A Collection

This is simply a collection of the things that I’ve read in the past week: snippets, if you will, from what I’m trying to put together in my head. I guess this is most aptly what I'm doing with my life.

11
Thirty spokes converge upon a single hub;
It is on the hole in the center that the use of the cart hinges.

We make a vessel from a lump of clay;
It is the empty space within the vessel that makes it useful.

We make doors and windows for a room;
But it is the empty spaces that make the room livable.

Thus, while the tangible has advantages,
It is the intangible that makes it useful.

--The Tao Teh Ching

“It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between “literally” and “figuratively.” If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively; it feels like it’s happening. If you are literally jumping for joy, for instance, it means that you are leaping in the air because you are very happy. If you are figuratively jumping for joy, it means that you are so happy that you could jump for joy, but are saving your energy for other matters. The Baudelaire orphans walked back to Count Olaf’s neighborhood and stopped at the home of Justice Strauss, who welcomed them inside and let them choose books from the library. Violet chose several about mechanical inventions, Klaus chose several about wolves, and Sunny found a book with many pictures of teeth inside. They then went to their room and crowded together on the one bed, reading intently and happily. Figuratively, they escaped from Count Olaf and their miserable existence. They did not literally escape, because they were still in his house and vulnerable to Olaf’s evil in loco parentis ways. But by immersing themselves in their favorite reading topics, they felt far away from their predicament, as if they had escaped. In the situation of the orphans, figuratively escaping was not enough, of course, but at the end of a tiring and hopeless day, it would have to do. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny read their books and, in the back of their minds, hoped that soon their figurative escape would eventually turn into a literal one.”

--Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, No. 1: The Bad Beginnings, or Orphans!, Ch 3, last paragraph

"Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or think, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!" 


-- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, Ch. 13

“The external proletariat (including, as its largest part, the peasantry), which came to provide the Soviet leadership with a mass basis for the struggle against capitalism after the First World War, emerged as a historical “subject” seemingly by virtue of (from the Marxian standpoint) an exogenous event, namely, by, virtue of the fact that the revolution succeeded in backward Russia, failed to materialize in the advanced industrial countries, and subsequently spread from Russia into preindustrial areas, while the advanced industrial countries continued to remain immune. But this event was not quite as exogenous as it seems… The sustained weakness of the revolutionary potential in the advanced industrial countries confined the revolution to that area where the proletariat had not been thus affected and where the regime had shown political disintegration together with economic backwardness.”

--Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis, Ch. 1: Marxian Concept of the Transition to Socialism

“The right of nature, which writers commonly call jus naturale, is the liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life; and consequently, of doing any thing, which in his own judgment, and reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto… And consequently it is a precept, or general rule of reason, that every man, ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek, and use, all helps, and advantages of war. The first branch of which rule, containeth the first, and fundamental law of nature; which is, to seek peace, and follow it. The second, the sum of the right of nature; which is, by all means we can, to defend ourselves.”

--Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. 14: On the First and Second Natural Laws, and of Contracts.

“It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who's showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already, I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace”

--Thom Gunn, The Hug