John Greenleaf Whittier - Barbara Frietchie

Introduction

http://myweb.northshore.edu/users/sherman/whittier/abolitionist/ft_barbarafrietchie.html

"This poem was written in strict conformity to the account of the incident as I had it from respectable and trustworthy sources. It has since been the subject of a good deal of conflicting testimony, and the story was probably incorrect in some of its details. It is admitted by all that Barbara Frietchie was no myth, but a worthy and highly esteemed gentlewoman, intensely loyal and a hater of the Slavery Rebellion, holding her Union flag sacred and keeping it with her Bible; that when the Confederates halted before her house, and entered her dooryard, she denounced them in vigorous language, shook her cane in their faces, and drove them out; and when General Burnside's troops followed close upon Jackson's, she waved her flag and cheered them. It is stated that May Qnantrell, a brave and loyal lady in another part of the city, did wave her flag in sight of the Confederates. It is possible that there has been a blending of the two incidents." - JGW

Barbara Frietchie

Up from the meadows rich with corn,

Clear in the cool September morn.

The clustered spires of Frederick stand
Green-walled by the hills of Maryland.

Round about them orchards sweep,
Apple and peach tree fruited deep,

Fair as the garden of the Lord
To the eyes of the famished rebel horde,

On that pleasant morn of the early fall
When Lee marched over the mountain-wall;

Over the mountains winding down,
Horse and foot, into Frederick town.

Forty flags with their silver stars,
Forty flags with their crimson bars,

Flapped in the morning wind: the sun
Of noon looked down, and saw not one.

Up rose old Barbara Frietchie then,
Bowed with her fourscore years and ten;

Bravest of all in Frederick town,
She took up the flag the men hauled down;

In her attic window the staff she set,
To show that one heart was loyal yet.

Up the street came the rebel tread,
Stonewall Jackson riding ahead.

Under his slouched hat left and right
He glanced; the old flag met his sight.

"Halt!"--the dust-brown ranks stood fast.
"Fire!"--out blazed the rifle-blast.

It shivered the window, pane and sash;
It rent the banner with seam and gash.

Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff
Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf.

She leaned far out on the window-sill,
And shook it forth with a royal will.

"Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country's flag," she said.

A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,
Over the face of the leader came;

The nobler nature within him stirred
To life at that woman's deed and word.

"Who touches a hair of yon gray head
Dies like a dog! March on!" he said.

All day long through Frederick street
Sounded the tread of marching feet.

All day long that free flag tost
Over the heads of the rebel host.

Ever its torn folds rose and fell
On the loyal winds that loved it well;

And through the hill-gaps sunset light
Shone over it with a warm good-night.

Barbara Frietchie's work is o'er,
And the Rebel rides on his raids no more.

Honor to her! and let a tear
Fall, for her sake, on Stonewall's bier.

Over Barbara Frietchie's grave,
Flag of Freedom and Union, wave!

Peace and order and beauty draw
Round thy symbol of light and law;

And ever the stars above look down
On thy stars below in Frederick town!

- John Greenleaf Whittier

* * * * * * * *

Commentary on Barbara Frietchie

http://myweb.northshore.edu/users/sherman/whittier/abolitionist/barbarafrietchie.html

As a Quaker during wartime, Whittier struggled to write patriotic poetry that wasn’t warlike, he heard a story that inspired such a poem. It was the story of Barbara Frietchie. As in many of his “historical” poems, Whittier used poetic license. When it became controversial, he wrote an introduction:

“This poem was written in strict conformity to the account of the incident as I had it from respectable and trustworthy sources. It has since been the subject of a good deal of conflicting testimony, and the story was probably incorrect in some of the details. It is admitted by all that Barbara Frietchie was no myth, but a worthy and highly esteemed gentlewoman, intensely loyal and a hater of the Slavery Rebellion, holding her Union flag sacred and keeping it with her Bible; that when the Confederates halted before her house, and entered her dooryard, she denounced them in vigorous language, shook her cane in their faces, and drove them out; and when General Burnside’s troops followed close upon Jackson’s she waved her flag and cheered them. It is stated that May Quantrell, a brave and loyal lady in another part of the city, did wave her flag in sight of the Confederates. It is possible that there has been a blending of the two incidents.”

