No eat

andabusers @ 2017-04-10T16:58:00

2017-04-10T23:58:05Z

I'm moving over to dreamwidth at Dodont.

andabusers @ 2016-05-23T00:24:00

2016-05-23T07:24:14Z

Aaaaaaaand I'm viciously sick the night before finals. I'm effectively allergic to food now. And yet also obese. Thanks, body, you utter rubbish heap.

andabusers @ 2016-04-14T22:23:00

2016-04-15T05:23:38Z

The most exciting thing that has happened lately is that the head of my department gave me the go-ahead to do an individual research project for credit on the moths at the college's farm and experimental forest campus. MOOOOTHS.

andabusers @ 2016-01-04T19:14:00

2016-01-05T03:14:22Z

I've been looking at ecology/conservation internships and jobs, and house prices to get an idea of what it's like to live in these places. In the UK living in the middle of nowhere means a couple of hours on transit to the nearest town. Here, remote is something else. A day's drive, perhaps. No trains, no buses. It's extremely intimidating. So of course I'm having a "what am I doing here???" freak-out. But it'll pass and I'm not going to self-destruct over it. I want a cookie!

Lately I've been feeling a bit better. Company and activity over new year helped. I'm staying in Berkeley and Ben's often out of the house so I have a lot of quiet time. Had a good chat about some stuff in one corner, and a helpful apology in another. I feel optimistic that therapy will help me, and that maybe I won't have to die alone after all. Anyway the world's not ending yet so I'm off to the pub for a not-excessive amount of beer.

Plato - various

2011-05-24T15:01:52Z

The Works of Plato

Apology

p60: "But far more dangerous are the others, who began when you were children, and took possession of your minds with their falsehoods ... And they are many, and their charges against me are of ancient date, and they were made by them in the days when you were more impressible than you are now - in childhood, or it may have been in youth - and the cause when heard went by default, for there was none to answer."

Phaedo

p138: "Is that idea or essencde, which in the dialectical process we define as essence or true existence - whether essence of equality, beauty, or anything else - are these essences, I say, liable at some times to some degree of change? or are they each of them always what they are, having the same simple self-existent and unchanging forms, not admitting of variation at all, or in any way, at any time?
... And these you can touch and see and perceive with the senses, but the unchanging things you can only perceive with the mind - they are invisible and are not seen?
That is very true, he said.
Well then, added Socrates, let us suppose that there are two sorts of existences - one seen, the other unseen."

p139: "And were we not saying long ago that the soul when using the body as an instrument of perception, that is to say, when using the sense of sight or hearing or some other sense (for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses) - were we not saying that the soul too is then dragged by the body into the region of the changeable, and wanders and is confused; the world spins around her, and she is like a drunkard, when she touches change?
Very true.
But when returning into herself she reflects, then she passes into the other world, the region of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are her kindred, and with them she ever lives, when she is by herself and is not let or hindered; then she ceases from her erring ways, and being in communion with the unchanging is unchanging. And this state of the soul is called wisdom?"

p142: "And this corporeal element, my friend, is heavy and weighty and earthy, and is that element of sight by which a soul is depressed and dragged down again into the visible world, because she is afraid of the invisible and of the world below - prowling about tombs and sepulchres, near which, as they tell us, are seen certain ghostly apparitions of souls which have not departed pure, but are cloyed with sight and therefore visible."

p145: "Why, because each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body, until she becomes like the body, and believes that to be true which the body affirms to be true; and from agreeing with the body and having the same delights she is obliged to have the same habits and haunts, and is not likely ever to be pure at her departure to the world below, but is always infected by the body; and so she sinks into another body and there germinates and grows, and has therefore no part in the communion of the divine and pure and simple."

p146: "... a soul which has been thus nurtured and has had these pursuits, will at her departure from her body be scattered and blown away by the winds and be nowhere and nothing."

p162: "I cannot understand how, when separated from the other, each of them was one and not two, and now, when they are brought together, the mere juxtaposition or meeting of them should be the cause of their becoming two ..."

