Those who marry God can become domesticated too--it's just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word "Love" means a forma...l touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and "Ave Maria" like "dearest" is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world's marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves--it was God's taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sometime after the Enlightenment, science and religion came to a gentleman's agreement. Science was for the real world: machines, ...manufactured things, medicines, guns, moon rockets. Religion was for everything else, the immeasurable: morals, sacraments, poetry, insanity, death, and some residual forms of politics and statesmanship. Religion became, in both senses of the word, immaterial. Science and religion were apples and or anges. So the pact said: render unto apples the things that are Caesar's, and unto oranges the things that are God's. Just as the Maya kept two calendars, one profane and one priestly, so Western science and religion fell into two different conceptions of the universe, two different vocabularies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Have you learned the alphabet of heaven and can count three? Do you know the number of God's family? Can you put mysteries into wo...rds? Do you presume to fable of the ineffable? Pray, what geographer are you, that speak of heaven's topography? Whose friend are you, that speak of God's personality?... Yet we have a sort of family history of our God,--so have the Tahitians of theirs,--and some old poet's grand imagination is imposed on us as adamantine everlasting truth, and God's own word. Pythagoras says, truly enough, "A true assertion respecting God is an assertion of God"; but we may well doubt if there is any example of this in literature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I begin, then, with some remarks about 'the meaning of a word.' I think many persons now see all or part of what I shall say: but ...not all do, and there is a tendency to forget, or to get it slightly wrong. In so far as I am merely flogging the converted, I apologize to them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Between a sign and the thing it signifies there is the fixed, determined relationship of cause and effect. We see this in the case... of the footprint in the sand, the tear on the eyelash, or the trademark of a commercial product. But no matter how closely tied a symbol is to the thing symbolized, the relation is variable, flexible, and free. It is in poetry, however, that the symbolic value of words reaches its apex. The cross has become the symbol of Christianity not because of its form but because the Christians, following St. Paul, at a definite moment in their history, decided to adopt the instrument of Christ's torture as their emblem. Similarly, the relation between a word and its meaning depends on its origin, its history, and its usage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It cannot in the opinion of His Majesty's Government be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some r...isk of terminological inexactitude.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is never finality in the display terminal's screen, but an irresponsible whimsicality, as words, sentences, and paragraphs a...re negated at the touch of a key. The significance of the past, as expressed in the manuscript by a deleted word or an inserted correction, is annulled in idle gusts of electronic massacre.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Look at this poet William Carlos Williams: he is primitive and native, and his roots are in raw forest and violent places; he is w...ord-sick and place-crazy. He admires strength, but for what? Violence! This is the cult of the frontier mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »