Without Lifting A Finger

‘Look at this flower,’ said I to the philosopher, ‘it is utterly impossible that this symmetry with its definitely numbered points and indentations, these little white and red streaks, this little golden crown in the middle, should not have been thought out beforehand! And how beautiful and charming it is, a poem, a work of art, a witticism, a bright-coloured, fragrant jest! A thing like that does not make itself!’ ‘It is beautiful in any case,’ said the philosopher, ‘whether it has been made or not! Put a question to it! The flower says nothing, it has no time for talking either, for it has to blossom and cannot bother about your doubts. For all these are doubts, which you are voicing, doubts of God, and contemptible doubts of Nature; and it makes me sick just to listen to a doubter, a sentimental doubter! Oh dear!’ He had heard this played as a trump card in the arguments of older people and he used it against me now, as well as other skirmishing devices of the kind which he had adop...

This fragment (also apparently from a play) is also a beautiful "clipping" I've culled from the work of Paul Claudel (in translation) at the Poetry Foundation. (Too bad someone doesn't publish a "selected" from this great poet in English, especially a Kindle version.;))

 

But the chief point was that he declared himself to be a scorner of women, and he waged continual war with them for trying, with their sensual allurement and their frivolity, to rob men of their virtue and their seriousness. As a Cynic, he was always pestering the women and girls with his unconventionalities; as an Epicurean, with erotic witticisms; and as a Stoic, he said rude things to them, but nevertheless, where three of them were gathered together, there he was always to be found.

The "snippet" above is from the Poetry Foundation -- it's a beautiful fragment from a larger work (a play I think) by Paul Claudel (brother of Camille). I found more of the poem on the website below: https://mycarmelblog.wordpress.com/2019/01/14/the-infant-jesus-of-prague/

Suddenly there was a sound of humming and piping overhead. Fiddle, bass viol, clarinet were being tuned, and a French horn was indulging in melancholy sounds. While the active portion of the assembly broke up and went upstairs to the spacious loft, the schoolmaster said: ‘Is there really to be dancing? I thought this custom had at last been done away with. Certainly this village is the only one for far and wide where it is ever practised! I honour age, but all that is old is not necessarily honourable and fitting! Meantime, you may as well look on, children, so that later on you can tell about it, for it is to be hoped that dancing at funeral rites will eventually be abolished!’

‘That’s not so,’ asserted Catherine. ‘You owe Henry a kiss, you witch!’ ‘Oh, for shame, Catherine! You shouldn’t tell such stories,’ said the embarrassed child, and the inexorable maid replied: ‘That’s as it may be, the hill fell down before you had turned round three times, and you owe Master Henry a kiss!’ ‘Then I will go on owing it,’ she cried laughing, and I, glad to have escaped the solemn ceremony, and yet turning the matter to my own advantage, said: ‘Good. Then promise me that you will always go on owing me a kiss!’ ‘Yes, I’ll do that!’ cried she, and gaily and mischievously, she gave the hand I proffered a resounding slap. She was now lively and boisterous, and as nimble as quicksilver, seemingly quite a different person from what she was by day. Midnight had transfigured her, her little face was quite rosy and her eyes shone with pleasure. She danced round the helpless Catherine, teased her and was pursued by her, there began a chase round the room in which I became involved...

Now we stood upon the brow of the hill which shimmered in the splendour of the setting sun; the glorified figure, light as down, of the young girl floated before my eyes, and near her I thought I saw the smiling countenance of the Almighty, the friend and protector of the landscape painter, as in my conversation today with the schoolmaster, I had claimed Him to be. When she was saying goodbye, Anna blushed deeper still in the light of the setting sun as she held out her hand to me, last of all. We barely touched fingertips, and addressed each other politely as ‘Sie’; but the boys laughed at us, and the girls gravely requested that we should say ‘Du’ to one another, for nothing else was tolerated among the young people in the country.