The incident took place in Frederick, Maryland, when the Confederate troops marched in. That morning there had been 40 Union flags flying, but by noon, when the Confederate troops entered, they had all disappeared.

Up rose old Barbara Frietchie then,

Bowed with her fourscore years and ten;

Bravest of all in Frederick town,

She took up the flag the men hauled down;

In her attic window the staff she set, 

To show that one heart was loyal yet.

Up the street came the rebel tread,

Stonewall Jackson riding ahead.

Under his slouched hat left and right

He glanced; the old flag met his sight.

He orders his men to fire on it, and

Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff

Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf.

She leans out the window and says the words that school children were to remember for generations:

“Shoot if you must, this old gray head,

But spare your country’s flag,” she said.

And the reaction of Stonewall Jackson is just as memorable:

The nobler nature within him stirred

To life at that woman’s deed and word:

“Who touches a hair of yon gray head

Dies like a dog! March on!” He said.

All day long that free flag tost

Over the heads of the rebel host.

Barbara represented one of Whittier’s favorite themes: the effectiveness of non-violent action.

* * * * * * * *

Background of Poem - Barbara Fritchie

http://www.ask.com/wiki/Barbara_Fritchie?o=2801&qsrc=999&ad=doubleDown&an=apn&ap=ask.com

From Wikipedia( View original Wikipedia Article )

Last modified on 8 November 2013 at 17:50

For the play based on this historical character, see Barbara Frietchie.

Barbara Fritchie (née Hauer) (December 3, 1766 – December 18, 1862), also known as Barbara Frietchie, and sometimes spelled Frietschie,^[1] was a Unionist during the Civil War. She was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and married John Casper Fritchie, a glove maker, on May 6, 1806.

Biography

She was a friend of Francis Scott Key and they participated together in a memorial service at Frederick, Maryland, when George Washington died. A central figure in the history of Frederick, she lived in a house that has, in modern times, become a stop on the town's walking tour. According to one story, at the age of 95 she waved the Union flag in the middle of the street to block, or at least antagonize Stonewall Jackson's troops, as they passed though Frederick in the Maryland Campaign. This event is the subject of John Greenleaf Whittier's poem of 1864, Barbara Frietchie. When Winston Churchill passed through Frederick in 1943, with President Roosevelt on their way to Shangra-la (nowCamp David), he recited the poem from memory,^[2] an excerpt of which follows.

"Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country's flag," she said.
A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,
Over the face of the leader came;
The nobler nature within him stirred
To life at that woman's deed and word;
"Who touches a hair of yon gray head
Dies like a dog! March on!" he said.....

Barbara Fritchie died at the age of 96 and was interred in Mount Olivet Cemetery, in Frederick City, Maryland.

Barbara Fritchie House and Museum

The Barbara Fritchie House and Museum is located at 154 West Patrick Street, Frederick, Maryland. It is a 1927 reconstruction, based on the original house, which was washed away during a storm.^[3]

In Her Honor

One of the Mid-Atlantic states' top ten horse races was named in her honor; it is one of only seven Grade I or Grade II races run in the state of Maryland. The Barbara Fritchie Handicap is an American race for thoroughbred horses, run at Laurel Park Racecourse in Laurel, Maryland each year. A Grade II race, it is open to fillies and mares age three and up, whose owners are willing to race them seven furlongs on the dirt. It offers a purse of $300,000, and has been run since 1952.

Authenticity of poem

The flag incident in the poem likely never occurred, however, as Barbara Fritchie was sick in bed that day. She told the housekeeper to hide all valuables to prevent looting, and to take in the U.S. flag that hung outside, but it was never moved, and as a result was shot up by the Confederate troops. Accounts differ as to how the legend that inspired the poem arose. The flag, a symbol of the need for myth in times of war, may be seen in the Barbara Fritchie House and Museum.

