CARL SAGAN from The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues.

When the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites - now down to 10 seconds or less - lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

NORMAN MAILER

I don’t know if I need seclusion, but I do like to be alone in a room.

DŌGEN

The moon reflected
In a mind clear
As still water:
Even the waves, breaking,
Are reflecting its light.

JULIAN RANDALL - “The King Is Dead, Long Live the King”

Heaven is the certainty that you will be avenged
           I know            I know             the kingdom is not fair
but it’s what I have  a montage of red and a mitosis
           of knuckles    I’m not sure how you could expect me
to love anything       Ain’t no question
                                                sadness is regal like that
                           golden and replaceable  once I wanted
a lineage of identical men             once a mouth soft and hot
as the quickest way that gold can hurt you     You see
           a pattern yet?            I practice the want of nothing       and fail
                                           I’ve been shown how ugly I can be
when I am invisible
                                           I don’t believe in yesterdays
The throat of loneliness?              Straddled with my knife
            I press my hands to my face         and the lament is a valley
the light sags through          What do you do when you have
                      lost Everything?         Rewrite the history of Everything
I don’t like my smile             because someone told me I didn’t like it
            Now I am gorgeous in all the languages I mothered
                        Flex the antonym of Missing             I avenge myself
Stretch my hands      I orphan my grief for the living and it is beauty
                                                            ain’t no question          I monarch
the lonely       I my own everything now I miss my love and
           it is an American grief          I strike the smell from nostalgia
cut my memory to spite my country        What is the odor of nothing
           but my dominion in want of excess             I grin and pillars of                       bone flower
into sawed-off crowns           say I flex the light and the light flexes
            heat shimmer             unfurling like a bicep           my lust a                              mirage
where the body is merely a congealing of the river           I can feel it
  slowly drifting away from me     The world I knew is gone
and getting more gone           and my anthem populating my nose
           with an abundance of salt  I slip the shroud over the life I named
and forget I belonged to someone once         My sovereign’s face is a riot
of diamonds whining        This will be a beautiful death      and I am             free
and gorgeous and desperate to never have to miss anyone again
I rock the jeweled shroud           become the bride of my own sad light

SHARA McCALLUM - “No Ruined Stone”

When the dead return
they will come to you in dream
and in waking, will be the bird
knocking, knocking against glass, seeking
a way in, will masquerade
as the wind, its voice made audible
by the tongues of leaves, greedily
lapping, as the waves’ self-made fugue
is a turning and returning, the dead
will not then nor ever again
desert you, their unrest
will be the coat cloaking you,
the farther you journey
from them the more
that distance will maw in you,
time and place gulching
when the dead return to demand
accounting, wanting
and wanting and wanting
everything you have to give and nothing
will quench or unhunger them
as they take all you make as offering.
Then tell you to begin again.

GRAHAM HANCOCK

In our society, if we want to insult somebody, we call them “a dreamer.” In ancient societies, that was praise.

FLORENCE RIPLEY MASTIN - “Dust”

My words are dust.
I who would build a star,
I who would touch the heel of the white sun;
Staggering up the inaccessible sky,
I look upon the dust.
The stainless clouds go mounting
In shining spires;
And a little heap of dust
Are my desires.
Yet, dwelling long upon these peaks
Unchained upon the flickering western sky,
I have beheld them at the breath of darkness
Fade slowly out and die.
What of my lineage?
Arrogant and swift,
I bend above the dust,
Untouched of all my grief,
Untarnished of the hour,
And lo! the leaf—
The passionate climbing flower!

SAMUEL R. DELANY from Dhalgren

Babes, I am so bored here that I don’t think, since I’ve come, I’ve ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.

RYAN ADAMS - "Oh My Sweet Carolina"

I went down to Houston
And I stopped in San Antone
I passed up the station for the bus
I was trying to find me something
But I wasn't sure just what
Man I ended up with pockets full of dust

So I went on to Cleveland and I ended up insane
I bought a borrowed suit and learned to dance
I was spending money like the way it likes to rain
Man I ended up with pockets full of 'caine

Oh my sweet Carolina
What compels me to go
Oh my sweet disposition
May you one day carry me home

I ain't never been to Vegas
But I gamble all my life
Building newsprint boats I race to sewer mains
Was trying to find me something
But I wasn't sure just what
Funny how they say that some things never change

Oh my sweet Carolina
What compels me to go
Oh my sweet disposition
May you one day carry me home

Up here in the city feels like things are closing in
The sunsets just my light bulb burning out
I miss Kentucky and I miss my family
All the sweetest winds they blow across the south

Oh my sweet Carolina
What compels me to go
Oh my sweet disposition
May you one day carry me home

May you one day carry me home

FRIDA KAHLO

You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and who brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.

