Murmur Of The World

“Let’s ask, ‘How big is the sun?’ Are we going to define the sun as limited by the extent of its fire? That’s one possible definition. But we could equally well define the sphere of the sun by the extent of its light.”

…it is more difficult to love God than to believe in Him.

Nor can we deny that we all eat and that each of us has grown strong on the bodies of innumerable animals. Here each of us is a king in a field of corpses.

To reveal your feelings is to bare your breast for a blow you are already too weak to receive or endure, much less manage to return.

The Disappointed One Speaks— ‘I listened for the echo and I heard only praise.’

Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery.

The greatest gift of life on the mountain is time. Time to think or not think, read or not read, scribble or not scribble – to sleep and cook and walk in the woods, to sit and stare at the shapes of the hills. I produce nothing but words; I consumer nothing but food, a little propane, a little firewood. By being utterly useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself.

Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason, you sing.

We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.

The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self

Silence is just like the color black. It’s meaningful. Strong. Deep. It does absolutely nothing yet explains everything. You can write pages about it. It’s elegant and noble without trying. All this, and it doesn’t even make a sound.

I have always adored our creator as perfect, but never his creation. I have never denied the evil in the world. No true thinker has ever affirmed that life on earth is harmonious and just, or that man is good, my dear friend. On the contrary. The holy Bible expressly states that the strivings and doings of man’s heart are evil, and every day we see this confirmed anew.

I have never been able to understand people with consistent lives – people who, for example, grow up in a liberal Catholic household and stay that way; or who in junior high school are already laying down a record on which to run for president one day. Imagine having no discarded personalities, no vestigial selves, no visible ruptures with yourself, no gulf of self-forgetfulness, nothing that requires explanation, no alien version of yourself that requires humor and accommodation. What kind of life is that?

If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don’t speak, it’s because everything’s perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.