Teefington

The known universe has one complete lover and that is the greatest poet. He consumes an eternal passion and is indifferent which chance happens and which possible contingency of fortune or misfortune and persuades daily and hourly his delicious pay. What baulks or breaks others is fuel for his burning progress to contact and amorous joy. Other proportions of the reception of pleasure dwindle to nothing to his proportions. All expected from heaven or from the highest he is rapport with in the sight of the daybreak or a scene of the winter woods or the presence of children playing or with his arm round the neck of a man or woman. His love above all love has leisure and expanse … he leaves room ahead of himself. He is no irresolute or suspicious lover … he is sure … he scorns intervals. His experience and the showers and thrills are not for nothing. Nothing can jar him … suffering and darkness cannot—death and fear cannot. To him complaint and jealousy and envy are corpses buried and rotten in the earth … he saw them buried. The sea is not surer of the shore or the shore of the sea than he is of the fruition of his love and of all perfection and beauty.

Walt Whitman in the preface to Leaves of Grass

Song: “To A Poet” by First Aid Kit

iTunes :: Amazon :: Back to Brain Pickings

30th May 2013 | 368 notes

inductives:

butchers row by Suzi Marshall on Flickr.

(via inductives)

29th May 2013 | 402 notes

nprfreshair:

Stephen King tells Terry Gross about what scares him these days:

It’s been quite a while since I was really afraid that there was a boogeyman in my closet, although I am still very careful to keep my feet under the covers when I go to sleep, because the covers are magic and if your feet are covered, it’s like boogeyman kryptonite. And I’m not as afraid of that as I used to be. The supernatural stuff doesn’t get to me anymore. So here’s the movie that scared me the most in the last 12 or 13 years. The movie opens with a woman in late middle-age, sitting at a table and writing a story and the story goes something like, ‘Then the branches creaked in the …’ and she stops and she says to her husband, ‘What are those things? I can’t think of them. They’re in the backyard and they’re very tall and birds land on the branches.’ And he says, ‘Why, Iris, those are trees,’ and she says, ‘Yes, how silly of me,’ and she writes the word and the movie starts. And that’s Iris Murdoch and she’s suffering the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. That’s the boogeyman in the closet now. … I’m afraid of losing my mind.