HANNAH ARENDT from The Origins of Totalitarianism

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Scenes from "Little Red Riding Hood"

by Edward Gorey

ORSON WELLES

Gluttony is not a secret vice.

FANNIE LOU HAMER

Black people know what white people mean when they say “law and order.”

NĀGĀRJUNA - “Space”

No trace of space
Is there before
The absence of obstruction
Which describes it.

With no obstruction,
How can there be
Absence of obstruction?
Who distinguishes between them?

Space is not obstruction
Or an absence of it,
Nor is it a description
Or something to describe.

Fluidity and heat,
Energy and gravity
Are just like space.

In seeing things
To be or not to be
Fools fail to see
A world at ease.

THOMAS MERTON from No Man is an Island

It is useless to try to make peace with ourselves by being pleased with everything we have done. In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must withdraw ourselves, to some extent, from effects that are beyond our control and be content with the good will and the work that are the quiet expression of our inner life. We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work without expecting an immediate reward, to love without an instantaneous satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition.

CAROLYN FORCHÉ - “Elegy”

The page opens to snow on a field: boot-holed month, black hour
the bottle in your coat half voda half winter light.
To what and to whom does one say yes?
If God were the uncertain, would you cling to him?
Beneath a tattoo of stars the gate open, so silent so like a tomb.
This is the city you most loved, an empty stairwell
where the next rain lifts invisibly from the Seine.
With solitude, your coat open, you walk
steadily as if the railings were there and your hands weren’t passing
through them.
“When things were ready, they poured on fuel and touched off the fire.
They waited for a high wind. It was very fine, that powdered bone.
It was put into sacks, and when there was enough we went to a bridge
on the Narew River.”
And even less explicit phrases survived:
“To make charcoal.
For laundry irons.”
And so we revolt against silence with a bit of speaking.
The page is a charred field where the dead would have written
We went on. And it was like living through something again one
could not live through again.
The soul behind you no longer inhabits your life: the unlit house
with its breathless windows and a chimney of ruined wings
where wind becomes an aria, your name, voices from a field,
And you, smoke, dissonance, a psalm, a stairwell.

CHRIS WILLIAMS from Ecology and Socialism

A world economic system predicated on relentless growth, devouring increasing amounts of raw materials and energy and spewing out ever-larger amounts of toxic waste products, has produced a whole series of environmental threats: species extinction, air and water pollution, genetically modified organisms, desertification, deforestation, soil depletion, and the ever-present possibility of nuclear warfare, to name only a few.

However, as it intersects with all other threats, and furthermore has a tendency to aggravate them, the most urgent and all-encompassing of these is global climate change. 

DŌGEN

Like tangled hair,
The circular delusion
Of beginning and end,
When straightened out,
A dream no longer.

SAMUEL BECKETT from The End

I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation. 

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER - “Track”

2 A.M. moonlight. The train has stopped
out in a field. Far off sparks of light from a town,
flickering coldly on the horizon
As when a man goes so deep into his dream
he will never remember he was there
when he returns again to his view
Or when a person goes so deep into a sickness
that his days all become some flickering sparks, a swarm
feeble and cold on the horizon
The train is entirely motionless
2 o’clock: strong moonlight, few stars

MARLENE DIETRICH as Frenchy in Destry Rides Again

And when I die, don’t pay the preacher, for speaking of my glory and my fame; just see what the boys in the back room will have, and tell them I sigh, tell them I cry, and tell them I died of the same.

James Merrill - “A Silence”

No coffin without nails.
This one you drive into mine
At least is golden.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

I despise the kind of book that tells you how to make yourself happy. The first duty of philosophy is making you understand what deep shit you are in.

H. L. HIX - "Blur"

Turns out lots of lines prove blurry I once thought sharp.
Some blur from further away, some from closer in.
Plant/animal, for instance. On which side, and why,
the sessile polyps, corals and sea anemones?
Same problem saying why my self must be internal.
Where do I see those finches glinting at the feeder?
To experience the is-ness of what is,
I’d need to locate the here-ness of what’s here.
Or be located by it. Or share location with it.
There’s a line I want to blur: between my senses
and my self. And another: between my senses
and the world. That anemone looks more like a lily
than an appaloosa. Looks, and acts. I feel that fizz
of finches sparkle on my tongue, the back of my throat.
I don’t say these words until I hear them. My voice
visits. Is visitation. I would choose the role
of visitor over visited, if I got to choose.
Those finches trill and warble in sequences of phrases.
I can tell there’s pattern, but not what the pattern is.
I can say I hear them (I do hear them) in my sleep,
but I can’t say what that means. Their twitters and chirps
start early, before I wake. I can say they chatter all day
(they do), when I’m hearing them and when I’m not,
but I can’t say how I know that. The back of my hand
always feels as if it’s just been lightly touched.

