Gratitude blooms

 
 
 
 
“At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.”
 
– Albert Schweitzer
 
 
 
 
“Skin had hope, that’s what skin does.
Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.
Love means you breathe in two countries.
And skin remembers – silk, spiny grass,
deep in the pocket that is skin’s secret own.
Even now, when skin is not alone,
it remembers being alone and thanks something larger
that there are travelers, that people go places
larger than themselves.”
 
– Naomi Shihab Nye, from ‘Two Countries’
 
 
 
 
“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”

– Marcel Proust
 
  
 
 
“You can have the other words – chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly but I’ll take it.”
 
– Mary Oliver
 
 
 
 
“Give praise with the sound of the milk-train far away
With its mutter of wheels and long-drawn-out sweet whistle
As it speeds through the fields of sleep at three in the morning,
Give praise with the immense and peaceful sigh
Of the wind in the pinewoods,
At night give praise with starry silences.
 
Give praise with the skirling of seagulls
And the rattle and flap of sails
And gongs of buoys rocked by the sea-swell
Out in the shipping-lanes beyond the harbor.
Give praise with the humpback whales,
Huge in the ocean they sing to one another.
 
Give praise with the rasp and sizzle of crickets,
          katydids and cicadas,
Give praise with hum of bees,
Give praise with the little peepers who live near water.
When they fill the marsh with a shimmer of bell-like cries
We know that the winter is over.
 
Give praise with mockingbirds, day’s nightingales.
Hour by hour they sing in the crepe myrtle
And glossy tulip trees
On quiet side streets in southern towns.”
 
– Anne Porter, from ‘A List of Praises’
 
 
  
 
“Gratitude is a vaccine, an antitoxin, and an antiseptic.”
 
– John Henry Jowett
 
 
 
 
“One regret dear world, that I am determined not to have when
I am lying on my deathbed is that I did not kiss you enough.”
 
– Hafiz of Persia
 
 
 
 
“Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled –
to cast aside the weight of facts
 
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.”
 
– Mary Oliver, from ‘The Ponds’
 
 
 
 
“Praise the bridge that carried you over.”
 
– George Colman
 
 
 
 
“over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
 
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is”

– W S Merwin, from ‘Thanks’
 
 
 
 

Francis Bacon’s Of Gardens

 
 
 
 
“And because the breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it comes and goes like the warbling of music) than in the hand, therefore nothing is more fit for that delight, than to know what be the flowers and plants that do best perfume the air. Roses, damask and red, are fast flowers of their smells; so that you may walk by a whole row of them, and find nothing of their sweetness; yea though it be in a morning’s dew. Bays likewise yield no smell as they grow. Rosemary little; nor sweet marjoram. That which above all others yields the sweetest smell in the air is the violet, specially the white double violet, which comes twice a year; about the middle of April, and about Bartholomew-tide. Next to that is the musk-rose. Then the strawberry leaves dying, which yield a most excellent cordial smell. Then the flower of the vines; it is a little dust, like the dust of a bent, which grows upon the cluster in the first coming forth. Then sweet-briar. Then wallflowers, which are very delightful to be set under a parlor or lower chamber window. Then pinks and gilliflowers, especially the matted pink and clove gilliflower. Then the flowers of the lime tree. Then the honeysuckles, so they be somewhat afar off. Of bean-flowers I speak not, because they are field flowers. But those which perfume the air most delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but being trodden upon and crushed, are three; that is, burnet, wild-thyme, and watermints. Therefore you are to set whole alleys of them, to have the pleasure when you walk or tread.”
 
 
– Francis Bacon, from ‘Of Gardens’, 1625
 
 
 
 

Islands, the Universe, Home

 
 
 
“You have to mix death into everything,” a painter once told me. “Then you have to mix life into that,” he said as his cigarette ashes dropped onto the palette. “If they are not there, I try to mix them in. Otherwise the painting won’t be human.”

– Gretel Ehrlich, ‘This Autumn Morning’
   
  
 
“What is this wild embrace? This slipping away of heat from air at daybreak, these clothes made of bird cries being peeled from my body? …
 
Lao Tzu exhorts us to listen to the world “not with ears but with mind, not with mind but with spirit.” Some days I hear what sounds like breathing: quick inhalations from the grass, from burnt trees, from streaming clouds, as if desire were finally being answered, and at night in my sleep I can feel black tree branches pressing against me, their long needles combing my hair.”
 
