1) On the ubiquity of beauty
Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
2) On the uses of simplicity
It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you can cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.
3) On experiencing the present moment
But time is one thing we have been given, and we have been given to time. Time gives us a whirl. We keep waking from a dream we can’t recall, looking around in surprise, and lapsing back, for years on end. All I want to do is stay awake, keep my head up, prop my eyes open, with toothpicks, with trees. …You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hook and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled.
4) On the miracle of creation
You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up solar energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo? …The lone ping into being of the first hydrogen atom ex nihilo was so unthinkably, violently radical that surely it ought to have been enough, more than enough. You open the door and all heaven and hell break loose.
5) On our flawed conception of the afterlife
Somewhere I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?” “No,” said the priest. “Not if you did not know.” “Then why,” asked the Eskimo earnestly, “did you tell me?”
6) On the task of being grateful for being alive
I think that the dying pray at the last not “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling form airplanes, people are crying thank you, thank you all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks. There is nothing to be done about it, but to ignore it, or see.
7) On the mystery of death of suffering
What I have been after all along is not an explanation but a picture. This is the way the world is, altar and cup, lit by the fire from a star that has only begun to die. My rage and shock at the pain and death of individuals of my kind is the old, old mystery, as old as man but forever fresh, and completely unanswerable.
8) On the joys of esoteric knowledge
I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress people even slightly. I’m horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering and, like the ancient mariner, fix him with a glitt’ring eye and say “Did you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are 288 separate muscles?” The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life.
9) On the untapped richness of life
The world is wilder in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain or Lazarus.
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