Paul Revere by Cyrus Dallin, North End, Boston

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Friday, April 25, 2008

WALT WHITMAN, THIS IS WHAT YOU SHALL DO:


Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men-go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers or families-re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I copied this to my important quotations file. It is my intention to whip it out at some time during an argument. You can tell me to erase it and I will but let me, instead trade it for this, the one right above yours:

Friedrich Nietzsche is the other writer who has written about forgetting.
An essay written in 1876 called “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” is just a paeon to the virtues of forgetting. It starts like this, “Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by. They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today. They leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again.... And so from morning until night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored.” No mnemonist here. “A human being may well ask an animal, ‘Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze and me?’ The animal would like to answer and say, ‘The reason is I always forget what I was going to say,’ but then he forgot that answer too, and stayed silent.”

Shaw Kenawe said...

anonymous,

Glad you enjoyed the quote. And thanks for the Nietzsche.

Come back again.

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