History disproves the poem with the fact that the Confederate troops never passed by her house. Although they were within range of sight, they would only have been heard by Mrs. Fritchie if they had yelled to her at the top of their lungs.

The troops marched south on Bentz Street and turned west on Patrick Street. To have passed Barbara Fritchie's house, they would have needed to turn east and march a minimum of 1000 feet to have been at her door.^[4]

The woman who inspired the poem, and who was brandishing the flag in front of the Confederate troops, was actually Mary Quantrell who lived on Patrick Street.^[5]

Trumbull Stickney - "In the Past" (poem)

In the Past

There lies a somnolent lake
Under a noiseless sky,
Where never the mornings break
Nor the evenings die.

Mad flakes of colour
Whirl on its even face
Iridescent and streaked with pallour;
And, warding the silent place,

The rocks rise sheer and gray
From the sedgeless brink to the sky
Dull-lit with the light of pale half-day
Thro’ a void space and dry.

And the hours lag dead in the air
With a sense of coming eternity
To the heart of the lonely boatman there:
That boatman am I,

I, in my lonely boat,
A waif on the somnolent lake,
Watching the colours creep and float
With the sinuous track of a snake.

Now I lean o’er the side
And lazy shades in the water see,
Lapped in the sweep of a sluggish tide
Crawled in from the living sea;

And next I fix mine eyes,
So long that the heart declines,
On the changeless face of the open skies
Where no star shines;

And now to the rocks I turn,
To the rocks, around
That lie like walls of a circling sun
Wherein lie bound

The waters that feel my powerless strength
And meet my homeless oar
Labouring over their ashen length
Never to find a shore.

But the gleam still skims
At times on the somnolent lake,
And a light there is that swims
With the whirl of a snake;

And tho’ dead be the hours i’ the air,
And dayless the sky,
The heart is alive of the boatman there:
That boatman am I.


- Trumbull Stickney, 1874-1904


 

Trumbull Stickney - "And, the Last Day Being Come, Man Stood Alone" (poem)

And, the Last Day Being Come, Man Stood Alone

And, the last day being come, Man stood alone
Ere sunrise on the world’s dismantled verge,
Awaiting how from everywhere should urge
The Coming of the Lord. And, behold, none

Did come,—but indistinct from every realm
Of earth and air and water, growing more
And louder, shriller, heavier, a roar
Up the dun atmosphere did overwhelm

His ears; and as he looked affrighted round
Every manner of beast innumerable
All thro’ the shadows crying grew, until
The wailing was like grass upon the ground.

Asudden then within his human side
Their anguish, since the goad he wielded first,
And, since he gave them not to drink, their thirst,
Darted compressed and vital.—As he died,

Low in the East now lighting gorgeously
He saw the last sea-serpent iris-mailed
Which, with a spear transfixèd, yet availed
To pluck the sun down into the dead sea.


- Trumbull Stickney, 1874-1904


 

Aldous Huxley - Bio, Quotes, and Select Video

 

Aldous Huxley quotes
600+ found on link - http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/3487.Aldous_Huxley

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

 - Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29

 

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”

 - Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

 

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”

 - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”

 - Aldous Huxley

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

 - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

 

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”

 - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

 

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”

 - Aldous Huxley

 

“I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.”

 - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

 

“I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.”

 - Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point

 

“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”

 - Aldous Huxley

 

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”

 - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

 

“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.”

 - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

 

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.”

 - Aldous Huxley

 

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”

 - Aldous Huxley

 

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”

 - Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays

 

“I like being myself. Myself and nasty.”

 - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.”

 - Aldous Huxley, Texts & Pretexts: An Anthology With Commentaries

 

“I am I, and I wish I weren't.”

 - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

 

“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”

 - Aldous Huxley

 

“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”

 - Aldous Huxley

 

“All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.”

 - Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

 

“Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions, he added parenthetically, out of Remy de Gourmont.”

 - Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza

 

“The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.”

 - Aldous Huxley

 

“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”

 - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

 

“Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.”

 - Aldous Huxley, Do What You Will: Twelve Essays

 

“Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.”

 - Aldous Huxley

 

“Every man's memory is his private literature.”