p179: "But the true earth is pure and situated in the pure heaven - there are stars also; and it is the heaven which is commonly spoken of by us as the ether, and of which our own earth is the sediment gathering in the hollows beneath. But we who live in these hollows are deceived into the notion that we are dwelling above on the surface of the earth; which is just as if a creature who was at the bottom of the sea were to fancy that he was on the surface of the water, and that the sea was the heaven through which he saw the sun and the other stars, he having never come to the surface by the reason of his feebleness and sluggishness, and having never lifted up his head and seen, nor ever heard from one who had seen, how much purer and fairer the world above is than his own. And such is exactly our case: for we are dwelling in a hollow of the earth, and fancy that we are on the surface; and the air we call the heaven, in which we imagine that the stars move. But the fact is, that owing to our feebleness and sluggishness we are prevented from reaching the surface of the air: or if any man could arrive at the exterior limit, or take the wings of a bird and come to the top, then like a fish who puts his head out of the water and sees the world, he would see a world beyond; and, if the nature of man could sustain the sight, he would acknowledge that this other world was the place of the true heaven and the true light and the true earth."

p182: "There is a chasm which is the vastest of them all, and pierces right through the whole earth ... And the seesaw is caused by the streams flowing into and out of this chasm, and they each have the nature of the soil through which they flow. And the reason why the streams are always flowing in and out, is that the watery element has no bed or bottom, but is swinging and surging up and down, hither and thither, over the earth - just is in the act of respiration the air is always in process of inhalation and exhalation, - and the wind swinging with the water in and out produces fearful and irresistible blasts: when the waters retire with a rush into the lower parts of the earth, as they are called, they flow through the earth in those regions, and fill them up like water raised by a pump, and then when they leave those regions and rush back hither, they again fill the hollows here, and when these are filled, flow through subterranean channels and find their way to their several places, forming seas, and lakes, and rivers, and springs."

Phaedrus

p268: "And I maintain that I ought not to fail in my suit, because I am not your lover: for lovers repent of their kindnesses which they have shown when their passion ceases, but to the non-lovers who are free and not under any compulsion, no time of repentance ever comes ..."

p284: "There will be more reason in appealing to the ancient inventors of names, who would never have connected prophecy (μαντιχή), which foretells the future and is the noblest of arts, with madness (μανιχή), or called them both by the same name, if they had deemed madness to be a disgrace or a dishonour; - they must have thought that there was an inspired madness which was a noble thing; for the two words μαντιχή and μανιχή, are really the same, and the letter τ is only a modern and tasteless insertion ... prophecy is more perfect and august than augury, both in name and fact, in the same proportion, as the ancients testify, is madness superior to a sane mind, for the one is only of human, but the other of divine origin."

p286-7: "The soul in her totality has the care of inanimate being everywhere, and traverses the whole heaven in divers forms appearing; - when perfect and fully winged she soars upward, and orders the whole world; whereas the imperfect soul, losing her wings and drooping in her flight, at last settles on the solid ground - there, finding a home, she receives an earthly frame which appears to be self-moved, but is really moved by her power; and this composition of soul and body is called a living and mortal creature. For immortal no such union can be reasonably believed to be; although fancy, not having seen nor surely known the nature of God, may imagine an immortal creature having both a body and a soul which are united throughout all time."

p288: "The divine intelligence, being nurtured upon mind and pure knowledge, and the intelligence of every soul which is capable of receiving the food proper to it, rejoices at beholding reality, and once more gazing upon truth, is replenished and made glad, until the revolution of the worlds brings her round again to the same place."

