To thine own self be true

Habitant French Canadian Pea Soup.
Super with Premium Plus Crackers.

Camp Maple Syrup

Leonard Cohen

“Arnold Bennett died last night; which leaves me sadder than I should have supposed. A lovable genuine man; impeded, somehow a little awkward in life; well-meaning; ponderous; kindly; coarse; knowing he was coarse; dimly floundering and feeling for something else; glutted with success; wounded in his feelings; avid; thicklipped; prosaic intolerably; rather dignified; set upon writing; yet always taken in; deluded by splendour and success; but naïve; an old bore; an egotist; much at the mercy fof life for all his competence; a shopkeeper’s view of literature; yet with the rudiments, covered over with fat and prosperity and the desire for hideous Empire furniture; of sensibility. Some real understanding power, as well as a gigantic absorbing power. These are the sort of things that I think by fits and starts this morning, as I sit journalising: I remember his determination to write 1,000 words daily; and how he trotted off to do it that night, and feel some sorrow that now he will never sit down and begin mechanically covering his regulation number of pages in his workmanlike beautiful but dull hand. Queer how one regrets the dispersal of anybody who seemed–as I say–genuine: who had direct contact with life–for he abused me; and I yet rather wished him to go on abusing me; and me abusing him. An element in life–even in mine that was so remote–taken away. This is what one minds.”
–Virginia Woolf, Sat., Mar. 28th, 1931, A Writer’s Diary

Note: There is an entry in AB’s diary for 1930 in which he records that he went to a dinner party at which VW was another guest, and adds: “Virginia is all right; other guests held their breath to listen to us.”

(left: dust jacket by VB’s artist-sister Vanessa Bell)

“Here in the few minutes that remain, I must record, heaven be praised the end of The Waves. I wrote the words O Death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity and intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice, or almost, after some sort of speaker (as when I was mad) I was almost afraid, remembering the voices that used to fly ahead. Anyhow it is done; and I have been sitting these 15 minutes in a state of glory, and calm, and some tears, thinking of Thoby [her older dead brother] and if I could write Julian Thoby Stephen 1881-1906 on the first page. I suppose not. How physical the sense of triumph and relief is! Whether good or bad, it’s done; and, as I certainly felt at the end, not merely finished, but rounded off, completed, the thing stated–how hastily, how fragmentarily I know; but I mean I have netted that fin in the waste of water which appeared to me over the marshes out of my window at Rodmell when I was coming to the end of To the Lighthouse.

What interests me in the last stage was the freedom and boldness with which my imagination picked up, used and tossed aside all the images, symbols which I had prepared, I am sure that this is the right way of using them–not in set pieces, as I had tried at first, coherently, but simply as images, never making them work out; only suggest. Thus I hope to have kept the sound of the sea and the birds, dawn and the garden subconsciously present, doing their work under ground.”
–Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

“The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don’t belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist; getting from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional. Why admit anything to literature that is not poetry–by which I mean saturated? Is that not my grudge against novelists? that they select nothing? The poets succeed by simplifying: practically everything is left out. I want to put practically everything in: yet to saturate.”

–Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

makes one believe that almost anything good, nice, or pleasurable is possible.

Anything not bolted down or secured will potentially be vandalized or stolen.

cellphone with you when you head out today, when you go to the bathroom, when you have a meal, and when you wake up in the middle of the night!

gets worn and damaged over time.

There are many frivolous, trivial things and people that distract us and keep us from that which is truly basic and important these daze: Justin, Donald, Kim (Kardashian), cellphones 24/7, pipelines, driverless cars, selfies, etc. Much as in Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us”, we spend our finite transient hours “getting and spending”. Out of touch with ourselves and one another, we are largely alienated from Nature and our immediate physical surroundings.

Above all, thinking and common sense have fallen out of favor and are to be avoided like the plague. We are obsessed only with ego, limited/limiting agendas, and ourselves, viewing ourselves as entitled perpetual victims sans any personal responsibility. In particular, our distracting limited agendas drive our choices. We have simultaneously become ‘connected’, yet isolated from ourselves and the lonely crowd. Doing as the herd-multitudes blindly do, staring into our church-like screen-shrines has created a narrow, limited platform for living, purpose, and meaning. It is, as we used to call it in the ’60s–a plastic or machine-like existence of no great matter or depth, signifying nothing/ness.

Although you could argue that this d-technology obsession is money and materially driven by corporations with their own agendas, ultimately, personal and individual choices and sellouts on a mass basis were made to both facilitate and foster a mass enslavement. I hear the same voice that book and reading aficionado Sven Birkerts once heard that says “Resist it”. And we have no one to blame for any shallowness, soulessness, and purposelessness in our lives and time except ourselves.

Ironically, in the end, the world of 1984 came to pass via a freely-chosen obsession with mere shiny gadgetry, truly leading us to the state of T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men”. The self-destructive submission process was an all-too easy, lazy on without a whimper. People sold out mindlessly and easily and required no external Orwellian dictator to strip us of what once was of most value: our minds and souls.

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”–Proverbs XXIX, 18

“The time is out of joint.”–Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, scene 5

“Common sense is very uncommon.”–Horace Greeley

“Man’s inhumanity to man/Makes countless thousands mourn!”–Robert Burns, “Man Was Made to Mourn”

“Excellent things are rare.”–Plato, The Republic

“Ay, sir; to be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.”–Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2

“When money speaks the truth is silent.”–Russian proverb

“Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.”–Thoreau

“The love of money is the root of all evil.”–I Timothy, VI, 10