Summertime
“It is a long time since my last visit,” said Dumbledore, peering down his crooked nose at Uncle Vernon. “I must say, your agapanthus are flourishing.”
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K.Rowling
19-Nose
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18-Dure
Lifetime
In a dark sea of centuries wherein nothing seemed to flow, a lifetime was only a brief eddy, even for the man who lived it. There was a tedium of repeated days and repeated seasons; then there were aches and pains, and finally Extreme Unction.
And a moment of blackness at the end – or at the beginning, rather.
For then the small shivering soul who had endured the tedium, endured it badly or well, would find itself in a place of light, find itself absorbed in the burning gaze of infinitely compassionate eyes as it stood before the Just One. It would be hard to believe differently.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) by Walter Miller
15-Edge
Settings
What else should our lives be but a series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become.
David Malouf
09-Mind
Synonyms
Thought: concept, cogitation, consideration, deliberation, estimation, idea, imagination, reflection, consideration, speculation, supposition.
Think: ponder; muse; cogitate, deliberate, esteem, imagine, reason, reflect, seriously consider; speculate, suppose.
25-Sage
The Tower
22-Care
Emotion
Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal.
As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change.
Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation – the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs & peaks.
If you watch carefully, you will see this undulation in every department of his life – his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up & down.
As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness & poverty.
Fun is closely related to Joy – a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.
THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS by C.S.LEWIS
19-Here
Thought
Think of the flow of thoughts in your mind as a social media feed. Throughout your life, you have “subscribed” to different things without noticing. Now their posts keep showing up in your feed, and you don’t know from where. Some are true & interesting, but many are unhelpful or simply untrue.
Practical Meditation by Giovanni Dienstmann
15-Such
Influence
A thousand years from now human beings would probably continue to die of cancer and earthquake and such clownish mishaps as slipping in bathtubs.
Mankind would continue to be burdened with eyes that grow weak, feet that grow tired, noses that itch, intestines vulnerable to bacilli, and generative organs that are nervous until the age of virtue & senility.
Most people would continue, at least for a few hundred years, to sit in chairs, eat from dishes upon tables, read books — no matter how many cunning phonographic substitutes might be invented, wear shoes or sandals, sleep in beds, write with some sort of pens, and in general spend twenty or twenty-two hours a day much as they had spent them in 1930.
Tornadoes, floods, droughts, lightning, and mosquitoes would remain, along with the homicidal tendency known in the best of citizens when their sweethearts go dancing off with other men.
And, most fatally & abysmally, men of superior cunning, of slyer foxiness, whether they might be called Comrades, Brethren, Commissars, Kings, Patriots, Little Brothers of the Poor, or any other rosy name, would continue to have more influence than slower-witted men, however worthy.
It Can’t Happen Here (1935) by Sinclair Lewis