Greta Garbo by Edward Steichen, 1928

ORSON WELLES

We now sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.

NĀGĀRJUNA - “Dedicatory Verse”

I prostrate to the Perfect Buddha,
The best of teachers, who taught that
Whatever is depedently arisen is
Unceasing, unborn,
Unannihilated, not permanent,
Not coming, not going,
Without distinction, without identity,
And free from conceptual construction.

TARJEI VESAAS - “Sun-Corner”

At home there’s a sun-corner
where spring quietly stirs.
Dripping all day long.

Clear drops from the snow-rim,
they reflect both good and bad
in their brief fall, and are shattered.
The sun is a hot cataract.

In that sun-corner,
where you were born -
it’s those drops that should
mirror you, and wet your lips,
pure from the snow-rim and
right into your heart.

It’s in that faint smell of
spring moisture you should fall asleep.
That call you should heed.
There, everything would feel right.

It’s all moving downhill.
Everything’s oozing toward a distant
goal,
on its way to the sea.
An unknown sea inside a dream.
All of spring’s sorrow is heading there.
All thoughts spiral there
and then disappear.

Your childhood sun-corner is where
you are when the call sounds.

GILLES DELUZE from Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered:

Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?

RYŌKAN

in this dream world
we doze
and talk of dreams –
dream, dream on,
as much as you wish 

ABUL ʿALA AL-MAʿARRI

The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains.

UMBERTO ECO

Invention can produce reality.

HANNAH ARENDT

The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.

ELIAS CANETTI

The Agony of Flies
____________________

It isn’t being alone that I need to know, for that comes easy to me. I like being alone; what I need to learn is how to keep silent around people … It doesn’t matter to whom my words are addressed or whether or not they are understood; the words in themselves have a horrifying and devastating effect on me. They are too strong; I need to muffle them by writing them down … I myself cannot evade my words; I am at their mercy; I take them in whole; I understand them fully and they shake me the way a storm shakes up the sea.

YUAN MEI - "Nearing Hao-pa"

(I saw in the mist a little village of a few tiled roofs and joyfully admired it.)

There’s a stream, and there’s bamboo,
there’s mulberry and hemp.
Mist-hid, clouded hamlet,
a mild, tranquil place.
Just a few tilled acres.
Just a few tiled roofs.
How many lives would I
have to live, to get
that simple.

HAROLD PINTER
Party Time

You don’t have to believe anything. You just have to shut up and mind your own business, how many times do I have to tell you? You come to a lovely party like this, all you have to do is shut up and enjoy the hospitality and mind your own fucking business. How many more times do I have to tell you? You keep hearing all these things. You keep hearing all these things spread by pricks about pricks. What’s it got to do with you?

FANNIE LOU HAMER

I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared to [register to vote] - but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.

DAVID HUME

The worst speculative skeptic I ever knew was a much better man than the best superstitious devotee and bigot.

Ft Tilden bunker ruins and graffiti.

LEAD BELLY - “There’s a Man Going ‘Round Taking Names”

There’s a man going ‘round taking names
There’s a man going ‘round taking names
He’s been taking my father’s name
And he left my heart in vain
There’s a man going 'round taking names.

There’s a man going 'round taking names
There’s a man going 'round taking names
He’s been taking my mother’s name
And he left my heart in vain
There’s a man going 'round taking names.

There’s a man going 'round taking names
There’s a man going 'round taking names
He’s been taking my sister’s name
And he left my heart in vain
There’s a man going 'round taking names.

There’s a man going 'round taking names
There’s a man going 'round taking names
He’s been taking my brother’s name
And he left my heart in vain
There’s a man going 'round taking names.

There’s a man going 'round taking names
There’s a man going 'round taking names
He’s been taking my father’s name
And he left my heart in vain
There’s a man going 'round taking names

Colin Kaepernick, American hero.

EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS

If I had followed my better judgement always, my life would have been a very dull one.

URSULA K. LE GUIN from her 2014 Speech at the National Book Awards

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art - the art of words.

THOMAS MERTON from Introductions East & West

It is true, political problems are not solved by love and mercy.

But the world of politics is not the only world, and unless political decisions rest on a foundation of something better and higher than politics, they can never do any real good for men. When a country has to be rebuilt after war, the passions and energies of war are no longer enough. There must be a new force, the power of love, the power of understanding and human compassion, the strength of selflessness and cooperation, and the creative dynamism of the will to live and to build, and the will to forgive.

