From "So Long, See You Tomorrow" - William Maxwell

"In that flat landscape a man cursing at his horses somewhere off in the fields can be heard a long way. All sounds carry: the dinner bell, wheels crossing a cattle guard, the clatter of farm machinery. When the gasoline engine sputters and dies or the blades of the mowing machine jam, Cletus knows that Mr. Wilson, a quarter of a mile away, has heard it and is waiting for the sound of the engine or the mowing machine to start up again. If it doesn't, he leaves his own work and comes across the pasture to see what the trouble is. With their heads almost touching, his father and Mr. Wilson study the difficulty."

Wallace Stevens - "The Snow Man"

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

From Livy's "The Early History of Rome"

"I confess to you that whenever, in my absence, I thought of my country, what I saw in my mind’s eye were these hills and plains, the Tiber and this beloved countryside, and the familiar sky under which I was born and bred. I can but hope that the love of these things will move you now to stay, and that the loss of them will not, in after years, tear your hearts with vain regret.”

Robert Hass - "A Sunset"

A Sunset

The sky tonight on the top of the ridge
Was bruise-colored, a yellow-brown
That is one definition of the word “sordid,”
Which, I think, used to describe
That color, carries neither a moral
Nor an aesthetic judgment. The sky
At dusk was sordid and then brightened
And softened to a glowing peach
Of brief but astonishing beauty,
If you happened to be paying attention.
I could take a hard right here
To the angry adolescent boy in Texas
Who shot and killed nineteen children
With a high-powered weapon my culture
Put into his hands. How to enter
The hive of that mind and undo what
The imagination had done there?
He wore a flak jacket, bought two rifles
At a local store, one of which fires forty rounds
A minute. He had it specifically in mind
To kill children of that age, the lithe-
Bodied young in their end-of-term clothing.
The connective tissue in this veering
Is the idea that it is the experience of beauty,
Not rules, not fear of consequences
Or reverence for authority, that informs
Our moral sense. This may be where
John Ashbery would introduce a non sequitur,
Not from aversion to responsibility
But from a sense he no doubt had
That there was a kind of self-importance
In the introduction of morality to poetry
And that one might, therefore, be better off
Practicing one’s art in more or less
The spirit of the poor juggler in the story
Of Christmas who, having no gift to bring
To the infant god, crept into the church
In the night and faced the crèche and juggled.

Play, beauty, the impulse to reproduce it,
The impulse to evoke and bring to rage
And then to stillness the violence
In our natures. One does not,
The argument is, watch “Lear” and then
Go out and kill someone. The next veering,
Undertaken without cynicism but
In a spirit of frankness (leaving aside
Plato’s originary arguments), would be
To introduce the collection of records
They found in Adolf Hitler’s bunker.
There were more than a hundred
Of them: Wagner, of course, the operas
Especially, but also Mussorgsky,
Rachmaninoff. He must have turned,
To rest his mind, from reports on the success
Of Zyklon B to the concertos of Rachmaninoff.
Monet might be the counter-argument.
I’ve read that, in his distress at hearing
Descriptions of the violence of the earlier war,
The mud and excrement and rotting bodies
And barbed wire, poison gas, the rows
On rows of young men hurled by their officers
At one another’s cannons and machine guns,
He rose one morning, walked down to his studio
By the pond at Giverny, and began
To paint the water lilies and kept painting them
As long as his hand could hold a brush.

It’s late. I need to return to the subject
Of that boy’s mind and the art we practice.
And the sunset—peach to dull gold which faded
To what felt, for just a second, for less
Than a second, a blessed and arriving silence,
And then a pale green at the skyline,
And then dark. And it was Monday night.

Plato’s idea, I think, was that beauty
Was an ordering of elements the world offered
And that the harmonies in that order
Taught the soul the good. A later culture
Would say that boy was taken by a demon
And study ways to exorcise it. The devil
Had a name: it was the love of evil.
And us? Is there a practice of the arts
That would install, inform, would
Deeply root a culture that would form
A mind or heart in which those young bodies
On the classroom floor had become
Unimaginable, from a love of the good
As ordinary as the children’s tennis shoes?
Probably not. Do we need to be able
To touch that mind? At that age?
It could have come from being laughed at.
Once. Or perhaps there was a sexual thrill
In putting on the costume, carrying
The rifle, saying I Am Doom as he strode
Across the parking lot. Is there a way
To undo the stew of computer games
And horror films and superhero fantasies
That gave a language to the moral injury
He wanted to inflict? Or the culture
Of resentment and fear that put the weapon
In his hands? Those people run governments.
Here’s another hard right turn. Think
Of how Walt Whitman loved this country,
Loved the President who died. Imagined
Himself as a hand brushing a fly from the brow
Of a sleeping child. In the dark
I thought of a radiant ordinariness
That burned, that burned and burned.

- Robert Hass

From the "Time Passes" Section of "To the Lighthouse"

“Well, we must wait for the future to show,” said Mr. Bankes, coming in from the terrace.

“It’s almost too dark to see,” said Andrew, coming up from the beach.

“One can hardly tell which is the sea and which is the land,” said Prue.

“Do we have that light burning?” said Lily as they took their coats off indoors.

“No,” said Prue, “not if everyone’s in.”

“Andrew,” she called back, “just put out the light in the hall.”

One by one the lamps were all extinguished, except that Mr. Carmichael, who liked to lie awake a little reading Virgil, kept his candle burning rather longer than the rest.

- Virgina Woolf

From "Sons and Lovers" - D.H. Lawrence

“One evening, directly after the parson’s visit, felling unable to bear herself after another display from her husband, she took Annie and the baby and went out. Morel had kicked William, and the mother would never forgive him.

She went over the sheep-bridge and across a corner of the meadow to the cricket-ground. The meadows seemed one space of ripe, evening light, whispering with the distant mill-race. She sat on a seat under the alders in the cricket-ground, and fronted the evening. Before her, level and solid, spread the big green cricket-field, like the bed of a sea of light. Children played in the bluish shadow of the pavilion. Many rooks, high up, came cawing home across the softly-woven sky. They stooped in a long curve down into the golden glow, concentrating, cawing, wheeling, like black flakes on a slow vortex, over a tree-clump that made a dark boss among the pasture.

A few gentlemen were practising, and Mrs. Morel could hear the chock of the ball, and the voices of men suddenly roused; could see the white forms of men shifting silently over the green, upon which already the under shadows were smouldering. Away at the grange, one side of the haystacks was lit up, the other sides blue-grey. A wagon of sheaves rocked small across the melting yellow light.

The sun was going down. Every open evening, the hills of Derbyshire were blazed over with red sunset. Mrs. Morel watched the sun sink from the glistening sky, leaving a soft flower-blue overhead, while the western space went red, as if all the fire had swum down there, leaving the bell cast flawless blue. The mountain-ash berries across the field stood fierily out from the dark leaves, for a moment. A few shocks of corn in a corner of the fallow stood up as if alive; she imagined them bowing; perhaps her son would be a Joseph. In the east, a mirrored sunset floated pink opposite the west’s scarlet. The big haystacks on the hillside, that butted into the glare, went cold.

With Mrs. Morel, it was one of those still moments when the small frets vanish, and the beauty of things stands out, and she had the peace and the strength to see herself.”