This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
First, O songs, for a prelude, lightly strike on the stretch'd tympanum, pride and joy in my city, how she led the rest to arms—how she gave the cue, how at once with lithe limbs, unwaiting a moment, she sprang; (O superb! O Manhattan, my own, my peerless! O strongest you in the hour of danger, in crisis! O truer than steel!) How you sprang! how you threw off the costumes of peace with indifferent hand; how your soft opera-music changed, and the drum and fife were heard in their stead; how you led to the war, (that shall serve for our prelude songs of soldiers,) How Manhattan drum-taps led.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
In our sun-down perambulations, of late, through the outer parts of Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing "base", a certain game of ball...Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms...the game of ball is glorious.
Walt Kelley, fully Walter Crawford "Walt" Kelly, Jr.
The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Your true soul and body appear before me. Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem, I whisper with my lips close to your ear, I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you. O I have been dilatory and dumb, I should have made my way straight to you long ago, I should have blabb'd nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you. I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you, none has understood you, but I understand you, none has done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself, none but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you, none but would subordinate you, I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you, I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits instrinsically in yourself. O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! You have not known what you are, you have slumber'd upon yourself all your life, your eyelids have been the same as closed most of the time. I pursue you where none else has pursued you. Conceal you from others or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me. I give nothing to anyone except I give the like carefully to you. These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, you are immense and interminable as they, these furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution, you are he or she who is master or mistress over them, Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.
The book of Isaiah both appeals to the theological-ideological assumptions and places them in question because the facts on the ground tell otherwise. Thus the book of Isaiah and the larger Jerusalem tradition expose this difficult interface between theological claim and lived reality, a difficult interface that is front and center in the book of Job, a difficult interface that every pastor must face in the form of the theodicy question.
Courage | Failure | Imagination | Poetry | Spirit | Will | Failure | Old |
The possibility of passion is a primary prophetic agenda... Passion as the capacity and readiness to care, to suffer, to die and to feel is the enemy of imperial reality.
Since you have forsaken the world and turned wholly to God, you are symbolically dead in the eyes of men; therefore, let your heart be dead to all earthly affections and concerns… For you must be well aware that if we make an outward show of conversion to God without giving Him our hearts, it is only a shadow and pretense of virtue, and no true conversion. Any man or woman who neglects to maintain inward vigilance, and only makes an outward show of holiness in dress, speech, and behavior, is a wretched creature. For they watch the doings of other people and criticize their faults, imagining themselves to be something when in reality they are nothing. In this way they deceive themselves. Be careful to avoid this, and devote yourself inwardly to His likeness by humility, charity, and other spiritual virtues. In this way you will be truly converted to God.
The church in the United States has largely signed on for democratic capitalism, and has watched while capitalism has been transposed into corporate socialism, while the democratic processes have been subordinated to the force of big money. The church has mostly positioned itself so that the promises of the gospel are readily lined out as "the American dream," with endless choices and bottomless entitlements that in turn have required the muscle of the military to sustain.
Poetry |
Imagination is a danger thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination to keep on conjouring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.
Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.
Poetry |
Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
The aim of a true philosophy must lie, not in futile efforts towards the complete accommodation of man to circumstances in which he chances to find himself, but in the maintenance of a kind of candid discontent, in the face of the very highest achievement.
Proud word you never spoke, but you will speak four not exempt from pride some future day. Resting on one white hand a warm wet cheek, over my open volume you will say, 'this man loved me'—then rise and trip away.
Poetry |
It appears to be among the laws of nature, that the mighty of intellect should be pursued and carped by the little, as the solitary flight of one great bird is followed by the twittering petulance of many smaller.
Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed that by what it achieved.