Without Lifting A Finger

Carlyle to Emerson: One more juicy bit (for today): What with railways, steamships, printing presses, it has surely become a most monstrous “tissue,” this life of ours; if evil and confusion in the one Hemisphere, then good and order in the other, a man knows not how: and so it rustles forth, immeasurable, from “that roaring Loom of Time,” — miraculous ever as of old!

Might've been injured in the recent storm. He was sitting on the sand (in a curious position) and when I approached him he "hobbled" to the water. In the two pics I got of him "on the water," it looks like he's dragging a leg.🙏💗

 

Carlyle to Emerson: Work and wages: the two prime necessities of man! It is pity they should ever be disjoined; yet of the two, if one must, in this mad Earth, be dispensed with, it is really wise to say at all hazards, Be it the wages then.

Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me a story. Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story—just like the typewriter was mine. Please let the story, dear God, in its revisions, be made too clear for any false & low interpretation because in it, I am not trying to disparage anybody’s religion although when it was coming out, I didn’t know exactly what I was trying to do or what it was going to mean. I don’t know now if it is consistent. Please don’t let me have to scrap the story because it turns out to mean more wrong than right—or any wrong. I want it to mean that the good in man sometimes shows through his commercialism but that it is not the fault of the commercialism that it does.  Perhaps the idea would be that good can show through even something that is cheap.

It may be that we each mean different things when we speak of love and happiness, within a couple, as well as within society. Especially now. When I was growing up in middle-class suburban England, our family knew no one who was illegitimate or divorced or homosexual; all was heteronormative, and no one saw a psychiatrist unless they were truly, deeply mad. (There were a few minor exceptions: a couple of schoolmasters we thought dodgy, plus a great-uncle who had remarried after his first wife was confined to an asylum.) Now, towards the end of my life, more children are born out of wedlock in this country than within it; divorce, homosexuality and seeing a shrink are routine, while gender has become more fluid. All this is as welcome as it is belated, and we may occasionally feel sharp pity for those in previous centuries horribly trapped in the prisons of social, religious and sexual expectation. Though it would be impertinent to imagine that they understood love less well. They certa...