Excerpts: The Book of Poverty and Death, Rainier Maria Rilke's The Book of Hours

The big cities are not true; they betray
the day, the night, animals and children.
They lie with silence, they lie with noise
and with all that lets itself be used.

None of the vast events that move around you
happens there. In streets and alleys
your winds falter and churn,
and in frenzied traffic grow confused.

You who know, and whose vast knowing
is born of poverty, abundance of poverty--

make it so the poor are no longer
despised and thrown away.

Look at them standing about--
like wildflowers, which have nowhere else to grow.

-- Rainier Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours,
excerpts from Book III, The Book of Poverty and Death, pp. 13, 19

Tangled

When we try

to 

pick 

out 

anything 

by itself,

we find it
hitched to everything else in the Universe.

-- John Muir,
My First Summer in the Sierra
1911 | page 110

(arranged quote)

Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

-- W.S. Merwin

This honor and privilege

It is an honor
and a privilege to
be alive,

however briefly,
on this marvelous planet
we call Earth.

- Edward Abbey
(arranged quote)

Pretty Chaotic

When we contemplate the whole globe as

one great dewdrop, striped and 

dotted with continents and islands, flying 

through space with other stars 

all singing and shining together as one, the 

whole universe appears as 

an infinite storm of beauty.

-- John Muir
Travels in Alaska
1915 | chapter 1 | page 5

(arranged quote)

Paradise Now

Bless and sit down.
Forgive and forget.

Practice kindness all day to everybody
and you will realize you're already
in heaven now.

-Jack Kerouac

(taken from letter to Edie Kerouac Parker, January 1957)

Nature's Peace

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

Nature's peace will flow into you 

as sunshine flows into trees. 

The winds will blow their own freshness into you, 

and the storms their energy, while 

cares will drop off like 

autumn leaves.

-- John Muir, Our National Parks, 1901, page 56

(arranged quote)

(and happy belated birthday, Mr. Muir, April 21)

Callow Resistance

Can it be that we do not love to be reminded
that we are very young
and callow
in a world that was old when
we came into it?

And could there be a strong resistance
to the certainty
that a living world will
continue its stately way when
we no longer inhabit it?

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America
(arranged quote)

The way you get in the wilderness

I watched,
not bored
not fascinated

simple-minded,

the way you get sometimes
in the wilderness, or
on the water.

-Kenneth Brower, 
(on sitting in a canoe 
with George Dyson, 
in the Inner Passage)
(arranged quote)

The Very Edge

Here I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying,
everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,
and the moon swam back,
its rays all silvered,
and time and again the darkness would be broken
by the crash of a wave,
and every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning.

-- Pablo Neruda

Enlightened

History must yield to
a more fully developed understanding

of the invidious quality of
discrimination.

-- Chief Justice Marshall, Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusets
(Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, 798 N.E.2d 941, 958 (Mass. 2003)).
(arranged quote)

Procession

We spend most of our adulthoods
trying to grasp the meanings
of our parents’ lives. How we shape

and answer those questions largely
turns us into who we are.

-Phillip Lopate
(arranged quote)

Reality Check

The first task

of reason

is to recognise its

own limitations.


-Peter Stone, paraphrasing Immanuel Kant
(arranged quote)

Words

Then it occurred to me
that the delicate shades
of feeling, of reaction,
are the result of communication,

and without such communication
they tend to disappear.

A man with nothing to say has no words.

Can its reverse be true—a man
who has no one to say anything to
has no words
as he has no need
for words?

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America

No Illusions

And perhaps it’s this
that defines the atheist:

the intuition that,
were we to believe in God,
no amount of religious code,
no matter how muscular,
could ever prevent us
from falling headlong into him.

Because we know ourselves.
We have no illusions.
We recognize perfectly
our own insignificance, and with it
how feeble our claim on sanity really is.

We cling to the earth with our toenails.

-- Oliver Broudy, The Convert
(arranged quote)

Survival

And the desert,
the dry and sun-lashed
desert, is a good school in which
to observe the cleverness and
the infinite variety of techniques of
survival
under pitiless opposition.

Life could not change the sun
or water the desert, so
it changed itself.

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America

Enriched

Life is enriched 

by aspiration and effort, 

rather than 

by acquisition and accumulation.

- Helen and Scott Nearing, Living The Good Life
(arranged quote)

Sufficient

It is not the greatness

of a man’s means

that makes him independent, so much as

the smallness of his wants


– William Cobbett
(arranged quote)

Home

In three hundred years
the American soul
has not found
a home.

-- Norman Cousins

Sailor Man

He was the one who followed
Dreams and stars and ships,
They say the wind had fastened
Strange words upon his lips.

There was something secret
In the way he smiled
As if he could remember
The laughter of a child.

Wayward as a seagull,
Lonely as a hawk
Yet he believed in fairies
And heard the mermaids talk.

Nothing ever held him
Longer than a day,
They speak of him as careless,
And whimsical and gay.

But I think he swaggered
So he could pretend
The other side of Nowhere
Led somewhere in the end.

- H. Sewall Bailey

The Wilderness Provides the Ultimate Delight

To countless people 

the wilderness provides 

the ultimate delight 

because it combines 

the thrills of 

jeopardy and beauty. 

It is the last stand for 

that glorious adventure 

into the physically unknown.

-- Bob Marshall

The Meaning

What does life mean?
A silly question, really;
the grammatical equivalent
of an Escher staircase.

Why should life mean anything?
And who should have reason to care,
except on those long nights
when the void looms so far and dark

that by sheer force of nothingness
the question is sucked into being,
implying the existence of an answer
larger than any you have at hand?

-- Oliver Broudy, The Convert

(arranged quote)