Lazuli Bunting @ Bartlett Park in Huntington Beach CA. Never saw as many LBs in one place, but of course getting close is another story. Still: just being with them was euphoric.;)🩵🩵🩵 #rlswihart #socal #huntingtonbeach #bartlettpark #buntingsofinstagram  #indigobunting #nature  #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2025💗🇺🇦

Clip: In Africa there was a lot of interest in the new prophecy, and Tertullian came to believe that it was genuine, accordingly mentioning it and defending it strongly in his later works.  Unfortunately his work in defence of it,  De ecstasi , in 7 books is lost. Tertullian fiercely attacks those who condemned the new prophecy, and in attacking the church authorities as more interested in their own political power in the church than in listening to the Spirit, he foreshadows the protestant reaction to papal claims. Link: https://www.tertullian.org/montanism.htm

 

Another fruitful source of strange tales was Roman Catholicism, with its legacy of deserted cloisters and the still surviving monasteries which were to be found here and there in the region that was still Catholic. To these tales the members of the orders inhabiting these monasteries contributed much, especially the Capuchin monks who to this day work hand in hand with the executioners in the exorcizing of devils, and in other such arts, among the superstitious peasants of the reformed faith. In a few remote districts at that time, there prevailed a spiritless, decayed type of Protestantism; the inhabitants did not hold themselves above the Catholics, looking down on them as deluded folk, but they faithfully shared their belief in all the fables, though they held them to be in substance evil and deserving of repudiation, and they did not laugh at Catholicism, rather they feared it as something sinister and heathenish. It was impossible for them to recognize a free thinker as a man who ...

A man always sets a double value on what Fate has deprived him of, and so my mother’s long tales used to fill me more and more with longing for the father who died before I knew him. My clearest recollection of him goes back, curiously, a full year before his death, to a single lovely moment when he carried me on his arm, one Sunday evening in the fields, pulled a potato plant out of the earth and showed me the little swelling tubers, already trying to awaken in me the knowledge and love of the Creator. I still see the green coat and the bright metal buttons close to my cheek, and his shining eyes which attracted my wondering gaze away from the green plant that he was holding aloft.

“But those orange trees were planted,” said Judith. “They’re not nature.” “When the sun shines through and plays in the leaves, I forget that,” said John Ford. “I also forget myself and my existence. Then I wish that nothing would ever change, that the leaves would go on moving forever, that the oranges would never be picked and everything would stay just the way it is.” “Then I suppose you’d like people to go on living as they have always lived?” Judith asked. John Ford gave her a gloomy look. “Yes,” he said. “We would. Up to a century ago the people who thought about progress were the people who had the power to bring it about. Until recently new ideas originated with the powerful; with princes, industrialists, public benefactors. Today the men with power have ceased to be benefactors of mankind; at best they do things that benefit certain individuals. Today all the new ideas come from the poor and powerless. The men with the power to change anything have stopped thinking. So no chan...

: ... it was as though a whole nation had set its lips to a giant flute—a long-drawn-out screech so bestial and brutal, but at the same time, what with the billowing clouds of black smoke and the vastness of the Mississippi, so proud, so grandiose, that, embarrassed and yet bodily shaken, I could only look off to one side. So overpowering was that signal that, splintered by fear, I lived a dream of America that up until then I had only heard about. It was a moment of expertly organized resurrection, in which the things around me ceased to be unrelated, and people and landscape, the living and the dead, took their places in a single painful and theatrical revelation of history. Theatrically flowed the Mississippi, theatrically the tourists moved from deck to deck, while an old man’s deep, far-carrying voice told the story of the great riverboats over the loudspeaker: the new era of travel and commerce they had initiated, steamboat races, black slaves loading firewood by the light of the...

Olive-sided Flycatcher @ Bartlett Park in Huntington Beach CA.  Spent some time chasing desert birds in Phoenix. Now I'm having a blast with our spring visitors in So Cal (this little guy jumped high on his perch just as I was calling it a day). Will be leaving for Michigan in less than a week.  Happy Hump Day and make the most of your spring.  Another update on the "state of birds" in North America (which to some degree parallels the "state of the world"), and it's not looking good. 😢 #rlswihart  #socal #huntingtonbeach #bartlettpark #birdsofnorthamerica  #birdsonearth  #thestateofFLY #flycatchersofinstagram  #olivesidedflycatcher  #nature #beauty #poetry #readthewhitebird #readmorepoetry2025💗

When the child saw a representation of nature, one of the painter’s pictures, for example, she never thought of asking whether there really was such a scene, and if so where, because the copy had replaced the original forever. I remembered that, unlike her, I myself as a child had always wanted to know where the object represented actually was. In our house, for instance, there was an oil painting of a glacier landscape with a mountain hut at the lower edge. I had always been convinced that this landscape and this hut existed in nature; I even thought I knew where the painter must have stood, and when someone told me the picture was pure imagination I couldn’t believe it.