Without Lifting A Finger

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil. I have known so intimately the way that demon works in my imagination. No statement that Sarah ever made was proof against his cunning doubts, though he would usually wait till she had gone to utter them. He would prompt our quarrels long before they occurred: he was not Sarah’s enemy so much as the enemy of love, and isn’t that what the devil is supposed to be? I can imagine that if there existed a God who loved, the devil would be driven to destroy even the weakest, the most faulty imitation of that love. Wouldn’t he be afraid that the habit of love might grow, and wouldn’t he try to trap us all into being traitors, into helping him extinguish love? If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions; he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints,...

The report was this: that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration. When I think over this rumor, hardly can I express the emotions which seize me. Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring — the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity — he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death. Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanit...

Cape Barren Goose (AKA Pig Goose) @ Orana Wildlife Park. Had the run of the place (and yes, it's showing off its sexy red band): was on the open "lawn" when we arrived and in a large open pen (with other ducks/geese) when we left. Primarily inhabits Southern Australia, but has a limited presence in NZ. Happy Monday!❤️🎈🪶 #rlswihart #newzealand #nz #capebarrengoose #piggoose #australiangeese #geeseofinstagram #nature #beauty #poetry #happymonday #readmorepoetry2024🎈♥️🪶

The next day I noticed that Bartleby did nothing but stand at his window in his dead-wall revery. Upon asking him why he did not write, he said that he had decided upon doing no more writing. "Why, how now? what next?" exclaimed I, "do no more writing?" "No more." "And what is the reason?" "Do you not see the reason for yourself," he indifferently replied.

He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a dinner, properly speaking; he must be a vegetarian, then; but no; he never eats even vegetables, he eats nothing but ginger-nuts. My mind then ran on in reveries concerning the probable effects upon the human constitution of living entirely on ginger-nuts. Ginger-nuts are so called, because they contain ginger as one of their peculiar constituents, and the final flavoring one. Now, what was ginger? A hot, spicy thing. Was Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all. Ginger, then, had no effect upon Bartleby. Probably, he preferred it should have none.

"True; but, with submission, sir, behold these hairs! I am getting old. Surely, sir, a blot or two of a warm afternoon is not to be severely urged against gray hairs. Old age — even if it blot the page — is honorable. With submission, sir, we both are getting old."

Aware that most disorders of the mind have their origin in the state of the body, I made vigorous use of the flesh-brush, and bathed my head with New England rum, a specific once recommended to me as good for buzzing in the ear. Wrapped in my dressing gown, with cravat nicely adjusted, and fingernails neatly trimmed, I complacently descended to the little cedar-parlor to breakfast.

 

Here Kluge is looking down, both literally and metaphorically, from a vantage point above the destruction. The ironic amazement with which he registers the facts allows him to maintain the essential distance of an observer. Yet even Kluge, that most enlightened of writers, suspects that we are unable to learn from the misfortunes we bring on ourselves, that we are incorrigible and will continue along the beaten tracks that bear some slight relation to the old road network. For all Kluge’s intellectual steadfastness, therefore, he looks at the destruction of his hometown with the horrified fixity of Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history,” whose “face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence tha...

New Poem in Quadrant Magazine (May 2024). You can buy the magazine, read the "tease" above, or follow the link below (where you should be able to read the whole poem). Thanks to Barry Spurr and staff at Quadrant. "October: Consecutive Days" https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2024/05/r-l-swihart-october-consecutive-days/ #rlswihart #quadrantmagazine #may3024 #october:consecutivedays #nature #poetry #beauty #deathoffriend #readmorepoetry2024🎈♥️🪶

Central to Kluge’s detailed description of the social organization of disaster, which is preprogrammed by the ever-recurrent and ever-intensifying errors of history, is the idea that a proper understanding of the catastrophes we are always setting off is the first prerequisite for the social organization of happiness. However, it is difficult to dismiss the idea that the systematic destruction Kluge sees arising from the development of the means and modes of industrial production hardly seems to justify the principle of hope. The construction of the strategy of air war in all its monstrous complexity, the transformation of bomber crews into professionals, “trained administrators of war in the air,”84 the question of how to overcome the psychological problem of keeping them interested in their tasks despite the abstract nature of their function, the problems of conducting an orderly cycle of operations that involve “200 medium-sized industrial plants”85 flying towards a city, and of the...