Saturday ~ MAY 16, 2016

It is not suffering that is precious, but the concentric pearlescence with which we contain it. The raw grit of anguish will never be in short supply. There is enough of it in the happiest life to serve these instructive purposes and there always will be. We are more sympathetic to Holocaust survivors than to malcontent children of privilege, but we all have our darkness, and the trick is making something exalted of it.

(Andrew Solomon, b. 1963)

Thursday ~ May 14, 2020

...Have compassion for me.
Look how men and women live, always precariously
balanced between good and bad fortune.
If you are out of trouble, watch for danger.
And when you live well, then think the hardest.
About life, lest ruin take you unawares.

(Sophocles, 496 - 406 BCE)

Sunday ~ May 10, 2020

I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand in case you have o rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants still stuck to the buds...
I learned to attend viewings even if I didn't know
the deceased, to press the moist hands
of the living, to look into their eyes and offer
sympathy, as though I understand loss even then.
I learned that whatever we say means nothing,
what anyone will remember id that we came.
I learned to believe I had the power to ease
awful pains materially like an angel.
Like a doctor, I learned to create
from another's suffering my own usefulness, and once
you know how to do this, you can never refuse.

(Julia Kasdorf, b. 1962)