p292-3 (hur hur): "Now he who is not newly initiated or who has become corrupted, does not easily rise out of this world to the sight of true beauty in the other; he looks only at her earthly namesake, and instead of being awed at the sight of her, he is given over to pleasure, and like a brutish beast he rushes on to enjoy and beget; he consorts with wantonness, and is not afraid or ashamed of pursuing pleasure in violation of nature ... at first a shudder runs through him, and again the old awe steals over him; ... then while he gazes on him there is a sort of reaction, and the shudder passes into an unusual heat and perspiration; for, as he receives the effluence of beauty through the eyes, the wing moistens and he warms. And as he warms, the parts out of which the wing grew, and which had been hitherto closed and rigid, and had prevented the wing from shooting forth, are melted, and as nourishment streams upon him, the lower end of the wing begins to swell and grow from the root upwards; and the growth extends under the whole soul - for once the whole was winged. During this process the whole soul is all in a state of ebullition and effervescence, - which may be compared to the irritation and uneasiness in the gums at the time of cutting teeth, - bubbles up, and has a feeling of uneasiness and tickling; but when in like manner the soul is beginning to grow wings, the beauty of the beloved meets her eye and she receives the sensible warm motion of particles which flow towards her, therefore called emotion, and is refreshed and warmed by them, and then she ceases from her pain with joy. But when she is parted from her beloved and her moisture fails, then the orifices of the passage out of which the wing shoots dry up and close, and intercept the germ of the wing; which, being shut up with the emotion, throbbing as with the pulsations of an artery, pricks the aperture which is nearest, until at length the entire soul is pierced and maddened and pained, and at the recollection of beauty is again delighted. And from both of them together the soul is oppressed at the strangeness of her condition, and is in a great strait and excitement, and in her madness can neither sleep by night nor abide in her place by day. And wherever she thinks that she will behold the beautiful one, thither in her desire she runs."

p309: "Here he appears to have done just the reverse of what he ought; for he has begun at the end, and is swimming on his back through the flood to the place of starting."

p322: "I have heard a tradition of the ancients, whether true or not they only know; although if we had found the truth ourselves, do you think that we should care much about the opinions of men?"

Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms

2011-04-19T00:37:59Z

p13: "I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowning and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring."

p54: "Through the other noise I heard a cough, then came the chuh-chuh-chuh-chuh - then there was a flash, as when a blast furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died. Then I floated, and instead of going on I felt myself slide back. I breathed and I was back."

p72: "'I am afraid of Him in the night sometimes.'
"'You should love him.'"

p73: "It was forbidden to play the flute at night. ... Because it was bad for the girls to hear the flute at night."

p170: "'I am the snake. I am the snake of reason.'
"'You're getting it mixed. The apple was reason.'
"'No, it was the snake.'"

p171: "'We never get anything. We are born with all we have and we never learn. We never get anything new. We all start complete.'"

p208: "We walked along together all going fast against time."

p249: "I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. ... If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."

Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights

2011-04-19T00:15:06Z

p16 (Editor's preface, Charlotte Bronte as Currer Bell): "... we should say he was child neither of Lascar nor gipsy, but a man's shape animated by demon life - a Ghoul - an Afreet. ... the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master - something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself."

p146-7: "His young and fair features were almost as deathlike as those of the form beside him, and almost as fixed: but his was the hush of exhausted anguish, and hers of perfect peace. ... I see a repose that neitther earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter - the Eternity they have entered - where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fullness. ... Do you believe such people are happy in the other world, sir? I'd give a great deal to know."

p156: "The world is surely not worth living in now, is it?"

p241: "I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped and my cheek frozen against hers."

p276: "I tell you I have nearly attained my heaven, unless a change takes place before you die ... the dead are not annihilated!"

p279: "They are afraid of nothing ... I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

Have I mentioned lately that moths are awesome?

2010-12-24T05:22:57Z

Moth caterpillar. Limacodidae. Amazing.

andabusers @ 2010-11-27T19:11:00

2010-11-27T19:11:17Z

I love this photostream so much.

This is a caterpillar. A caterpillar.

Lepidoptera are awesome.

andabusers @ 2010-11-06T17:03:00

2010-11-06T17:03:27Z

I MADE AN ALBUM. :D Yays.

andabusers @ 2010-11-03T16:56:00

2010-11-03T16:56:35Z

Also, one to add to the bizarre instruments of injury list:

Dog-lead.

Ow. :(

andabusers @ 2010-10-25T10:01:00

2010-10-25T09:01:04Z

The People's Music Awards is like crack to me. I'm now #3 on the folk/world/jazz/classical charts and #4 on the female solo charts. Thanks to those who voted. :) I've been getting email notifications when someone votes for me, and it fills me with fuzzy warm tribbles. If you still want to vote (apparently 35 votes would put me into #1), there's about 7 hours left on the clock ...

