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Obituarists sharpened their quills in 2014 when word had it the death of Clive James was imminent. Since then we have witnessed a late flowering of poetry, reviews and articles tinged with mortality that revealed to the last his Twainian flair for journalistic self-promotion, albeit in the internet age. Now the quills are out in earnest.
I dreamed Thoreau told me that whenever I was lost, if only I'd remember that it was not I but simply those familiar places of the world that were lost then I would realise at last the trick of standing upright here ... Everywhere, departure opens wide its gates into the nothing that awaits us in the dusk
Hopkins' words highlight how difficult it is for poets or lesser human beings to focus consistently on the particularity of each human being, let alone of each being in the world. Yet this is a necessary condition for recognising the claim that each person and the world make on us. It is no wonder that we sometimes falter in our commitment.
Staring toward the stringy picture through a linguistic lens I have begun to see that the elderly magic, deplored by most religions, was a daughter of coincidence mathematically robed in some downright glorious colours.
It's gone too far. The minute you voice even the smallest doubt about the Current Way of Things you get hammered. If, for example, you ask why large multinationals should profit from aged care, the guardians of Economic Correctness look at you funny. Either they don't get it, or they do and they cast you as an enemy of democracy.
It's difficult to move in this landscape. Haunted and fragile and tragic, there's no place that is benign. A cursed house, the Greeks might say.
Thank God for Bollywood and daytime TV. For the all night partyers and marathon love makers. For the hash brownie bakers, the nut crackers and pot-stirrers ... the drum-beating banjo-twanging wannabe musicians ... the incense wafting up from the first floor through our bathroom vent — frankincense I'm tempted to think.
This is yer suit and yer tie. This is yer glimpse of the sky. This is yer walk in the rain. This is yer dash for the train. This is yer train to the city. This is yer town without pity.
I love reading about the lives of the poets. The ones for whom nothing good ever happened. The ones who were sure that if they did not write, they would surely disappear. The ones who tried to make the invisible visible, and failed; who carried news to this world from another one, as if it were bottles of wine and loaves of bread.
I'm a white man in a white man's world, his mother tongue the lingua franca everywhere. I may not be rich, but I am more or less free, and my calling has let me travel the world. It's easy for me, not having had to fight for mine, to ask us to go deeper than identity when we write. But when James Baldwin says the same thing, it compels.
This place is new to my son, who doesn't know that satin bowerbirds pilfer the brush ... He's busy tracing each scribble in each gum, and my hands are full of his hands, faintly heavy — faintly delicate. A towering deciduous fig hangs over us; its branches are neural pathways, thin at their tips the way memories thin in time.
We're taught to think that aspiration means what you do alone, what sets you apart. As such it is a concept that is both lauded and loaded. Aspiration, neoliberal style, is a secular version of the gospel of prosperity so loved by the prime minister. God, or the Market, smiles on those who aspire to greater things.
181-192 out of 200 results.