It was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials

Tom stood looking in. Ma was heavy, but not fat; thick with child-bearing and work. She wore a loose Mother Hubbard of gray cloth in which there had once been colored flowers, but the color was washed out now, so that the small flowered pattern was only a little lighter gray than the background. The dress came down to her ankles, and her strong, broad, bare feet moved quickly and deftly over the floor. Her thin, steel-gray hair was gathered in a sparse wispy knot at the back of her head. Strong, freckled arms were bare to the elbow, and her hands were chubby and delicate, like those of a plump little girl. She looked out into the sun-shine. Her full face was not soft; it was controlled, kindly. Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding. She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken. And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt and fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials. But better than joy was calm. Imperturbability could be depended upon. And from her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.

--John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath (1939)

There was a dream of death

What appealed to James was a sense that the questing human spirit could be in contact with a realm greater than oneself and the material world, a domain outside and beyond ourselves that we only suspect exists. Moder-day scholar William Kastenbaum has talked of an "emergent quality" that people seek--a sense that the soul could feel liberated, somehow continue to develop, and be part of an evolving relationship between life and death--as a great potential comfort. Perhaps this is why some grieving patrons seeking to memorialize their loved ones in the Gilded Age cemetery chose to do so with a combination of aesthetic beauty and mystery. They sought and generated a form of funerary art in which the great Unknown, the riddle of life and death, was embraced. They wanted monuments that moved visitors in new ways--not with cloying sentiment and confidence about man's place in God's heaven, but with a sense of perfect wonder, a sense that a veil could be lifted for a momentary glimpse here on earth of the meaning of death. There was a dream of a death that was not terrifying and grim for their lost one but that was transformational, performed with a mystic experience, a profound sense of beauty, love, and understanding, and a connection with the larger universe in some form, somewhere, somehow. For the imaginative and sensitive viewer with these sophisticated goals, three-dimensional statues in the sensory landscape of the cemetery provided a focus for highly private meditation, psychic exploration, and reflection about the hereafter.

--Cynthia Mills, Beyond Grief: Sculpture and Wonder in the Gilded Age Cemetery (2015)

 

They became lords of sounds and lesser things

The people all saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.

Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they had stored up from other times. So they chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish. They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A mood come alive. Words walking without masters; walking altogether like harmony in a song.

--Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

 

'[they] have transferred their artificial ideas to nature"

[C]ertainly nothing could be more unaccountably whimsical, than for an architect to model his performance by the human figure, since no two things can have less resemblance or analogy, than a man, and an house or temple; do we need to observe that their purposes are entirely different? What I am apt to suspect is this: that these analogies were devised to give a credit to the works of art, by shewing a conformity between them and the noblest works in nature, not that the latter served at all to supply hints for the perfection of the former. And I am the more fully convinced, that the patrons of proportion have transferred their artificial ideas to nature, and not borrowed from thence the proportions they use in works of art; because in any discussion of this subject, they always quit as soon as possible the open field of natural beauties, the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and fortify themselves within the artificial lines and angles of architecture. For there is in mankind an unfortunate propensity to make themselves, their views, and their works, the measure of excellence in every thing whatsoever.

—Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (2nd edition, 1759)

'knocking so ineffectively at the doors of the palace'

He capped the pen. It was a service someone had to perform, he felt. A translation service. What was all this, but a modern tower of Babel? Here was someone speaking nothing but dance, and someone else speaking paint, and someone speaking poetry, and someone speaking music. And what were they trying to express, but the inexpressible? If there existed words, regular words, to say what they were aiming at, then why would they even need to do what they did? Why were they all living here, knocking so ineffectively at the doors of the palace? The ink was insufficient as anything else, but perhaps it was a start. If he'd been a sculptor, he'd have sculpted it for them: Look! There! Love.

—Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House (2014)

'some promise my idiot heart made itself'

"Look at her up there, offering herself like—"

"Who? Sobriety doesn't suit you. Good God." Marlon handed over his own drink. "It's delicious," he said.

Viktor looked down at it. "I don't drink."

"You don't?" Marlon thought through the past weeks, and took back his glass. "You mixed the vat last night. And you're always dropping things. You're the drunkest man I know."

"I've never touched the stuff. I couldn't dance."

"But when you were younger."

"I started training when I was eight." Viktor poked the fire with a long branch and said, "Tell me something. Tell me why I could walk down a street in the city and see two faces in the crowd. And one of them—a stranger—it might be a beautiful woman—for one of them I feel nothing, I remain intact. And the other, no more beautiful, no more spectacular: When I see her, I fall through the universe. And only because of our past, only because of some promise my idiot heart made itself years before."

"Why don't you try a drink."

"The truth is, there's no such thing as love. There's only history."

—Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House (2014)

fastened to a dying animal

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

—William Butler Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium" (1928)

'All of them are different, like the fingers on a hand.'

[Pope] Francis has frequently used his public audience in St. Peter's Square as a venue to focus on the importance of the family.

In his talk, Francis repeatedly praised children as "the joy of family and society" and the key to humanity's future. As he often does, he departed from his prepared text to speak off the cuff, at one point noting that he was one of five children growing up in Argentina, and that when his mother was asked which was her favorite child she would compare them to her five fingers.

"If you hit this one it hurts me, if you hit that one, it hurts me," he recalled his mother saying. "All of them are mine. All of them are different, like the fingers on a hand."

—David Gibson, "Pope Francis: Opting not to have children a 'selfish choice,'" Religious News Service, February 11, 2015

'danced fatalistically with nature'

She had tea waiting when Ethan came back. They sat outside. He wore nothing over his short-sleeved shirt despite the chill. Pammy wondered whether it would be all right to get him a sweater. She decided finally it might be taken as an imposition of sorts, a subtle belittling of his distress. What comfort, really, would warm clothing give him now? It occurred to her that people unconsciously honored the processes of the physical world, danced fatalistically with nature whenever death took someone close to them. She believed Ethan wanted to feel what was here. If it rained, he wouldn't move. If she draped a sweater over his shoulders, he might well shrug it off. We are down to eating and sleeping, if that. Rudiments, she thought. Whatever the minimum. That's what we're down to. She watched color spread across the sky beyond the Camden Hills. A sunset is the story of the world's day. They spun back away from it, upended like astronauts, but snug in their seats, night-riding, as the first stars pinched into view.

—Don DeLillo, Players (1977)

'an original person'

"You tell me I am not an original person. Observe, dear prince, that nothing offends a man of our day and our race more than to tell him that he is not original, that he is weak-willed, has no particular talents and is an ordinary person. You haven't even given me credit for being a first-rate scoundrel, and you know I was ready to annihilate you for it just now. You offended me more than Epanchin, who, without discussion, without having tried to tempt me, in the simplicity of his heart, note that, believes me capable of selling my wife. That has enraged me for a long time, and I want money. When I have money, I shall become a highly original man. What's most low and hateful about money is that even talent can be bought with it, and will be, till the end of the world."

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (1869) (trans. Garnett, 1913)