Imitation and Plagiarism

I believe that writing is derivative. I mean, I think good writing comes from good reading. And, I think that writers, when they sit down to write hear in their heads the rhythms of good writers they have read. Sometimes, I could even tell you which writer's rhythms I am imitating. It's not exactly plagiarism, but it's just experience. It's falling in love with good language and trying to imitate it.

~Charles Kuralt

el cielo y el infierno

"...Teóricamente el cielo es un sitio de premio, y el infierno es un lugar de tortura y castio...entonces se dice que el cielo es un sitio con cocineros franceses, policías ingleses, mecánicos alemanes, amantes italianos y organización suiza. En el infierno en cambio los mecánicos son franceses, los policías son alemanes, los amantes son suizos, la organización está a cargo de italianos, y los cocineros son ingleses..."

L.R.d.P.

Aportes Alimenticios del Viejo al Nuevo Mundo
Historia de la Cocina
Lucia Rojas de Perdomo

Impressions

Monet Refuses The Operation

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separatefrom the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to becomethe fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could seehow heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

~Lisel Mueller

Home Improvement

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shall thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there's no more dying then.

~Shakespere's Sonnet 146

Patience

Put thou thy trust in God,
in duty's path go on;
walk in his strength with faith and hope,
so shall thy work be done.

Commit thy ways to him,
thy works into his hands,
and rest on his unchanging word,
who heaven and earth commands.

Though years on years roll on,
his covenant shall endure;
though clouds and darkness hide his path,
the promised grace is sure.

Give to the winds thy fears;
hope, and be undismayed:
God hears thy sighs and counts thy tears;
God shall lift up thy head.

Through waves and clouds and storms
his power will clear thy way:
wait thou his time; the darkest night
shall end in brightest day.

Leave to his sovereign sway
to choose and to command;
so shalt thou, wondering, own his way,
how wise, how strong his hand.

Words: Mitre Hymn Book, 1836
based on John Wesley's 1739 paraphrase of a text
by Paul Gerhardt, 1653 ("Befiehl du deine Wege")

Feeding on Words

The devotional works that have appeared have been so varied as to make classification difficult. Some of the great names are Meister Eckhart, Bernard of Clairvaux, Jan van Ruysbroeck, Michael Molinos, John of the Cross, Thomas Traherne, Richard Rolle, William Law, Walter Hilton, Francis de Sales, Jakob Boehme and Gerhart Tersteegen. To those might be added the more familiar names of Fenelon, Guyon and Thomas á Kempis.
To a large extent these were universal Christians who experienced the grace of God so deeply and so broadly that they encompassed the spiritual possibilities of all men and were able to set forth their religious experiences in language acceptable to Christians of various ages and varying doctrinal viewpoints. Just as a sincere hymn may strike a worshipful chord common to all Christians, so these works of devotion instantly commend themselves to true seekers everywhere. There need only be genuine faith in Christ, complete separation from the world, an eager cleaving unto God and a willingness to die to self and carry the cross, and the Holy Spirit will introduce His people to each other across the centuries and teach them the meaning of spiritual unity and the communion of saints. . . .
. . . people are unable to appreciate the great spiritual classics because they are trying to understand them while having no intention to obey them. The Greek Church father, St. Gregory, said it better than I could, so we'll let him tell us: "He who seeks to understand commandments without fulfilling commandments, and to acquire such understanding through learning and reading, is like a man who takes shadows for truth. For the understanding of truth is given to those who have become participants in truth (who have tasted it through living). Those who are not participants in truth and are not initiated therein, when they seek this understanding, draw from it a distorted wisdom. Of such the apostle says, `The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit,' even though they boast of their knowledge of truth." In conclusion, we use books profitably when we see them as a means toward an end; we abase them when we think of them as ends in themselves. And for all books of every sort let us observe Bacon's famous rule: "Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested."

~A.W. Tozer

Enjoyment and Renunciation

There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape-nuts on principle.
- G. K. Chesterton

Give me neither poverty nor riches;
feed me with the food that is needful for me,
lest I be full, and deny thee,
and say, "Who is the Lord?"
or lest I be poor, and steal,
and profane the name of my God.
-Proverbs 30:8-9

Things that Count
~Gilbert Meilaender