Henry David Thoreau - Cape Cod

2010-10-23T01:25:09Z

p1: "Take Time by the forelock. It is also the safest part to take a serpent by."

p29: "The Pilgrims appear to have regarded themselves as Not Any's representatives."
By Heman Doane: "Two hundred years have, on the wings of Time, / Passed with their joys and woes, since thou, Old Tree! / Put forth thy first leaves in this foreign clime, / Transplanted from the soil beyond the sea. / ***** / [These stars represent the more clerical lines, and also those which have deceased.]"

p33, by Rev Samuel Treat: "Thou must erelong go to the bottomless pit. Hell hath enlarged herself, and is ready to receive thee. There is room enough for thy entertainment ..."

p40: "The breakers looked like droves of a thousand white horses of Neptune, rushing to the shore, with their white manes streaming far behind; and when at length the sun shone for a moment, their manes were rainbow-tinted. Also, the long kelpweed was tossed up from time to time, like the tails of sea-cows sporting in the brine."
On a Cape Cod wrecker: "It was like an old sail endowed with life, - a hanging cliff of weather-beaten flesh, - like one of the clay boulders which occurred in that sand bank. He had on a hat which had seen salt water, and a coat of many pieces and colors, though it was mainly the color of the beach, as if it had been sanded. His variegated back - for his coat had many patches, even between the shoulders - was a rich study to us, when we had passed him and looked around. It might have been dishonorable for him to have so many scars behind, it is true, if he had not had many more and more serious ones in front. He looked as if he sometimes saw a doughnut, but never descended to comfort; too grave to laugh, too tough to cry; as indifferent as a clam, - like a sea-clam with hat on and legs, that was out walking the strand."

p47, from Seaweed by Henry wadsworth Longfellow: "When descends on the Atlantic / The gigantic / Storm-wind of the equinox, / Landward in his wrath he scourges / The toiling surges, / Laden with sea-weed from the rocks."

p49: "Before the land rose out of the ocean, and became dry land, chaos reigned; and between high and low water mark, a sort of chaos reigns still, which only anomalous creatures can inhabit."

p53: "... we put our eyes, by turns, to a knot-hole in the door, and, after long looking, without seeing, into the dark, - not knowing how many shipwrecked men's bones we might see at last, looking with the eye of faith, knowing that, though to him that knocketh it may not always be opened, yet to him that looketh long enough through a knot-hole the inside shall be visible, - for we had had some practice of looking inward, - by steadily keeping our other ball covered from the light meanwhile, putting the outward world behind us, ocean and land, and the beach, - till the pupil became enlarged and collected the rays of light that were wandering in that dark (for the pupil shall be enlarged by looking; there never was so dark a night but a faithful and patient eye, however small, might at last prevail over it), - after all this, I say, things began to take shape to our vision, - if we may use this expression where there was nothing but emptiness, - and we obtained the long wished-for insight."

p54: "Indeed, it was the wreck of all cosmical beauty there within."

p72: "The saffron-robed Dawn rose in haste from the streams / Of Ocean, that she might bring light to immortals and to mortals."

p74: "Is Heaven such a harbor as the Liverpool docks?"

p75: "They were alone with the beach and the sea, whose hollow roar seemed addressed to them, and I was impressed as if there was an understanding between them and the ocean which necessarily left me out, with my snivelling sympathies. That dead body had taken possession of the shore, and reigned over it as no living one could, in the name of a certain majesty which belonged to it."

p82: "It was literally (or littorally) walking down to the shore ..."

p84: "The heroes and discoverers have found true more than was previously believed, only when they were expecting and dreaming of something more than their contemporaries dreamed of, or even themselves discovered, that is, when they were in a frame of mind befitted to behold the truth. Referred to the world's standard, they are always insane."

p86, Humphrey Gilbert 1583 "We are as near to Heaven by sea as by land."
"There must be something monstrous, methinks, in a vision of the sea bottom from over some bank a thousand miles from the shore, more awful than its imagined bottomless; a drowned continent, all livid and frothing at the nostrils, like the body of a drowned man, which is better sunk deep than near the surface."

p104: "... the shining torch of the sun fell into the ocean."

p119: "Thus he struggled, by every method, to keep his light shining before men. Surely the light-house keeper has a responsible, if an easy, office. When his lamp goes out, he goes out; or, at most, only one such accident is pardoned."