– Gretel Ehrlich, ‘The Fasting Heart’  
 
 
Order Islands, the Universe, Home (Viking, 1991).
 
 
*

Rollo May on imagination and form

  
 
 
“When you write a poem, you discover that the very necessity of fitting your meaning into such and such a form requires you to search in your imagination for new meanings. You reject certain ways of saying it; you select others, always trying to form the poem again. In your forming, you arrive at new and more profound meanings than you had even dreamed of. Form is not a mere lopping off of meaning that you don’t have room to put into your poem; it is an aid to finding new meaning, a stimulus to condensing your meaning, to simplifying and purifying it, and to discovering on a more universal dimension the essence you wish to express.”
 
 
 
“Imagination is the outreaching of mind. It is the individual’s capacity to accept the bombardment of the conscious mind with ideas, impulses, images, and every other sort of psychic phenomena welling up from the preconscious. It is the capacity to “dream dreams and see visions”, to consider diverse possibilities, and to endure the tension involved in holding these possibilities before one’s attention. Imagination is casting off mooring ropes, taking one’s chances that there will be new mooring posts in the vastness ahead.”
 
 
 
from The Courage to Create (1975)
 
 

On Fairy Stories

  
 
“Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold. And overbold I may be accounted, for though I have been a lover of fairy stories since I learned to read, and have at times thought about them, I have not studied them professionally. I have been hardly more than a wandering explorer (or trespasser) in the land, full of wonder but not of information.
 
 
The realm of fairy story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.”
 
 
– J R R Tolkien, ‘On Fairy Stories’

The memory of magic

  
 
“You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.
 
After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm.
 
That’s what I believe.
 
The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir”. It just happens.
 
These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you.”
 
– Robert R. McCammon, Boy’s Life (Pocket Books, 1991).
 
 
 
Order Boy’s Life here.
 
Visit Robert’s website.
 
 
 

Why I love Dorothy Parker

  
 
 
“I like best to have one book in my hand and a stack of others on the floor beside me so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours. In all reverence I say Heaven bless the Whodunit, the soothing balm on the wound, the cooling hand on the brow, the opiate of the people.”
 
 
 
“There’s life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.”
 
 
 
“If you’re going to write, don’t pretend to write down. It’s going to be the best you can do, and it’s the fact that it’s the best you can do that kills you.”
 
 
 
“Indeed, it turns out that as a source of entertainment, conviviality, and good fun, she ranks somewhere between a sprig of parsley and a single ice-skate.”
  
  
 
Faute de Mieux
 
Travel, trouble, music, art,
A kiss, a frock, a rhyme –
I never said they feed my heart,
But still they pass my time.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
“I know that there are things that never have been funny, and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.”
 
 
 
“There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.”
 
 
 
“This is me apologizing. I am a fool, a bird-brain, a liar and a horse-thief … I wouldn’t touch a superlative again with an umbrella.”
 
 
 
“This wasn’t just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it.”
    
 
 
“What can you say when a man asks you to dance with him? I most certainly will not dance with you, I’ll see you in hell first. Why, thank you, I’d love to awfully, but I’m having labor pains. Oh, yes, do let’s dance together – it’s so nice to meet a man who isn’t a scaredy-cat about catching my beri-beri … I’d love to waltz with you. I’d love to waltz with you. I’d love to have my tonsils out. I’d love to be in a midnight fire at sea…” 
 
 
 
 
  
“The Monte Carlo casino refused to admit me until I was properly dressed so I went and found my stockings and then came back and lost my shirt.”
 
 
 
“Don’t let me take any horses home with me. It doesn’t matter so much about stray dogs and kittens, but elevator boys get awfully stuffy when you try to bring in a horse … Three highballs, and I think I’m St. Francis of Assisi.”
 
 
 
“I should have stayed home for dinner. I could have had something on a tray. The head of John the Baptist or something.”
 
 
 
“That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say No in any of them.”  
 
 
 
Unfortunate Coincidence
 
By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying –
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
“Sometimes I think I’ll give up trying, and just go completely Russian and sit on a stove and moan all day.”
 
 
 
“What fresh hell is this?”
 
