To Help A Monkey Cross The River,

Thomas Lux

which he must cross, by swimming, for fruits and nuts, to help him I sit with my rifle on a platform high in a tree, same side of the river as the hungry monkey. How does this assist him? When he swims for it I look first upriver: predators move faster with the current than against it. If a crocodile is aimed from upriver to eat the monkey and an anaconda from down river burns with the same ambition, I do the math, algebra, angles, rate-of-monkey, croc- and snake-speed, and if, if it looks as though the anaconda or the croc will reach the monkey before he attains the river’s far bank, I raise my rifle and fire one, two, three, even four times into the river just behind the monkey to hurry him up a little. Shoot the snake, the crocodile?They’re just doing their jobs, but the monkey, the monkey has little hands like a child’s, and the smart ones, in a cage, can be taught to smile.

Paris

ÉDITH PIAF

On se rappelle les chansons
Un soir d'hiver, un frais visage
La scène à marchands de marrons
Une chambre au cinqième étage
Les cafés-crèmes du matin
Montparnasse, le Café du Dôme
Les faubourgs, le quartier latin
Les Tuileries et la Place Vendôme
Paris, c'était la gaieté, Paris
C'était la douceur aussi
C'était notre tendresse
Paris, tes gamins, tes artisans
Tes camelots et tes agents
Et tes matins de printemps
Paris, l'odeur de ton pavé d'oies
De tes marroniers du bois
Je pense à toi sans cesse
Paris, je m'ennuie de toi mon vieux
On se retrouvera tous les deux
Mon grand Paris
Evidemment il y a parfois
Les heures un peu difficilesmais
tout s'arrange bien, ma foiAvec
Paris, c'est si facile
Pour moi, Paris c'est les beaux jours
Les airs graves ou tendresPour moi,
Paris c'est mes amours
Et mon coeur ne peut se reprendre
Paris, tu es ma gaieté,
Paris Tu es ma douceur aussi
Tu es toute ma tendresse
Paris, tes gamins, tes artisans
Tes camelots et tes agents
Et tes matins de printemps
Paris, l'odeur de ton pavé d'oies
De tes marroniers du bois
Je pense à toi sans cesse
Paris, je m'ennuie de toi mon vieux
On se retrouvera tous les deux
Mon grand Paris

Pandora's Box

Naked Heart

When the light goes out tonite
See a golden path of dreams
Seeing things that never should
Be seen mistaken fantasy for real
Shark infested waters of my mind
Devouring everything in sight
It's like a dog that has a bone
And won't let go till it's done
With one wave of the hand the
Final curtain fell
When the last screw came out
The lid slipped off Pandoras's Box

Both Sides Now

Joni Mitchell

Rows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I've looked at clouds that way
But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
Clouds got in my way
I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all
Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels
The dizzy dancing way that you feel
As every fairy tale comes real
I've looked at love that way
But now it's just another show
And you leave 'em laughing when you go
And if you care, don't let them know
Don't give yourself away
I've looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
It's love's illusions I recall
I really don't know love
Really don't know love at all
Tears and fears and feeling proud
To say "I love you" right out loud
Dreams and schemes and circus crowds
I've looked at life that way
Oh but now old friends they're acting strange
And they shake their heads
And they tell me that I've changed
Well something's lost but something's gained
In living every day
I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life,
I really don't know life at all

Beautiful Mysterious

Albert Einstein

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this
emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and
stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

Great Spirits

Albert Einstein

"Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds."

