Idle Culture
Writings of a cultural dysfunct
Saturday, December 31, 2005
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
My Life
by Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate 2001-2003
Sometimes I see it as a straight line
drawn with a pencil and a ruler
transecting the circle of the world
or as a finger piercing
a smoke ring, casual, inquisitive,
but then the sun will come out
or the phone will ring
and I will cease to wonder
if it is one thing,
a large ball of air and memory,
or many things,
a string of small farming towns,
a dark road winding through them.
Let us say it is a field
I have been hoeing every day,
hoeing and singing,
then going to sleep in one of its furrows,
or now that it is more than half over,
a partially open door,
rain dripping from the eaves.
Like yours, it could be anything, a nest with one egg,
a hallway that leads to a thousand rooms--
whatever happens to float into view
when I close my eyes
or look out a window
for more than a few minutes,
so that some days I think
it must be everything and nothing at once.
But this morning, sitting up in bed,
wearing my black sweater and my glasses,
the curtains drawn and the windows up,
I am a lake, my poem is an empty boat,
and my life is the breeze that blows
through the whole scene
the surface of the water, the limp sail,
even the heavy, leafy trees along the shore.
Friday, May 06, 2005
Martin Luther King Jr. Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau1: "Improved means to an unimproved end". This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual "lag" must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the "without" of man's nature subjugates the "within", dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.
This problem of spiritual and moral lag, which constitutes modern man's chief dilemma, expresses itself in three larger problems which grow out of man's ethical infantilism. Each of these problems, while appearing to be separate and isolated, is inextricably bound to the other. I refer to racial injustice, poverty, and war."
Excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr. Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
1. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), American poet and essayist.