 
 
“And you know those anecdotes that begin that way; me, I find them more efficacious than sheep-counting, rain on a tin roof, or alanol tablets.”
 
 
 
“They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.”
 
 
 
Résumé 
 
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
 
 
 

 
 
“All I need is enough room to lay a hat and a few friends.”
 
 
 
“That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.”
 
 
 
“She wore a feather boa that was always getting into other people’s plates or was being set afire by other people’s cigarettes.”
 
– John Keats, You Might As Well Live
 
 
 
“She is a combination of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth.”
 
– Alexander Woollcott, ‘Our Mrs Parker’, While Rome Burns
 
 
 
“Parker was one of the wittiest people in the world and one of the saddest …”
 
– Brendan Gill, A New York Life: Of Friends and Others
 
 
 
*

 
Dorothy Parker interviewed by Marion Capron in The Paris Review.
 
Order The Portable Dorothy Parker.
 
Order Complete Poems.
 
Order A Journey into Dorothy Parker’s New York.
 
Visit The Dorothy Parker Society’s website.
  
Visit The Algonquin Round Table’s website.
   
 
 
 

Fourteen writers on their childhood reading

  
 
 
“Not only can I remember, half a century later, my first readings of Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, but I can sense quite clearly my feelings at the time – all the wide-eyed excitement of a seven-year-old, and that curious vulnerability, the fear that my imagination might be overwhelmed by the richness of these invented worlds. Even now, simply thinking about Long John Silver on the waves of Crusoe’s island stirs me far more than reading the original text. I suspect that these childhood tales have long since left their pages and taken on a second life inside my head.”
 
– J G Ballard, The Pleasure of Reading,
ed. Antonia Fraser (Bloomsbury, 1992)
 
 
 
“Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives … In childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune-teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future.”
 
 – Graham Greene, Collected Essays
 (Penguin, 1969)
 
 
 
“The first book I ever treasured was a cloth book, a children’s book perhaps, and though I have no memory of the story I do think of it as something sacred … I was more addicted to words than to pictures. Words were talismanic, transfiguring, making everything clearer, and at the same time more complex. Words were the sluice gates to the mind and to the emotions. Reading for me, then as now, is not a pleasure, but something far more visceral, a brush with terror.”
 
– Edna O’Brien, The Pleasure of Reading,
ed. Antonia Fraser (Bloomsbury, 1992)
 
 
 
“In that box were Gulliver’s Travels, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Dick Whittington, Greek and Roman Myths, and best of all, Norse Tales. Why did the Norse tales strike so deeply into my soul? I do not know, but they did. I seemed to remember seeing Thor swing his mighty short-handled hammer as he spread across the sky in rumbling thunder, lightning flashing from the tread of his steeds and the wheels of his chariot … That held majesty for me …”
 
– Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
(Harper Perennial, 1996)
 
 
 
“The best part of me was always at home, within some book that had been laid flat on the table to mark my place, its imaginary people waiting for me to return and bring them to life. That was where the real people were, the trees that moved in the wind, the still, dark waters.”
 
– Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life
(Ballantine Books, 1998)
 
 
 

  
 
“As I grew older, the images of bleak yet rapturous imposture – particularly in fairy tales – aroused an inescapable sensation of wanting to write. Princesses turned into mute swans, princes into beasts. Think of the eerie lure of the Pied Piper! I began to pursue that truly voluptuous sensation in middle childhood.”
 
– Cynthia Ozick, The Book That Changed My Life,
ed. Diane Osen (Modern Library, 2002)
 
 
 
“No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book. Everything that seemed to fill them full for others we pushed aside, because it stood between us and the pleasures of the Gods.”
 
– Marcel Proust, ‘Days of Reading’, A Selection of His Miscellaneous
Writings, trans. Gerard Hopkins (A Wingate, 1948)
 
 
 
“Books provide the most helpful of road maps for (an) inner journey. They show us the tracks of fellow travelers, footprints left by earlier pilgrims who have trod the path that stretches before us. Their luminosity helps to light our way. As we read we realize that we are not alone.”
 
 – Terry W Glaspey, Books and Reading: A Book of Quotations,
ed. Bill Bradfield (Dover, 2002)
 
 
 
“Remember the feeling when turning the page was almost too much to bear? As adults grown weary of clichés and redesigned storylines, we too easily forget the initial jolt, the power, almost drug-like, of those first readings, when imagination flared up and seemed capable of consuming us.”
 