p133: "Every vessel is an ark."

p152: "The godlike part of the cod, which, like the human head, is curiously and wonderfully made, forsooth has but little less brain in it, - coming to such an end! to be craunched by cows! I felt my own skull crack from sympathy. What if the heads of men were to be cut off to feed the cows of a superior order of beings who inhabit the islands in the ether? Away goes your fine brain, the house of thought and instinct, to swell the cud of a ruminant animal!"

p167, Sir Ferdinand Gorges, in Maine Hist. Coll., Vol II, p68): an "Imaginary Province called Laconia".

p185: "... in the shape of an egg-shell painted red, and placed high on iron pillars, like the ovum of a sea monster floating on the waves, - destined to be phosphorescent."
"... but when your light goes out, it will be a sign that the light of your life has gone out also."

p192: "Here is the spring of springs, the waterfall of waterfalls."

andabusers @ 2010-10-13T01:10:00

2010-10-13T00:10:46Z

Utterly dead, not especially happy, badly need a back massage, not looking forward to tomorrow.

But at least I have new socks.

andabusers @ 2010-10-02T12:31:00

2010-10-02T11:31:19Z

O hai here is a song that you may well have heard me playing already. It is called Canny Man and it is a murder ballad and I wrote it a few months ago actually but just got round to recording it.

Also, I don't know if I mentioned that I got bored of OKCupid (just another thing to check if anyone's messaged me and when they do it's really shit dead baby jokes THEY'RE KILLING MY LOVE FOR DEAD BABY JOKES this is a serious problem) so deactivated my profile a little while ago, and then reactivated it yesterday so I could find a wife for Sven. Five minutes in, seen a picture of a dude with his cock out. Classy. There is really nobody worth stalking on there. The end.

andabusers @ 2010-09-17T23:05:00

2010-09-17T22:05:18Z

I spam everything.

andabusers @ 2010-02-15T22:56:00

2010-02-15T22:56:40Z

Dum diddly um pum pum.

Since I seem to be pimping myself out on all avenues, I put a new song on Facebook.

Nanananananana.

andabusers @ 2010-01-30T23:20:00

2010-01-30T23:20:47Z

I did record a song and it is now on my music page on Facebook, first song on the music player. It is called Life Is Good and is in stereo, woo.

andabusers @ 2010-01-15T06:35:00

2010-01-15T06:35:17Z

Helloes. I made a Facebook page for music things. Be my fan so I can pretend I'm popular.

I suppose I'd better try to sleep at some point. So very very jetlagged.

Things I dog-eared in Shaft by Ernest Tidyman

2009-12-20T20:23:37Z

p48: "Survival was a dark place, a black place."

p63-64: "Time lost its continuum for him now and then. He was getting old or getting bored ... Years ago he had wondered about his wife and children in those broken hours of darkness. Now he assumed that they were all right or that somebody would tell him if they were not. He felt now as if that part of his life did not exist, as though it had vanished along with the sequence of time."

p72: "Somewhere above him there was a light, a single bulb glimmering into all this treachery of decay. Only the barest flicker of it reached him. He could not even see his own feet in the murk. They found their way up the stairs."

p76: "It wouldn't change if he were buying a pack of cigarettes or if, as now, he were buying a piece of death."

p81: "He landed and was away with a blur of motion. Now nobody could catch him. Nobody could hurt him. This was his way in the world. These dark streets were his place. An exultation of power fed his body from the pit of his stomach. He missed that. He ran, flew. They would find the alley, the doorway, the hidden place in the moment that they needed it."

p83: "A mask, but not a mask. Even in sleep, there was life in it. Life and strength."

p87: "It was the underside of the world, the antithesis and the opposite."

p98: "They were so goddamn cool but their minds were tearing at each other, ripping and smashing at each other like a pair of studs hungry for the same woman. Power was the woman and they were both after her."

p120: "'No name,' he said."

p150: "The small collections of jumble and dust glowed at him under the fragile cowardice of night lights. The doorways were dark and silent, emptier than the hopes that lived behind them ... It just came, that's all. Its mother was desperation and its father was anger. The seed of it was planted back in the No Name when he realized what was happening and that he had somehow to change the pattern of it, take a positive role in it."

