“…If he had smiled why would he have smiled?
To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone, whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.”
- James Joyce, from Ulysses
I saw the country in a light that we usually do not see: the low-slanting rays picked out the foliage of the trees and high-lighted a new wheatfield against the dark curtain of woods on the knobs, which were in shadow.
It was very beautiful. Deep peace. Sheep on the slopes behind the sheep barn. The new trellises in the novitiate garden leaning and sagging under a hill of roses. A cardinal singing suddenly in the walnut tree, and piles of fragrant logs all around the woodshed waiting to be cut in bad weather.
I looked at all this in great tranquility, with my soul and spirit quiet. For me, landscape seems to be important for contemplation. Anyway, I have no scruples about loving it. Didn’t Saint John of the Cross hide himself in a room up in a church tower, where there was one small window through which he could look out at the country?
- Thomas Merton, from The Sign of Jonas
1936 - 2023
Untitled - Eurana Park, Pennsylvania, 1982
Untitled, Mauch Chunk Lake, Jim Thorpe, PA, 2012
Untitled, Eurana Park, Pennsylvania, 1983
Untitled, Eurana Park, Pennsylvania, 1982
Untitled - Children in Neshaminy Creek, 2012
And when much people were gathered together, and were come to him out of every city, he spake by a parable:
A sower went out to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the way side; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it.
And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away, because it lacked moisture.
And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it.
And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an hundredfold. And when he had said these things, he cried,
He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.
And his disciples asked him, saying, What might this parable be?
And he said, Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God: but to others in parables; that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand.
Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God.
Those by the way side are they that hear; then cometh the devil, and taketh away the word out of their hearts, lest they should believe and be saved.
They on the rock are they, which, when they hear, receive the word with joy; and these have no root, which for a while believe, and in time of temptation fall away.
And that which fell among thorns are they, which, when they have heard, go forth, and are choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this life, and bring no fruit to perfection.
But that on the good ground are they, which in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience.
No man, when he hath lighted a candle, covereth it with a vessel, or putteth it under a bed; but setteth it on a candlestick, that they which enter in may see the light.
“We have more power at our disposal today than we have ever had, and yet we are more alienated and estranged from the inner ground of meaning and of love than we have ever been.”
“…Can I ask you a question? Those moths in November, where are they now, do you think? You remember. We’d see them each evening around three in the afternoon; first a few, then a bucketful, and all at once millions, everywhere. The cold arrived, the cold that really means it, and they were gone. They simply vanished, the way we all do in the end, but what does that mean? What does it mean, to say “Where are they?” Where are we? We change, all right; but where else, strange fellow moths, is there to go but the world? I saw the first trillions of snowflakes today as the light was beginning to change, to darken, blowing and swirling across the bare back fields and back roads. Like you and I, they did as they were told. To things already here, we were called forth and asked to join them, asked to live. Not forever, not even very long. But we are called forth, we are brought here, and we are not brought here to die. I’ve been looking at Edvard Munch’s The Sick Child, for the first time since I was nineteen. The girl is sitting up in bed, a green blanket pulled up to her waist, the mother seated facelessly beside her to the left; her left hand and the child’s are clasped, knitted together, like the spot where a broken bone was healed. Then there is the child’s thinning hair, the poor skull showing through the sparse wisps of it: it makes you think of an infant’s, the little continents of bone still closing. Hair the color of the red wine in the half-full glass that’s glowing on a table in the foreground, in the half-light. Her head is turned sharply to the left, her line of sight passing right over the woman’s bowed head in the direction of some unseen source of light—I always thought it was a window, but who’s to say it’s not a mirror. I see that now. Face beaming or reflecting from the depths of resignation, with a small exhausted smile of utmost sweetness, an unmistakable expression of gladness toward the outer world, the sight of things exactly as they are, and expressing the sum of all knowledge regarding that world: it is still there…”
- Franz Wright, from “The Window”, in Kindertotenwald
