#read4fun

Ron Keeler Reviews "Bad Meringue"

be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living; train yourself to it - but take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your inmost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.

The lesson of the beet, then, is this: hold up your divine blush, your innate rosy magic or end up brown.

The most intense spiritual experiences all seem to involve the suspension of time. It is the feeling of being outside of time, of being timeless, that is the source of ecstasy in meditation, chanting, hypnosis, and psychedelic drug experiences, Although it is briefer and less lucid, a timeless, egoless state (the ego exists in time, not space) is achieved in sexual orgasm, which is precisely why orgasm feels so good. Even drunks, in their crude, inadequate way, are searching for the time less time. Alcoholism is an imperfect spiritual longing.

They say that February is the shortest month, but you know they could be wrong.  Compared, calendar page against calendar page, it looks to be the shortest, all right. Spread between January and March like lard on bread, it fails to reach the crust on either slice. In its galoshes-- and you'll never catch February in stocking feet-- its a full head shorter than December, although in leap years, when it has growth spurts, it comes up to April's nose.  However more abbreviated than its cousins it may look, February feels longer than any of them, It is the meanest mood of winter, all the more cruel because it will masquerade as spring, occasionally for hours at a time, only to rip off its mask with a sadistic laugh and spit icicles into every gullible face, behavior that grows quickly old. February is pitiless and it is boring. That parade of red numerals on its page adds up to zero: birthdays of politicians, a holiday reserved for rodents, what kind of celebrations are those? The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine's Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's Day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, angsty February has cause for celebration, indeed.  Expect to the extent that it 'tints the buds and swells the leaves within,' February is as useless as the extra r in its name. It behaves like an obstacle, a wedge of slush and mud and ennui, holding both progress and contentment at bay. James Joyce was born in February, as was Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo, which goes to show that writers are poor at beginners, although worse at knowing when to stop.  If February is the color of lard on rye, its aroma is that of wet wool trousers. As for sound, it is an abstract melody played on a squeaky violin, the petty whine of a shrew with cabin fever, O February, you may be little but you're small! Were you twice your tiresome length, few of us would survive to greet the merry month of May.