Stretch a bow to the very full, And you will wish you had stopped in time; Temper a sword-edge to its very sharpest, And you will find it soon grows dull. When bronze and jade fill your hall. It can no longer be guarded. Wealth and place breed insolence. That brings ruin in its train. When your work is done, then withdraw! Such is Heaven’s Way.
The poorest man hath as true a title and just right to the land as the richest man … True freedom lies in the free enjoyment of the earth … If the common people have no more freedom in England but only to live among their elder brothers and work for them for hire, what freedom then have they in England more than we can have in Turkey or France?
While this kingly power reigned in one man called Charles, all sorts of people complained of oppression … Thereupon you that were the gentry, when you were assembled in Parliament, you called upon the poor common people to come and help you … That top bough is lopped off the tree of tyranny, and the kingly power in that one particular is cast out. But alas, oppression is a great tree still, and keeps off the sun of freedom from the poor commons still.
A thought: Sometimes the clouds and sunlight will form in a way you’ve never seen them do before, and your city will feel as if it’s another city altogether. On the Campus today at sunset, people were stopping on the grass watching the sun turn stove-filament orange through the rain clouds.
It’s just something I noticed. It made me realize that the sun is really built of fire. It made me feel like an animal, not a human.
And I wondered then, how do we ever know what beauty lies inside of people, and the strange ways this world works to lure that beauty outward?
In 1944 the mother of the poet Yevtushenko travelled from Siberia to Moscow, where she witnessed a procession of 20,000 German prisoners of war marching through the streets. The generals strutted at their head, oozing contempt, determined to show that they still considered themselves superior. ‘The bastards smell of perfume,’ someone shouted. The crowd yelled its hatred. The women waved their clenched fists in anger, and the police had great difficulty in holding them back. But when the Russians saw how pitifully thin and ragged the ordinary German soldiers were, dirty, battered and completely miserable, many of them hobbling on crutches, the street became silent. Suddenly, an elderly woman broke through the cordon and held out a crust of bread to one of the soldiers. Then from every side, other women copied her, giving food, cigarettes, whatever they had with them. ‘The soldiers were no longer enemies. They were people.’ But such spontaneous outbursts of compassion have seldom been more than rainbows in the sky; they have not changed the climate; they have not so far stimulated a desire to listen to what enemies have to say.
If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us. The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.
It isn’t a case of miracles not happening – it’s just a case of people calling them something else. Can’t you see the doctors round the dead man? He isn’t breathing any more, his pulse has stopped, his heart’s not beating: he’s dead. Then somebody gives him back his life, and they all – what’s the expression? – they reserve their opinion. They won’t say it’s a miracle, because that’s a word they don’t like. Then it happens again and again perhaps – because God’s about on the earth – and they say: these aren’t miracles, it is simply that we have enlarged our conception of what life is. Now we know you can be alive without pulse, breath, heart-beats. And they invent a new word to describe that state of life, and they say science has disproved a miracle.
The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.
‘To tell the truth, I never had it so good,’ he wrote. ‘But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy.’ That was hardly a joke. When a man’s breast feels like a cage from which all the dark birds have flown – he is free, he is light. And he longs to have his vultures back again. He wants his customary struggles, his nameless, empty works, his anger, his afflictions and his sins.
