“It always seems to me amazing that we had such flawless poets among us in our youth. But for that very reason I also keep wondering, with a kind of secret anxiety: can such artists sworn entirely to the art of poetry exist in our own times, in our new way of life, which chases people out of their own peace of mind like animals running from a forest fire?” ~ Stefan Zweig, The World Of my Father and Mother under Austro Hungarian Empire The World of Yesterday (trans. Anthea Bell)
My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death
There Is No One Like Anyone Else, Ever
“Fiction offers many pleasures – we may enjoy its capacity to make the world anew for us through its descriptions, or to advance our understanding of science or philosophy through its application of ideas to examples of human behaviour, but although it does – on examination – seem so faint as to be numinous, nonetheless it’s our conviction that fictional characters’ hopes, fears and desires matter that allows fictions to become facts on the ground – a ground we sympathetically traverse alongside them.”
“Della and Tatum, Sweet Pea, Imrich and Packy, Ida and Cal. You met a lot of unpretentious people in Philip Levine’s spare, ironic poems of the industrial heartland. … Mr. Levine’s death is a serious blow for American poetry, in part because he so vividly evoked the drudgery and hardships of working-class life in America, and in part because this didn’t pull his poetry down into brackishness.”
~ New York Times
“Annoyed
because I had declined
to
print his poems—two frail barks,
unseaworthy,
I thought—he whined,
included
out-of-place remarks
“alleging
my incompetence,
then
added that I was too old
to
be an editor. What sense
he
may possess should tell him, `Hold
“your
pen! That’s agism! You’re daft!’
Why
burn a useful bridge? Instead,
acknowledge
that the poet’s craft
is
hard, success unsure. Ahead
“new
chances lie; but talk goes round—
Friends,
patrons, publishers might hear,
Concluding
that you’ve run aground.
Miranda
rights for this aren’t clear.
“Envoi
“You’re
doubtless waiting for my death.
Write
on, Sir, but don’t hold your breath.”
“But only in youth does coincidence seem the same as fate. Later, we know that the real course of our lives is decided within us; our paths may seem to diverge from our wishes in a confused and pointless way, but in the end the way always leads us to our invisible destination.”
~ Stefan Zweig, Via Wes Anderson Praise The World of Yesterday (trans. Anthea Bell)
The thing we’ve done that no one else has is match worldwide genetic populations to their languages, so that you’re looking at a comparable set, … showing that language and genes do in fact share similar geographic fault lines.”
-The Atlantic
"If a more provocative book has been written in the last 10 years, I haven’t read it," states Collin Hansen. "But that’s not because David Platt rejects biblical teaching, as we’ve seen with some other young pastors. And that’s not because Counter Culture advances any particular sectarian theological agenda that would repel other evangelicals. Counter Culture is the most controversial book I’ve seen in at least the last decade mostly because he restates the teaching of Jesus and his Word without any qualifications, with little attempt to cast such demanding beliefs in a way that would appeal to modern readers."
"If a more provocative book has been written in the last 10 years, I haven’t read it," states Collin Hansen. "But that’s not because David Platt rejects biblical teaching, as we’ve seen with some other young pastors. And that’s not because Counter Culture advances any particular sectarian theological agenda that would repel other evangelicals. Counter Culture is the most controversial book I’ve seen in at least the last decade mostly because he restates the teaching of Jesus and his Word without any qualifications, with little attempt to cast such demanding beliefs in a way that would appeal to modern readers."