February 2011
“I run great risk of failing. It may be that I shall encounter ruin where I look for reputation and a career of honor. The chances are perhaps more in favor of ruin than of success. But whatever may be the chances, I shall go on as long as any means of carrying on the fight are at my disposal.”
—Anthony Trollope
Play
Not What Was Expected
This barber is not trying to cut my throat. He is not singing. He does not look crazy, and there is actually a smile on his face.
He runs the sharp, cold metal across my sandpaper cheek, and I wonder what would happen if he did cut me.
Would I feel it right away, like my wife describes cutting her ankle when shaving her legs? Would I feel nothing until he splashed hot water on my face and something to sting out the pain? Would there be a sizzle? Would there be a scar?
Something inside me hopes so. Maybe my wife would notice the scar on my face, think I’m hideous and leave. Maybe I’d stop finding shortened curly-cues on the shower wall, course and brown pasted against our fake porcelain tiles.
Maybe she’ll leave me.
“Within the flux of existence, the power of the beautiful not only endures but is itself the cause of the perpetuation of human existence.”
—Stanley Rosen
“When we are mindful of every nuance of our natural world, we finally get the picture: that we are only given one dazzling moment of life here on Earth, and we must stand before that reality both humbled and elevated, subject to every law of our universe and grateful for our brief but intrinsic participation with it.”
—Elizabeth Gilbert
Play
“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.”
—George Bernard Shaw
Play
“The higher type of man clings to virtue, the lower type of man clings to material comfort. The higher type of man cherishes justice, the lower type of man cherishes the hope of favors to be received.”
—Confucius
Play
Play
“Man’s greatest actions are performed in minor struggles. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment and poverty are battlefields which have their heros-obscure heros who are at times greater than illustrious heros.”
—Victor Hugo
“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. I will not refuse to do the something I can do.”
—Helen Keller
Play