p151: "There were still some people around. Standing, walking, talking. Just staring into the night. The spooked, the stoned and the sleepless.

p204: "He started for the dark stairs, listening to the churning mass of confusion he had caused, listening for the voices of the ones he wanted."

p213: "He played with names and continents. Nobody would know him, nobody would want him. He would lose himself. He would let the smell of death wash away with each mile, each strange place, each new person he encountered. He wouldn't even given them his right name. They wouldn't know who he was or what he was. And that would make them even."

andabusers @ 2009-12-20T12:22:00

2009-12-20T20:22:45Z

Ma: "Os, how does the Reveille go, the one to get you up in the army?"
Dad: "'Drop your cocks and grab your socks!'"

I'm pretty sure that's not how the Reveille goes.

andabusers @ 2009-12-14T00:32:00

2009-12-14T00:32:18Z

Fitting.

Yesterday,
all my hanjabanja seemed so far away.

Which song was this lyric from?

andabusers @ 2009-11-04T19:40:00

2009-11-04T19:41:02Z

WikiAnders: What rhymes with compost?

C.S. Lewis - The Screwtape Letters

2009-10-13T11:13:50Z

Frontispiece: "The devil ... the prowde spirite ... cannot endure to be mocked." (Thomas More)

p10: "There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth."

p12: "Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit."

p17: "Keep everything hazy in his mind now, and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him the peculiar kind of clarity which Hell affords."

p26: "They have never known that ghastly luminosity, that stabbing and searing glare which makes the background of permanent pain to our lives ... If you examine the object to which he is attending, you will find that it is a composite object containing many quite ridiculous ingredients."

p27: "Once all his thoughts and images have been flung aside or, if retained, retained with a full recognition of their merely subjective nature, and the man trusts himself to the completely real, external, invisible Presence, there with him in the room and never knowable by him as he is known by it - why, then it is that the inclculable may occur."

p44: "Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation? / Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal ... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time."

p45: "To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense."

p57: "Something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the humans call Music, and something like it occurs in Heaven - a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us."

p61: "He must not be allowed to suspect that he is now, however slowly, heading right away from the sun on a line which will carry him into the cold and dark of utmost space."

p64: "And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of revelries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off."

p76-7: "The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity ... For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. / ... But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity. It is far better to make them live in the Future ... In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time - for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays."

p107: "The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels."

p108: "Wrap a darkness about it, and in the centre of that darkness let his sense of ownership-in-Time lie silent, uninspected, operative."

p111: "Meanwhile I enclose a little booklet, just issued, on the new House of Correction for Incompetent Tempters."

p114: "No square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise ... We will make the whole universe a noise in the end ... In the heat of composition I find that I have inadvertently allowed myself to assume the form of a large centipede."

p116: "The World and the Flesh have failed us; a third Power remains."

p120: "'Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.'"

p130: "The questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future to help them make."

p138-9: "You must remember that he takes Time for an ultimate reality. He supposes that the Enemy, like himself, sees some things as present, remembers others as past, and anticipates others as future ... he doesn't really think (though he would say he did) that things as the Enemy sees them are things as they are! ... Creation in its entirety operates at every point of space and time."

p140: "'History is bunk.'"

p143: "He feels that he is 'finding his place in it', while really it is finding its place in him."

p158: "The dream became a nightmare and then you woke. You die and die and then you are beyond death. How could I ever have doubted it?"

p159: "What is blinding, suffocating fire to you, is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a Man."

p160: "He is caught up into that world where pain and pleasure take on transfinite values and all our arithmetic is dismayed. Once more, the inexplicable meets us."

George MacDonald sermon

2009-10-13T10:56:06Z

Was such his condition now that the greatest gladness of the universe could express itself only in a loud cry? ... And the mighty story ends with a cry. ... Take me, soothe me, refresh me, make me over again. ... Thou wilt know every shade of my suffering. ... when the storm of the world died away behind his retiring spirit, and he entered the regions where there is only life, and therefore all that is not music is silence, (for all noise comes of the conflict of Life and Death)...