The Pleasure Principle

Sigmund Freud

" The programme of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle
imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled; yet we must not -- indeed, we
cannot -- give up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfilment by some
means or other. Very different paths may be taken in that direction,
and we may give priority either to the positive aspect of the aim, that
of gaining pleasure, or to its negative one, that of avoiding unpleasure.
By none of these paths can we attain all that we desire. Happiness, in
the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of
the economics of the individual's libido. There is no golden rule which
applies to everyone: every man must find out for himself in what particular
fashion he can be saved. All kinds of different factors will operate to
direct his choice. It is a question of how much real satisfaction he can
expect to get from the external world, how far he is led to make himself
independent of it, and, finally, how much strength he feels he has for
altering the world to suit his wishes. In this, his psychical constitution
will play a decisive part, irrespectively of the external circumstances.
The man who is predominantly erotic will give first preference to his
emotional relationships to other people; the narcissistic man, who inclines
to be self-sufficient, will seek his main satisfactions in his internal mental
processes; the man of action will never give up the external world on which
he can try out his strength. As regards, the second of these types, the nature
of his talents and the amount of instinctual sublimation open to him will
decide where he shall locate his interests. Any choice that is pushed to an
extreme will be penalized by exposing the individual to the dangers which
arise if a technique of living that has been chosen as an exclusive one should
prove inadequate. Just as a cautious business-man avoids tying up all his
capital in one concern, so, perhaps, worldly wisdom will advise us not to
look for the whole of our satisfaction from a single aspiration. Its success
is never certain, for that depends on the convergence of many factors, perhaps
on none more than on the capacity of the psychic constitution to adapt its
function to the environment and then to exploit that environment for a
yield of pleasure."

"Civilization and its Discontents" (1930 [1929]) [SE, XXI, p.83)

Spirits and Demons

Sigmund Freud

"Spirits and demons, as I have shown in the last essay, are only projections
of man's own emotional impulses. He turns his emotional cathexes into
persons, he peoples the world with them and meets his internal mental
processes again outside himself - in just the same way as that intelligent
paranoic, Schreber, found a reflection of the attachments and detachments
of his libido in the vicissitudes of his confabulated 'rays of God'."

("Totem and Taboo", 1912-1913)

Success

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty;
To find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by
a healthy child, a garden patch
or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed
easier because you have lived;
This is to have succeeded.

The Jester

Rudyard Kipling

There are three degrees of bliss
At the foot of Allah's Throne,
And the highest place is his
Who saves a brother's soul
At peril of his own.
There is the Power made known!
There are three degrees of bliss
In Gardens of Paradise,
And the second place is his
Who saves his brother's soul
By exellent advice.
For there the Glory lies!
There the are three degrees of bliss
And three abodes of the Blest,
And the lowest place is his
Who has saved a soul by jest
And a brother's soul in sport...
But there do the Angels resort!

The Oft Repeated Dream

Robert Frost

She had no saying dark enough
For the dark pine that kept
Forever trying the window latch
Of the room where they slept.

The tireless but ineffectual hands
That with every futile pass
Made the great tree seem as a little bird
Before the mystery of glass!

It never had been inside the room,
And only one of the two
Was afraid in an oft-repeated dream
Of what the tree might do.

His Nobel Prize

William Faulkner

I believe that man will not merely endure: he wil prevail.
He is immortal, not beause he alone among creatures has
an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit
capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

A Dream Within A Dream

Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow--
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand--
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep--while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

The Harlot's House

Oscar Wilde

We caught the tread of dancing feet,
We loitered down the moonlit street,
And stopped beneath the harlot's house.
Inside, above the din and fray,
We heard the loud musicians play
The 'Treues Liebes Herz' of Strauss.
Like strange mechanical grotesques,
Making fantastic arabesques,
The shadows raced across the blind.
We watched the ghostly dancers spin
To sound of horn and violin,
Like black leaves wheeling in the wind.
Like wire-pulled automatons,
Slim silhouetted skeletons
Went sidling through the slow quadrille,
Then took each other by the hand,
And danced a stately saraband;
Their laughter echoed thin and shrill.
Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed
A phantom lover to her breast,
Sometimes they seemed to try to sing.
Sometimes a horrible marionette
Came out, and smoked its cigarette
Upon the steps like a live thing.
Then, turning to my love, I said,
'The dead are dancing with the dead,
The dust is whirling with the dust.'
But she - she heard the violin,
And left my side, and entered in:
Love passed into the house of lust.
Then suddenly the tune went false,
The dancers wearied of the waltz,
The shadows ceased to wheel and whirl.
And down the long and silent street,
The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet,
Crept like a frightened girl.

Chapter Heading

Ernest Hemingway

For we have thought the larger thoughts
And gone the shorter way.
And we have danced to devil's tunes,
Shivering home to pray;
To serve one master in the night,
Another in the day.

Ten Poems, Paris 1923