 – Roger McGough, The Pleasure of Reading,
ed. Antonia Fraser (Bloomsbury, 1992)
 
 
 
“In every corner of Palermo (I have been told) knives and guitars were teeming, but those who filled my mornings and gave a horrid pleasure to my nights were Stevenson’s blind buccaneer, dying under the horses’ hoofs, and the traitor who abandoned his friend on the moon, and the time traveler who brought from the future a faded flower, and the spirit incarcerated for centuries in Solomon’s jar, and the veiled prophet of Khorassan who hid behind precious stones and silk, his face ravaged by leprosy.”
 
– Jorge Luis Borges, Evaristo Carriego,
trans. Rodríguez Monegal (Gleizer, 1955)
  
 
 

  
 
“Let me give you, let me share with you, the City of Invention. For what novelists do … is to build Houses of the Imagination, and where houses cluster together there is a city. And what a city this one is, Alice! It is the nearest we poor mortals can get to the Celestial City: it glitters and glances with life, and gossip, and colour, and fantasy: it is brilliant, it is illuminated, by day by the sun of enthusiasm and by night by the moon of inspiration … And it is to this city that the readers come, to admire, to learn, to marvel and explore …”
 
– Fay Weldon, Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen
(Carroll & Graf, 1991)
 
 
 
“What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. I wanted strength, not tea parties. What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live.”
 
– Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
(Harper and Row, 1986)
 
 
 
“At any moment the impulse might seize me; and then, if the book was in reach, I had only to walk the floor, turning the pages as I walked, to be swept off full sail on the sea of dreams. The fact that I cold not read added to the completeness of the illusion, for from those mysterious blank pages I could evoke whatever my fancy chose.”
 
– Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance
(Simon and Schuster, 1998)
 
 
 
“I lay voluptuously on my stomach on the big bed, blissfully alone, and I felt a thrill which has never left me as I realized that the words coming magically from my lips were mine to say or not say, read or not. It was one of the peaks of my whole life. Slowly my eyes rode across the lines of print, and the New World smiled. It was mine, not something to beg for, book in hand, from anyone who cold read when I could not. The door opened, and without hesitation I walked through.”
 
– MFK Fisher, Among Friends
(Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004)

Orchidelirium

   
  
  
I’ve only read a few chapters but I’m pretty sure that if you loved John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (as I did), you’ll love Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (Vintage, 2000).
 
It was a New York Times bestseller, a Barnes and Noble Discover book, a Borders New Voices selection and the subject of the movie, Adaptation. It promises to live up to its reputation.
 
The back cover reads: “The Fakahatchee Strand, Florida, once a vast swamp awash with indigenous orchids, was plundered during the orchid boom of the 1890s. Its remaining plants, now fiercely protected by law, still attract the unwelcome attentions of thieves. John Laroche is one such self-confessed and convicted thief. Intrigued by newspaper reports of his trial, Susan Orlean followed Laroche on an enthralling exploration into the eccentric world of the obsessive orchid collectors; a subsculture of aristocrats, enthusiasts and smugglers whose passion for plants is all-consuming.”
 
 
 
 
 
“Sometimes this kind of story turns out to be something more, some glimpse of life that expands like those Japanese paper balls you drop in water and then after a moment they bloom into flowers, and the flower is so marvelous that you can’t believe there was a time when all you saw in front of you was a paper ball and a glass of water.”
 
 
Susan Orlean on Florida:
 
“It is a collision of things you would never expect fo find together in one place – condominiums and panthers and raw woods and hypermarkets and Monkey Jungles and strip malls and superhighways and groves of carnivorous plants and theme parks and royal palms and hibiscus trees and those hot swamps with acres and acres that no one has ever even seen – all toasting together under the same sunny vault of Florida sky.”
  
 
Read more about The Orchid Thief at Susan’s website.
 

Ruskin on cookery

  
 
 
“Cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Helen and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and balms and spices, and all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves and savory in meats … It means the economy of your grandmothers and the science of the modern chemist; it means much testing and no wasting; it means English thoroughness and French art and Arabian hospitality …”
 
– John Ruskin