Life is like stepping onto a boat which is about to sail out to sea and sink.
– Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
Tribute to Emerson
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) fue un escritor, filósofo y poeta estadounidense. La filosofía de Emerson es típicamente liberal: potencia los valores del individuo y del yo, es afirmativa, vitalista y optimista. De ahí las alabanzas que mereció por parte de pensadores como Friedrich Nietzsche y otros. Es considerado uno de los primeros ensayistas norteamericanos; publicó dos series de este tipo de escritos, entre los cuales destacan títulos como “Naturaleza”, “Libros”, “Autosuficiencia”, “Ancianidad”, “Civilización americana”, “Historia”, “Confianza en sí mismo”, “El poeta”, “Compensación”, “Experiencia”, “Política” o “El trascendentalista”.
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* I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, — and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.
* A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
* There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but though his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
* We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.
* Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so.
* Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
* Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
* Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company.
* Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world, — as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.
* Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man must be so much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design; — and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients. A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man … and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.
* A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
* These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see, —painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them, and are willing to let the words go; for, at any time, they can use words as good when occasion comes. If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.
* You take the way from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision, there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well.
Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain.
* Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim
* Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power not confident but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is. Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not.
This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain.
* Power is in nature the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul.
* But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
* Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.
* It may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?
* Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
* Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative.
* Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.
There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency.
* Henceforward I am the truth’s. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities.
* I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men’s, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and, if we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last.
* In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
Full text at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Essays:_First_Series/Self-Reliance
Honoring Hemingway
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway 
Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961) fue un escritor y periodista estadounidense. Uno de los principales novelistas y cuentistas del siglo XX. Ganador del Premio Nobel de Literatura en 1954 por su obra completa.
* The Torrents of Spring (1926)
* Fiesta (The Sun Also Rises) (1926)
* Adiós a las armas (A Farewell to Arms) (1929)
* Las verdes colinas de África (Green Hills of Africa) (1935)
* Tener y no tener (To Have and Have Not) (1937)
* Por quién doblan las campanas (For Whom the Bell Tolls) (1940)
* Al otro lado del río y entre los árboles (Across the River and into the Trees) (1950)
* El viejo y el mar (The Old Man and the Sea) (1952). Premio Pulitzer en 1953.
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August 11, 1940
Ernest Hemingway Talks of Work and War
By ROBERT VAN GELDER
Ernest Hemingway was here in New York copy-reading and delivering to Scribners his publishers, at the rate of 300 pages a day, the final draft of his longest novel. People who have read the manuscript agree that it is his best. Said one such reader encountered as he waited, rather bemused, for a chance to cross a cross-street on which there was no traffic, one afternoon some months ago: “I’ve just read the first three-quarters of the new Hemingway and you might as well believe me because you’re going to find out that it’s true–it is even better than ‘”Farewell to Arms.'”
Mr. Hemingway’s stay here was supposed to be all for work, but cheerfulness kept breaking in. On the eleventh day of July’s heat wave his rooms at the Hotel Barclay saw as lively company as any rooms in town. An electric fan droned on the coffee table, flanked by bottles of White Rock and fronted by a superb bowl of ice. A fifth of Scotch rested hospitably on the floor where it could be handily reached from three of the four chairs. Lawyers, old friends and visiting soldiers came and went. The telephone rang not quite continuously. Mr. Hemingway wore an unbuttoned pajama coat affording a view of chest that–if Max Eastman still is interested–would have made the eyes of a fur trapper pop.
“I’ve worked at it solid for seventeen months,” said Hemingway of his new novel. “This one had to be all right or I had to get out of line, because my last job, ‘To Have and Have Not,’ was not so good. For seventeen months I wrote no short stories or articles–nothing to earn a penny. I’m broke.”
A friend said: “Ernest, if I am paid $200 for the job I am doing tonight we will have a wonderful time tomorrow.” “Don’t worry about $200,” said Hemingway. “Whether you get it or I get it we’ll still have a wonderful time tomorrow. Charley Scribner isn’t broke.”
The talk was a mixture of Spanish, French and English. Each comment that Hemingway made on his writing he prefaced with an explanatory speech to Gustavo Duran, the former pianist and composer, who had developed as one of the most brilliant of the army corps commanders on the Loyalist side of the civil war in Spain.
“Sorry, Gustavo, but Bob has to ask these questions, it’s his job, and I’m supposed to answer them, see?” And then, rapidly: “I start work each morning at 7:30 and work until about 2:30. The first thing I do when I’m writing a novel is read back through all that has gone before. That way I break the back of the job. Then I put the words in–like laying bricks. I write in longhand and don’t try to make much time. I’ve tried this speed writing, getting it all down and then going over it, but the trouble is if you speed too much you don’t know if you have a book or not when you’ve finished the first draft.”
“About how many words do you write each day?” Duran asked, seriously. Hemingway looked at him, not sure whether or not he was being ribbed. “I don’t know, Gustavo. Some days a lot, some days a little. I never write to fit a thesis or a plan. I start with blank paper and put all that I know at the time on the paper. Most of the time it is tough going. You can’t figure any average. Why in hell do you want to know, Gustavo?”