 - Aldous Huxley

 

“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”

 - Aldous Huxley

 

“Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.”

 - Aldous Huxley

 

“Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.”

 - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

 

 

 

Biography

Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley /ˈhʌksli/ (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and a prominent member of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel writing, film stories and scripts. He spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death.
 

Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist. He later became interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism,^[1][2] in particular Vivekananda's Neo-Vedanta and Universalism.^[3] He is also well known for his use of psychedelic drugs.

 

By the end of his life Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time.^[4]

 

 

 

 

Biography.com

http://www.biography.com/people/aldous-huxley-9348198

 

Aldous Huxley was born July 26, 1894, in Godalming, England. He published his first book in 1916 and worked on the periodical Athenaeum 1919–1921. Thereafter he devoted himself largely to his own writing and spent much of his time in Italy until the late 1930s, when he settled in California. He established himself as a major author in his first two published novels, Crome Yellow and Antic Hay.

 

 

 

EGS.edu

http://www.egs.edu/library/aldous-huxley/biography/

 

Aldous Huxley, was a British writer. He was born on July 26, 1894 and died on November 22, 1963. He would become most specifically known to the public for his novels, and especially his fifth one, Brave New World, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Aldous Huxley was born on July 26th 1894 in Godalming in the Surrey county in southern England. He would be the son of the English schoolteacher and writer Leonard Huxley (1860 - 1933) and of Julia Arnold (1862 - 1908). More than literature, however, Aldous Huxley would in fact be born into a family of renowned scientists, with two of his three brothers, Julian and Andrew, who would be eminent biologists and a grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, who would be a famous, controversial naturalist in his time, nicknamed as “Darwin’s Bulldog”.

Aldous Huxley would come to be known mostly as a novelist and essayist but he would also write some short stories, poetry, travelogues and even film scripts. In his novels and essays Aldous Huxley would always play the role of a critical observer of accepted traditions, customs, social norms and ideals. Importantly, he would be concerned in his writings with the potentially harmful applications of so-called scientific progress to mankind.

At the age of 14 Aldous Huxley would lose his mother and he himself would subsequently become ill in 1911 with a disease that would leave him virtually blind. As if all of this was note enough, his other brother, Noel, would kill himself in 1914. Because of his sight he would not be able to do the scientific research that had attracted him earlier. Aldous Huxley would then turn himself to literature. It is important to note that in spite of a partial remission, his eyesight would remain poor for the rest of his life. This would not, however prevent him from obtaining a degree in English literature with high praises.

While continuing his education at Balliol College, one of the institutions at Oxford University in England, Aldous Huxley would not longer be financially supported by his father, which would make him having to earn living. For a brief period in 1918, he would be employed as a clerk of the Air Ministry, which would convince him that he does not want a career in either administration or business. As result, his need for money would lead him to apply his literary talents. It is around those days that he would become friends with the famous writer D.H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930) at Oxford.

Aldous Huxley would finish his first novel, which he would never publish, at the age of seventeen, and he would decisively turn to writing at the age of twenty. At that point he would publish poems and also become a journalist and art critic. This would allow him to frequently travel and mingle with the European intelligentsia of the time. He would meet surrealists in Paris and would as a result of all of this write many literary essays. Aldous Huxley were to be deeply concerned about the important changes occurring at the time in Western civilization. They would prompt him to write great novels in the 1930s about the serious threats posed by the combination of power and technical progress, as well as about what he identified as a drift in parapsychology: behaviorism (as in his Brave New World). Additionally he would write against war and nationalism, as in Eyeless in Gaza (1936), for example.

One of his most known novels, and arguably his most important, would be Brave New World. Aldous Huxley would write it in only four months. It is important to note that at that time Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945) was not yet in power in Germany and that the Stalinist purges had not yet begun. Aldous Huxley had therefore not been able to tap into the reality of his time the dictatorial future he would have the foresight to write about before it had happened. Indeed here Aldous Huxley imagined a society that would use genetics and cloning in order to condition and control individuals. In this future society all children are conceived in test tubes. They are genetically conditioned to belong to one of the five categories of populations, from the most intelligent to the stupidest.