The will for reconciliation.

DŌGEN

A white heron
Hiding itself
In the snowy field,
Where even the winter grass
Cannot be seen.

RAINER MARIA RILKE - “I live my life in widening circles”

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not ever complete the last one,
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, that primordial tower.
I have been circling for thousands of years,
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?


Translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

EDMUND WHITE from Our Young Man

These absurd showbiz queens are as much a part of New York street life as sirens, steam from manholes, or ghostly Asian deliverymen ferrying chop-suey-to-go on unlit bikes going the wrong way.

Philippe Caza - 1972

GEORGE HARRISON

I fell in love, not with anything or anybody in particular but with everything.

FERNANDO PESSOA

I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can’t be one in my body.

SAMUEL BECKETT from Malone Dies

I wonder what my last words will be, written, the others do not endure, but vanish, into thin air. I shall never know.

ALAN WATTS

We suffer from the delusion that the entire universe is held in order by the categories of human thought, fearing that if we do not hold to them with the utmost tenacity, everything will vanish into chaos.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

____________________

I am absolutely convinced that the main source of hate in the world is religion and organized religion. Absolutely convinced of that. And I think it should be - religion - treated with ridicule, hatred, and contempt.

So when I say that I think religion poisons everything, I’m not just doing what publishers like and coming up with a provocative subtitle. I mean to say it infects us in our most basic integrity.

It says we can’t be moral without “Big Brother,” without a totalitarian permission. It means we can’t be good to one another without this. It means we must be afraid.

We must also be forced to love someone whom we fear - the essence of sado-masochism, the essence of abjection, the essence of the Master/Slave relationship. And that it knows death is coming, and can’t wait to bring it on.

I say that is Evil.

And though I do, some nights, stay home, I enjoy more the nights when I go out and fight against this ultimate wickedness and this ultimate stupidity.

TENSHIN REB ANDERSON from Warm Smiles from Cold Mountains: Dharma Talks on Zen Meditation

I don’t like the cold, but I love the cold. When I walk in the cold wind, I hate it, but I feel myself surrounded by the truth. I feel I am in the right place. The cold wind is so invigorating, so vital. And I hate it. I feel both of those things. I’m afraid the cold will take away my warm smile and warm heart. Certainly it can take away my warm fingers and warm toes. Can I find a way for this warm person to be settled in the cold mountains? If I stay too warm, I’ll be afraid of the cold. If I get too cold, I’ll be afraid of the cold. What is Buddha’s work in the middle of the cold? Have a dialogue with the cold, a dialogue with emptiness. Stare at the cold, stare at the not-you. If you look at it long enough, it will look back at you. The cold mountains will smile.

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS from The Wild Boys

Home is where your ass is and if you want to move you move your ass the first step is learning to change homes with someone else and have someone else’s ass.

HALLDÓR LAXNESS from The Fish Can Sing

A wise man once said that next to losing its mother, there is nothing more healthy for a child than to lose its father.

ELIZABETH BISHOP - "Lullaby for the Cat"

Minnow, go to sleep and dream,
close your great big eyes;
Round your bed Events prepare
The pleasantest surprise.

Darling Minnow, drop that frown,
Just cooperate,
Not a kitten shall be drowned
In the Marxist State.

Joy and Love will both be yours,
Minnow, don’t be glum.
Happy days are coming soon—
Sleep, and let them come…

CORMAC McCARTHY from Blood Meridian

One evening almost within sight of the town of El Paso they looked off toward the north where the Gileños wintered and they knew they would not be going there. They camped that night at the Hueco tanks, a group of natural stone cisterns in the desert. The rocks about in every sheltered place were covered with ancient paintings and the judge was soon among them copying out those certain ones into his book to take away with him. They were of men and animals and of the chase and there were curious birds and arcane maps and there were constructions of such singular vision as to justify every fear of man and the things that are in him. Of these etchings—some bright yet with color—there were hundreds, and yet the judge went among them with assurance, tracing out the very ones which he required. When he had done and while there yet was light he returned to a certain stone ledge and sat a while and studied again the work there. Then he rose and with a piece of broken chert he scappled away one of the designs, leaving no trace of it only a raw place on the stone where it had been. Then he put up his book and returned to the camp.

CHARLES WRIGHT - “Yard Work”

I think that someone will remember us in another time,
Sappho once said—more or less—
Her words caught
Between the tongue’s tip and the first edge of the invisible.

I hope so, myself now caught
Between the edge of the landscape and the absolute,
Which is the same place, and the same sound,
That she made.