Duran shrugged: “I don’t know. It is interesting.” He talked of his own job as a commander. He said that in his army regulations the first sentence was the seemingly meaningless one that roughly translated into “the first duty of the commander is to make decisions.”
“It seems simple when you read it. You think, ‘What is decision? Each day I decide what color shoes to wear, what to eat.’ But decision, when the life or death of hundreds of men depend on your decision, that is much else. In Spain I was assigned, as you know, to hold a position. My cowardice told me to draw in my left flank so that if I failed I would be near the French border and the lives of thousands would be saved if we lost. My judgment said perhaps that is right but perhaps it would be better to turn my right flank, though if we lost we would be cut off from safety. That is a decision that hurts all through your body; you cannot sleep, you ache. There is nothing more difficult in life.”
“Which flank did you turn?”
“My right flank. But that is not important. The decision is important.”
“Do you suppose all commanders feel that way? Did Napoleon?”
“Napoleon was a victor. When you are a victor, what can hurt you? But when you must fight a long defensive action with no chance of winning, only of holding the enemy off, then with every decision you are in hell,” said Duran. “You ache with wanting–but what you want cannot quite be reached. It is like my sitting in this chair wanting to rip that necktie from your neck. I reach, I almost seize it. It is just beyond my hand. Always in war there are possibilities plain to be seen, but materials are lacking, the men fail, a mistake is made somewhere along the line–and frustration eats your stomach.”
It was suggested that perhaps because the military decision is so difficult to make, that is why when it is made rightly it pays off so well. There is nothing in finance, for example, to compare with it, or in internal politics, and perhaps for twenty years the importance of the military decision has been underestimated and aims that are practically inferior have been mistakenly rated above the real pay-off, which still is strength at arms. Hemingway exclaimed: “That’s what the new novel is about!” and then another visitor arrived, and the talk took another turn.
Much of the conversation ran to questions of survival or failure to survive. “Where is so- and-so?” “He went back to Russia and was shot.” “And so-and-so?” “He also was shot.” Another Spanish fighter had landed in a German concentration camp. A married pair “tried to get to Chile but were turned away. They finally were admitted to Buenos Aires.” Duran himself escaped from Spain aboard a British destroyer, was taken to Marseille, transported across France in a sealed train, and shipped to England. He was on his way here during the Blitzkrieg in Flanders.
“The world now is very confusing. It is amazing how sure we once were, Ernest, that our ideas were right.”
“The fight in Spain will have to be fought again,” Hemingway said.
Duran looked at his hands.
“I don’t know.”
Telephone calls, visitors ushered in and out, another rather hesitant question about writing and another apology to Duran.
“The thing wrong with ‘To Have and Have Not’ is that it is made of short stories. I wrote one, then another when I was in Spain, then I came back and saw Harry Morgan again and that gave me the idea for a third. It came out as a new novel, but it was short stories, and there is a hell of a lot of difference. A novel–when you do a novel”–he couldn’t find the phrase he wanted. “I don’t know how many more I’ll do. But they say that when you’re in your forties you ought to know enough and have enough stuff to do one good one. I think this is it.”
After his long session of work Hemingway looked elephant-big, enormously healthy. His talk is unevenly paced, a quick spate and then a slow search for a word. His chair keeps hitching across the floor toward the other chairs, and then as he reaches a point, a conclusion, he shoves is chair back to the edge of the group again. While Duran was telephoning in the next room he said that Duran was a character in the new novel, which is set in Spain during the civil war, and that while he was writing the book he badly wanted to see Duran, “to straighten things out, to get information.”
“Now that I’ve finally found him the book is on its way to the printer, can’t be changed. But I’ve questioned him and the stuff I used was all right. You write what should be true as, with what knowledge you have, it seems to you. And that’s the best you consider do, anyway.”
Lion & lamb ;)
This pairing brings together two super-sized egos, but can be harmonious if they learn to co-rule the relationship. When dating, Aries likes the chase, and Leo won’t mind being pursued, especially if it means being treated like royalty. The proud, hard-to-win air of Leo only spurs the Aries on to greater shows of desire. These two are stars on the town, and have a lot of stamina to keep the party going late.
Trouble ensues if Aries says or does things that conveys disrespect, which can be a deal breaker for Leo. But the charming Ram knows how to get back inside the circle of trust for another round. Both sides reach their boiling points quickly, and irritation with the other could soon eclipse all the other good feelings. This relationship can be a real rollercoaster, with thrills-a-minute, but needs anger management to work for the long haul. When it’s good, it’s glorious, since these two are bon vivants that inspire eachother’s creative impulses.
Kerge on raske olla 
raske on kergeks saada
hõlpus on olla
kes me ei ole
vaev õppida olema
kes me
päriselt oleme
(J. Kaplinski)
¿Águila o sol?
I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.
(Octavio Paz)
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