 

Brave New World would also delineate what the perfect dictatorship would look like. It would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be, as Aldous Huxley tells us, a system of slavery where, through entertainment and consumption the slaves “would love their servitude”. To many this would and still does resonate with the contemporary status quo. The title of the book comes from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610 - 1611), Act 5 Scene 1. Aldous Huxley’s novel would in fact eventually be made into a film in 1998. Although this one contains many elements from the book, the film would however portray a rather different storyline.

In 1937 he would write a book of essays entitled Ends and Means: an Enquiry Into the Nature of Ideals and Into the Methods Employed for Their Realization in which he would explore some of the same themes:

“A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.”

In 1958 Aldous Huxley would publish Brave New World Revisited, a collection of essays in which he would think critically about the threats of overpopulation, excessive bureaucracy, as well as some hypnosis techniques for personal freedom. While Aldous Huxley’s early works would clearly be focused on defending a kind of humanism, he would become more and more interested in spiritual questions. He would particularly become interested in parapsychology and mysticism, which would be a subject matter on which he would also write a lot about. It is not really surprising, therefore, that in 1938 Aldous Huxley would become a friend of religious philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 - 1986), considered by some to be a mystique himself, largely because of his early association with the Theosophical Society, from which he would powerfully break away from. In any case, Huxley would become a great admirer of this one’s teachings and would encourage him to put his insights in writings. Aldous Huxley would even write the forward for Jiddu Krishnamurti’s The First and Last Freedom (1954). Tellingly, Huxley would state after having listened to one of Krishnamurti’s talks:

 

“... the most impressive thing I have listened to. It was like listening to a discourse of the Buddha - such power, such intrinsic authority...”

In 1937, the writer would move to California and became a screenwriter for Hollywood. At the same time he would continue writing novels and essays, including the satirical novel After Many a Summer (1939) and Ape and Essence (1948). In 1950 the American Academy of Arts and Letters would award him the prestigious Award of Merit for the Novel, a prize that had also been bestowed to illustrious writers such as Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961) and Thomas Mann (1875 - 1955). Aldous Huxley would also be the author of an essay on the environment that would greatly inspire future ecological movements.

The 1950s would be a time of experiences with psychedelic drugs for him, especially LSD and mescaline, from which he would write the collection of essays The Doors of Perception (1954), which would become a narrative worshipped by hippies. The book would also inspire the famous singer Jim Morrison (1943 - 1971), to call his band “The Doors”. Aldous Huxley himself had found the title of the book in William Blake’s (1757 - 1827) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

By the end of his life Aldous Huxley would be considered by many as a visionary thinker. The so-called “New Age” school of thought would often quote his mystical writings and studies of hallucinogens, and in fact it continues to do so today. Considered one of the greatest English writers having written 47 books, Aldous Huxley would die at the age of 69 in Los Angeles on November 22 1963, the same day as President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Aldous Huxley would be cremated and his ashes would be buried in the family vault in the UK.

 

Aldous Huxley interviewed by Mike Wallace : 1958 (Full)

 

 

 

 

Aldous Huxley on human thought and expression

(lecture on language)

 

 

 

 

Aldous Huxley - Speech at UC Berkeley, The Ultimate Revolution 1962

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thomas Merton Quotes & Sayings

 

Love Always Wins

 

“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.” ~ Thomas Merton, Love and Living

 

"In technological society, in which the means of communication and signification have become fabulously versatile, and are at the point of an even more prolific development, thanks to the computer with its inexhaustible memory and its capacity for immediate absorption and organization of facts, the very nature and use of communication itself becomes unconsciously symbolic. Though he now has the capacity to communicate anything, anywhere, instantly, man finds himself with nothing to say. Not that there are not many things he could communicate, or should attempt to communicate. He should, for instance, be able to meet with his fellow man and discuss ways of building a peaceful world. He is incapable of this kind of confrontation. Instead of this, he has intercontinental ballistic missiles which can deliver nuclear death to tens of millions of people in a few moments. This is the most sophisticated message modern man has, apparently, to convey to his fellow man. It is, of course, a message about himself, his alienation from himself, and his inability to come to terms with life.“ ~ Thomas Merton, Love and Living

