my eyes and listen to the mystery of all music as an ocean. It may be I have not learned dates in history in order to reach the essence of timelessness. It may be I never learned geography the better to map my own routes and discover my own lands. The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress.
And more biting:
America suffers from too much realism, too much Dreierism, too many Hemingways and Thomas Wolfes.
Love
Carson McCullers, in her “Ballad of the Sad Cafe” (1951), writes of the lover and the beloved (which one is God?):
First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth. Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as dearly as anyone else — but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself. It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.
You don’t say? Last, some prime, spare knowingness from Alice Munro in a story, “Carried Away”:
So they passed into a state of gingerly evaluation—which he knew well and could only hope she did—full of small pleasant surprises, half-sardonic signals, a welling-up of impudent hopes, and a fateful sort of kindness.
And
Judith moved ahead and touched Don’s arm. I knew that touch—an apology, an anxious reassurance. You touch a man that way to remind him that you are grateful, that you realize he is doing for your sake something that bores him or slightly endangers his dignity. It made me feeler older than grandchildren would to see my daughter touch a man—a boy—this way. I felt her sad jitters, could predict her supple attentions.
And talk about voice, i.e., unreported indirect narration:
She continued to look at him without a smile or any admission of her female foolishness
-DVD
“Sentiments unite; opinions separate” 👏🏼
Great quotes … and the harsher ones, too.
Great grasp of the literature. Outstanding creativity.