September 26, 2006
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Today’s Birthdays:T. S. Eliot and Linda Hamilton
From Eliot’s
“Ash Wednesday“–“Prophesy to the wind,
to the wind only for only
The wind will listen.
And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper,
saying….”
From The Man in the High Castle:
“Juliana said, ‘Oracle, why did you write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy? What are we supposed to learn?’
‘You have a disconcertingly superstitious way of phrasing your
question,’ Hawthorne said. But he had squatted down to witness the coin
throwing. ‘Go ahead,’ he said; he handed her three Chinese brass coins
with holes in the center. ‘I generally use these.’
She began throwing the coins; she felt calm and very much
herself. Hawthorne wrote down her lines for her. When she had thrown
the coins six times, he gazed down and said:‘Sun at the top. Tui at the bottom. Empty in the center.’
‘Do you know what hexagram that is?’ she said. ‘Without using the chart?’
‘Yes,’ Hawthorne said.
‘It’s Chung Fu,’ Juliana said. ‘Inner Truth. I know without using the chart, too. And I know what it means.’”
Our Lady of
Judgment Day“One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical,
decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in
the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every
day is Doomsday.”– Emerson, Ch. VII, “Works and Days,” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. VII, Society and Solitude (1870)