 

“If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success . . . If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.” ~ Thomas Merton, Love and Living

 

 

 

 

Wikipedia Bio (Link)

 

Thomas Merton, O.C.S.O. (January 31, 1915 – December 10, 1968), was an Anglo-American Catholic writer and mystic. A Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky, he was a poet, social activist, and student of comparative religion. In 1949, he was ordained to the priesthood and given the name Father Louis.

 

Merton wrote more than 70 books, mostly on spirituality, social justice and a quiet pacifism, as well as scores of essays and reviews, including his best-selling autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), which sent scores of World War II veterans, students, and even teenagers flocking to monasteries across the US, and was also featured in National Review's list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century. Merton was a keen proponent of interfaith understanding. He pioneered dialogue with prominent Asian spiritual figures, including the Dalai Lama, the Japanese writer D.T. Suzuki, and the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Merton has also been the subject of several biographies.

 

Merton's influence has grown since his death and he is widely recognized as an important 20th-century Catholic mystic and thinker. Interest in his work contributed to a rise in spiritual exploration beginning in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. Merton's letters and diaries reveal the intensity with which their author focused on social justice issues, including the civil rights movement and proliferation of nuclear arms. He had prohibited their publication for 25 years after his death. Publication raised new interest in Merton's life.

 





 

“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”  ~ Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude 

 



Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu





~ Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island



 

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them” ~ Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

 

“You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.” ~ Thomas Merton

 

“If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.” ~ Thomas Merton

 

“To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us - and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him. ~ Thomas Merton

 

Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.” ~ Thomas Merton

 

“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.” ~ Thomas Merton

 

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.” ~ Thomas Merton

 

 

 

 

“The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.” ~ Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

 

“Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself.” ~ Thomas Merton

 

“If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.” ~ Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

 

“Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.” ~ Thomas Merton

 

“Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in another.” ~ Thomas Merton

 

“Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.” ~ Thomas Merton

 

 

 

 

“Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.” ~ Thomas Merton

 

“Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism.” ~ Thomas Merton

 

“A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.” ~ Thomas Merton

 

“Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.” ~ Thomas Merton

 

“But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.” ~ Thomas Merton

 

“Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity.” ~ Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

 

“Keeping a journal has taught me that there is not so much new in your life as you sometimes think. When you re-read your journal you find out that your latest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. Still, it is true that one penetrates deeper and deeper into the same ideas and the same experiences.” ~ Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

 

“If you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy. If you write for men--you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while. If you write for yourself, you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted that you will wish that you were dead.” ~ Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation

 

“Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.” ~ Thomas Merton

 

 

 

 

“To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times.” ~ Thomas Merton

 

“Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair.” ~ Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

 

“By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.” ~ Thomas Merton

 

“Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.” ~ Thomas Merton
 

 

 

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Thomas Merton with his students at Bellarmine University



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

R.E. Slater - A Second Sight (a poem)

Photo: Edward James

A Second Sight

by R.E. Slater

There is no second sight in passage,

we grope towards futures blind,

hopeful, brave, unknowing,

believing kinder days lie ahead.

And on that morning's final day,

when death doth come arising,

may it be quick, incautious, merciful,

met like any other day's mourning.

As there is an end to life in death,

so is there an end to death in life,

each measuring the other's half,

testing vigor, strength, and soul.

Meeting winter’s end with fairer spring,

waking small flowers to rise and greet,

each one blessed, unique, e'er frail,

refrains to tomorrow’s hope reshaped.


- R.E. Slater

October 15, 2013
In honor of my father's passing this day
*Adapted, “Head in the Clouds”

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved

Untitled Poem

"Head in the Clouds"

There is no second sight.

We grope towards our future blind
It's kinder that way.

On the mourning of her final day,
she came to her death clear-eyed,
brave, unknowing.

And when the snow melts,
spring has come,
there is an end to war.

One small flower
blessed, unique,
will flower no more.