Meanwhile, let’s stick to business.
Everything else does, the landscape, the absolute, the invisible.
My job is yard work—
I take this inchworm, for instance, and move it from here to there.

LI BAI - “Self-Abandonment”

I sat drinking and did not notice the dusk,
Till falling petals filled the folds of my dress.
Drunken I rose and walked to the moonlit stream;
The birds were gone, and men also few.

FERNANDO PESSOA

Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it’s all evaporating. I constantly feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else. What I’m attending here is a show with another set. And the show I’m attending is myself.

SAMUEL BECKETT from The Unnamable

I’ll clap an eye at random in the thick of the mess, on the off chance something might stray in front of it, then I’ll let down my trousers and shit stories on them, stories, photographs, records, sites, lights, gods and fellow-creatures, the daily round and common task.

Mink Stole as Dottie Hinkle in John Waters' SERIAL MOM.

LEONARD COHEN - "Famous Blue Raincoat"

It's four in the morning, the end of December
I'm writing you now just to see if you're better
New York is cold, but I like where I'm living
There's music on Clinton Street all through the evening.
I hear that you're building your little house deep in the desert
You're living for nothing now, I hope you're keeping some kind of record.

Yes, and Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear
Did you ever go clear?

Ah, the last time we saw you you looked so much older
Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder
You'd been to the station to meet every train
And you came home without Lili Marlene

And you treated my woman to a flake of your life
And when she came back she was nobody's wife.

Well I see you there with the rose in your teeth
One more thin gypsy thief
Well I see Jane's awake --

She sends her regards.

And what can I tell you my brother, my killer
What can I possibly say?
I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you
I'm glad you stood in my way.

If you ever come by here, for Jane or for me
Your enemy is sleeping, and his woman is free.

Yes, and thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes
I thought it was there for good so I never tried.

And Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear --

Sincerely, L. Cohen

VIRGINIA WOOLF from To The Lighthouse

But slumber and sleep though it might there came later in the summer ominous sounds like the measured blows of hammers dulled on felt, which, with their repeated shocks still further loosened the shawl and cracked the tea-cups. Now and again some glass tinkled in the cupboard as if a giant voice had shrieked so loud in its agony that tumblers stood inside a cupboard vibrated too. Then again silence fell; and then, night after night, and sometimes in plain mid-day when the roses were bright and light turned on the wall its shape clearly there seemed to drop into this silence, this indifference, this integrity, the thud of something falling.

DŌGEN

Drifting pitifully in the whirlwind of birth and death,
As if wandering in a dream,
In the midst of illusion I awaken to the true path;
There is one more matter I must not neglect,
But I need not bother now,
As I listen to the sound of the evening rain
Falling on the roof of my temple retreat
In the deep grass of Fukakusa.

JAMES JOYCE from Ulysses

He laughed to free his mind from his mind’s bondage.

SAMUEL BECKETT from The Calmative

I hugged the walls, famished for shadow.

CAROLYN FORCHÉ - "The Museum of Stones

These are your stones, assembled in matchbox and tin,
collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct,
battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir–
stones, loosened by tanks in the streets
from a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen,
schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse,
pebble from Apollinaire’s oui,
stone of the mind within us
carried from one silence to another,
stone of cromlech and cairn, schist and shale, horneblende,
agate, marble, millstones, ruins of choirs and shipyards,
chalk, marl, mudstone from temples and tombs,
stone from the tunnel lined with bones,
lava of a city’s entombment, stones
chipped from lighthouse, cell wall, scriptorium,
paving stones from the hands of those who rose against the army,
stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown,
those that had flown through windows, weighted petitions,
feldspar, rose quartz, blueschist, gneiss and chert,
fragments of an abbey at dusk, sandstone toe
of a Buddha mortared at Bamiyan,
stone from the hill of three crosses and a crypt,
from a chimney where storks cried like human children,
stones newly fallen from stars, a stillness of stones, a heart,
altar and boundary of stone, marker and vessel, first cast, lode and hail,
bridge stones and others to pave and shut up with,
stone apple, stone basil, beech, berry, stone brake,
stone bramble, stone fern, lichen, liverwort, pippin and root,
concretion of the body, as blind as cold as deaf,
all earth a quarry, all life a labor, stone-faced, stone-drunk
with hope that this assemblage of rubble, taken together, would become
a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immoveable and sacred
like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn.

Gloria Swanson and Judy Holliday - Academy Awards, 1951.

MILAREPA

If you lose all differentiation between yourselves and others,
fit to serve others you will be.
And when in serving others you will win success,
then shall you meet with me;
And finding me, you shall attain to Buddhahood.