The Mountain Goats are a national treasure and if you don't agree we can never be friends.
"You are cursed more than all cattle"
-The first curse in the Bible is put on the serpent by God (Genesis 3:14).
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work--a life's
work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all
for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something
which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be
difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the
purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the
acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened
to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail,
among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained
by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit.
There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young
man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in
conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is
worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He
must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching
himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything
but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which
any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and
compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes
not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and
victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs
grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but
of the glands.Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and
watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to
say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of
doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the
last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound:
that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I
believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not
because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has
a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's,
the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help
man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and
hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory
of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be
one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
The Clydesdale became a symbol of the Anheuser-Busch beer company (makers of
Budweiser) when August A. Busch II (Gussie Busch) told his father (then current
President of Anheuser Busch) that he needed to come see the new Lincoln car he
had purchased. After admonishing "Gussie" that purchasing a new luxury vehicle
during the depression was unwise, he came out of the brewery in St. Louis and
discovered to his delight a new Studebaker Beer Wagon and a perfectly conformed
Six Horse Hitch of Clydesdales.
The sense of touch; feeling.
The stroke in beating time.
Sensitive mental touch; peculiar skill or faculty; nice perception or discernment; ready power of appreciating and doing what is required by circumstances.
in the slaughter house of love, only the weak survive
those who are not killed for love are dead meat
-ccg
I love it when people cross a line most of us stepped timidly back from during grade school.
From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the earth rolled down.
...
The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon. I have since read that this wave of shadow moves 1,800 miles an hour. Language can give no sense of this sort of speed — 1,800 miles an hour. It was 195 miles wide. No end was in sight — you saw only the edge. It rolled at you across the land at 1,800 miles an hour, hauling darkness like plague behind it. Seeing it, and knowing it was coming straight for you, was like feeling a slug of anaesthetic shoot up your arm … We saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed before it hit.
This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds. How could anything moving so fast not crash, not veer from its orbit amok like a car out of control on a turn?
...We blinked in the light. It was as though an enormous, loping god in the sky had reached down and slapped the earth’s face.
In 1781, in the north of England, Hamilton met new recruit who had "a melancholy hung over his countenance, and wanness preyed on his cheeks", a "universal weakness, but no fixed pain; a noise in his ears, and giddiness of his head". The young soldier would not eat, and he got weaker until the nurse happened to discuss his hometown with him. Hamilton noted that the topic of home seemed to cheer the soldier's spirits; after Hamilton told the young recruit that he could return home, he began eating again and his strength returned.Ostalgie
Ostalgie is a German term referring to nostalgia for life in the former East Germany.Solastalgia
Now available are formerly defunct brands of East German foodstuffs, old state television programmes on video and DVD, and the previously widespread Wartburg and Trabant cars.
...is a neologism coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe a form of homesickness or nostalgia one gets when still at home. It was coined with particular reference to environmental change in one's surroundings due to development or climate change.
I don't think you quite understand how unhappy living in New Mexico made me.
Right now it's important that you understand that I'm happy now and it's because I left.
Someday I'll show you who I would have become had I stayed.
