How do we do it?

I am more and more convinced
that our happiness or our unhappiness
depends far more on the way we meet the events of life
than on the nature of those events themselves.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, in Lightning Fast Enlightenment

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hopeless

The main thing you need to know about instructions
is that no one is going to read them—
at least not until after repeated attempts
at “muddling through” have failed.”

        Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think, Revisited

 

 

 

 

Promises

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future,
making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.

        Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Laughter

He told me a joke.
And seeing him laugh has done more for me
Than any scripture I will ever read.

        Meister Eckhart, in Love Poems from God

 

 

 

 

Poem: June

The sun is rich
And gladly pays
In golden hours,
Silver days,

And long green weeks
That never end.
School’s out. The time
Is ours to spend.

There’s Little League,
Hopscotch, the creek,
And, after supper,
Hide-and-seek.

The live-long light
Is like a dream,
and freckles come
Like flies to cream.

         John Updike

 

 

 

 

 

 

No stopping history and change

To say that the future will be different from the present is, to scientists, hopelessly self-evident. I observe regretfully that in politics, however, it can be heresy. It can be denounced as radicalism, or branded as subversion. There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed. It hardly seems necessary to point out in California -- of all States -- that change, although it involves risks, is the law of life.

Robert F. Kennedy, 1964 Address at the California Institute of Technology  

So it began

In preparation for Operation Overlord, the BBC's Radio Londres signalled to the French Resistance with the opening lines of the 1866 Verlaine poem "Chanson d'Automne" to indicate the start of D-Day operations under the command of the Special Operations Executive.

The first three lines of the poem, "Les sanglots longs / des violons / de l'automne" ("The long sobs of autumn's violins"), would mean that Operation Overlord was to start within two weeks. These lines were broadcast on 1 June 1944.

The next set of lines, "Blessent mon coeur / d'une langueur / monotone" ("wound my heart with a monotonous languor"), meant that it would start within 48 hours and that the resistance should begin sabotage operations, especially on the French railroad system; these lines were broadcast on 5 June at 23:15    

        Wikipedia entry

"Chanson d'Automne"

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l'automne
Blessent mon cœur
D'une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l'heure.
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens,
Et je pleure...

Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
De çà, de là,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte...

 

"Autumn Song" (English translation)

With long sobs
the violin-throbs
of autumn wound
my heart with languorous
and montonous
sound.

Choking and pale
When I mind the tale
the hours keep,
my memory strays
down other days
and I weep;

and I let me go
where ill winds blow
now here, now there,
harried and sped,
even as a dead
leaf, anywhere.