When do we come of age?
Longform Improv is a young art form. You might be the one to discover the next cool device. You might be the one to have that legendary show. Any show can by definition be your best one. Believe in that, bring that excitement to the stage. Look down the line, really try to know the people you’re up there with, and understand that you and every other person standing on the stage with you has the potential to do the best work they’ve ever done in the next half hour. Facilitate that by any means necessary.
Chris Gethard on improvnonsense
Really all that bad?
If there is anything that I have learned from reading philosophy, it’s that philosophers are never what you would expect. For example, I have always thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a pretty unpleasant person, but after reading his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, I am feeling much more friendly towards him. Of course, I wouldn’t name any son of mine Jean-Jacques (I’m not that far gone), but I was tempted to frame a quotation or two for my bathroom wall.
By considering what we might have become, if we were left to ourselves, we should learn to bless Him whose beneficent hand, correcting our institutions and giving them an immoveable basis, has prevented the disorder which they would have otherwise produced and made our happiness emerge from methods which seemed as if they should fill us with misery.
“Learn the person God has commanded you to be, and in which part of human affairs you have been placed.”
(end of preface to Second Discourse)
Where do these people come from?
My father wrestles ideas into books and changes the minds of young people.
My mother uses her hands and her voice (reassuring and strong) to help women bring their children into the world.
My brother raises three children who love God, and when he orders books from Amazon, he puts things like “[My wife] is amazing and awesome and beautiful” in the address line.
My sister teaches her daughter how to pray and cook and clean and arrange flowers and make the world beautiful.
My brother loves fiercely, his wife, his friends, his cat, his hobbies, his sports.
My brother watches the world and sees patterns (in light, in sound, in code, in cards, in numbers, in people) and loves to make use of what he sees.
My brother gives his time to young boys, and decides for himself what’s impossible.
My sister is dangerously sweet and kind and quiet and beautiful and smart and will one day fold a piano in half through sheer concentration.
My brother feels music and writes songs without trying.
My sister writes words from her heart and laughs while she’s rolling her eyes.
My sister takes the world by storm, as self-confident as the cherubim.
How do I spell the world?
Poetry is, for the Christian, the art of being a creature; the art of being finite and searching out a relationship with the Infinite in the Most Holy and the Little Holy and the Barely Holy which He uses to make Himself known; the art of being content with the slowness with which the Infinite makes Himself known to finite man. Poetry is simply organized gratitude for creation; if all the cosmos signifies God, as Dante suggests, then poetry is the work of making sentences out of objects, then stories out of those sentences; poetry wants to see how a mountain and an apple rhyme; if all the cosmos is a text which reveals God, then poetry seeks to know the grammar and syntax of being human.
from The Cedar Room
Don’t you just love Gilbert?
The Iliad might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.
G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
What time is it?
3 am
Folded at my desk
sucking at a mug of pretentious coffee
hoping I can improve
or at least improvise.
Who knows the difference between chalk and cheese?
Stilton and Milton
(or Literature in the 17th and 20th Centuries)
Pardon, dear Lady, if this Christmas time,
The Convalescent Bard in halting rhyme
Thanks you for that great thought that still entwines
The Wicked Grocer with more wicked lines;
These straggling Crayon lines — who cares for these,
Who knows the difference between Chalk and Cheese?
Not wholly sound the saw, accounted sure,
That weak things perish and strong things endure:
Milton, six volumes on my groaning shelves,
May groan till Judgement Day and please themselves
As, harsh with leaden type and leathery pride,
Puritan Bards must groan on Christmas tide:
My table groans with Stilton — for a while:
Paradise Found not Lost, in Milton’s style
Green as his Eden; as his Michael strong:
But O, my friend, it will not groan there long.
–
G.K. Chesterton
The poets are no longer silent.
Why would I want a life of dreams?
“Live the life you’ve dreamed.” – Thoreau
How can you live the life you’ve dreamed
before dreaming of living a life? But what
is dreaming without living but a lifeless
dream, a dream dead before given breath?
We love our dreams. Dreams are hopes,
and we hope for what we love. Live the
life you’ve loved, and dream of love. Why
should we live before we dream but love
before we can live? Love is the law of life,
and dreams look to the future. But the future
is tomorrow, and love is today.
Will you recant?
Faith is often idly measured in a hypothetical situation where a maniac holds a gun to your head and tells you to deny that Christ is Lord. “How can I do that?” you say passionately. “That would be like denying that the sky is blue.” It is an unshakeable fact and your willingness to profess it makes you a good Christian.
Honestly, if a maniac held a gun to my head and told me to deny that the sky is blue, I would comply. I would name the sky whatever color he wanted. Yes, it is an unshakeable fact that the sky is blue, but what do you gain by arguing? You won’t convince him and you’ll be dead.
The reason I would refuse to deny Christ is not because His Lordship is a fact (even though it is). It is because He is my friend, He died for me, and to lie about Him would be to deny that friendship.
Last year, after I read NT Wright’s “Jesus and the Victory of God,” I had a moment of realization. It was like that moment when I understood that my grandparents are in fact my parents’ parents. Suddenly, history becomes real. I was listening to a talk on Philippians, where Paul tells the saints they are required to have the mind of Christ, Wright’s words were bouncing around in my head, and in that moment I realized the enormity of the fact that Jesus was a man. What is more natural to man than uncertainty? Jesus was tempted just as we are (Heb. 4:15), which means that the decision to flee His death and look for some other way was tempting. He feared death. He feared separation from God. But He had faith. Why would I agree with someone who tells me that this man doesn’t exist? I have good friends who sacrifice themselves for me in a thousand small ways every day. If someone suggested one of them didn’t exist, or used their name as a curse, I would be an ungrateful friend if I didn’t speak up. If a maniac held a gun to my head and told me to deny that my mother is my mother, I would refuse. Not because it would be a lie to agree, but because it would be an insult.
That man, the one who lived in Israel two thousand years ago, Jesus, who is God introduced, was obedient to death. Every second I exist I reap the fruit of His obedience. That is a friend that I would stand by. It would be an insult to do otherwise.
Can you define the center?
Robert Bly on translating Tomas Tranströmer:
You feel yourself, because of the work you’ve done on the image, invaded by the image. You feel that it has become a part of your house like someone who’s moved into your house, and your house is changed then. Your house has changed because these images have come in. So that’s the way I feel about translation. It’s a blessing.
from robertbly.com
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