2022 July Blog by Chuck Peek
Some thoughts that seem eerily appropriate to the Jan. 6 hearings:
Those who put out the people’s eyes, reproach them for their blindness. (John Milton)
It’s said that “power corrupts,” but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable. (David Brin)
We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind, and tide. … I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that. (Thomas Edison)
If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other. (President Ulysses S. Grant)
Literature encourages tolerance — bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they’re so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can’t see them also as possibilities. (Northrop Frye)
The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed. (Ernest Hemingway)
Our ability to grow is directly proportional to an ability to entertain the uncomfortable. (Twyla Tharp)
This is no “age to wear away in.” Wordsworth’s Yarrow Visited 1815
Holy Shit! said everybody not watching Fox News (sic).
As we just recently passed by what now must be the world’s most ambiguous holiday—the 4th of July:
War, at first, is the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn’t any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone’s being worse off. (Karl Kraus)
The ultimate sense of security will be when we come to recognize that we are all part of one human race. Our primary allegiance is to the human race and not to one particular color or border. I think the sooner we renounce the sanctity of these many identities and try to identify ourselves with the human race the sooner we will get a better world and a safer world. (Mohamed ElBaradei)
Some thoughts on the possibilities ahead:
What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup. (Boris Pasternak)
& what are we
to one another but a means
to a meaning we haven’t yet
discovered two points of light
on the inky dark
(Camille Rankine, from “Matter in Retreat”)
“Concepts create idols. Only wonder comprehends anything. People
kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees.” (Jurgen Moltmann)
The near grows out of the far. (John G. Neihardt, on his monument at Wayne NE cemetery)
In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart. (Sigmund Freud)
A final anecdote and good omen:
I will celebrate my 80th birthday this fall. Talking with someone about aging and birthdays, they noted someone we both know who turned 94. I said I didn’t know about living to be 94 but sort of hoped I’d make at least 84. Soon after we took our trip westward, and in Greeley, Colorado, I, Charles A. Peek, pulled into a parking spot and looked at the car ahead of me and this is what I saw:
August Blog will be a recap of our westward trek and some poetry—the blog will explain why the poetry!
Kearney Nebraska
July 2022
capeek 