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How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit
to employ I trust
in Nature for the stable laws Where the
heart lies, let the brain lie also. I thought that my invincible power would
hold the world captive, leaving me in a freedom undisturbed. Thus
night and day I worked at the chain with huge fires and cruel hard
strokes. When at last the work was done and the links were complete
and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip. |
Castle at Tulum, by Frederick
Catherwood, 1844 |
All the great utterances of man have to be
judged not by the letter but by the spirit – the spirit which unfolds
itself with the growth of life in history.
Rabindranath Tagore; from the preface to Sādhanā: The Realisation of
Life (1916)
Of course man is useful to man, because his body is a marvellous
machine and his mind an organ of wonderful efficiency. But he is a
spirit as well, and this spirit is truly known only by love. When we
define a man by the market value of the service we can expect of him, we
know him imperfectly. With this limited knowledge of him it becomes easy
for us to be unjust to him and to entertain feelings of triumphant
self-congratulation when, on account of some cruel advantage on our
side, we can get out of him much more than we have paid for. But when we
know him as a spirit we know him as our own. We at once feel that
cruelty to him is cruelty to ourselves, to make him small is stealing
from our own humanity ...
Rabindranath Tagore; ibid
Though the West has accepted as its teacher him who boldly
proclaimed his oneness with his Father, and who exhorted his followers
to be perfect as God, it has never been reconciled to this idea of our
unity with the infinite being. It condemns, as a piece of blasphemy, any
implication of man's becoming God. This is certainly not the idea that
Christ preached, nor perhaps the idea of the Christian mystics, but this
seems to be the idea that has become popular in the Christian west.
But the highest wisdom in the East holds that it is not the
function of our soul to gain God, to utilise him for any special
material purpose. All that we can ever aspire to is to become more and
more one with God. In the region of nature, which is the region of
diversity, we grow by acquisition; in the spiritual world, which is the
region of unity, we grow by losing ourselves, by uniting. Gaining a
thing, as we have said, is by its nature partial, it is limited only to
a particular want; but being is complete, it belongs to our wholeness,
it springs not from any necessity but from our affinity with the
infinite, which is the principle of perfection that we have in our soul.
Rabindranath Tagore; ibid
I am restless. I am athirst for faraway things. My soul goes out
in a longing to touch the skirt of the dim distance. O Great Beyond, O
the keen call of thy flute! I forget, I ever forget, that I have no
wings to fly, that I am bound in this spot evermore.
Rabindranath Tagore; from
The Gardener
(1915), p. 5
Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the
tip of a leaf.
Rabindranath Tagore; ibid, p. 45
O Woman, you are not merely the handiwork of God, but also of
men; these are ever endowing you with beauty from their own hearts … You
are one-half woman and one-half dream.
Rabindranath Tagore; ibid, p. 59
Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one
single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished
flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one
spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years.
Rabindranath Tagore; ibid, p. 85
Nationality is respectable only when it is on the defence, when
it is waging wars of liberation it is sacred; when those of domination
it is accursed.
Rabindranath Tagore
Praise shames me, for I secretly beg for it.
Rabindranath Tagore
The dissenter is every human being at those moments
of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
Archibald MacLeish, American poet, writer and the US Librarian of Congress, born on
May 7, 1892
We are deluged with facts, but we have lost, or are losing, our human
ability to feel them. Which means that we have lost or are losing our ability to
comprehend the facts of our experience.
Archibald MacLeish
What is more important in a library than anything else – is the fact that
it exists.
Archibald MacLeish; from 'The Premise of Meaning', American Scholar
(Washington, DC, June 5,
1972)
There are those I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity,
the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the
American Dream.
Archibald MacLeish; from Archibald MacLeish's The Fall of the City,
Columbia Workshop, CBS radio (1937)
Listen (MP3)
We are as great as our belief in human liberty – no greater. And our
belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.
Archibald MacLeish; from 'Now Let Us Address the Main Question: Bicentennial of
What?', New York Times (July
3, 1976)
The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call
human life – to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility,
scope, even dignity.
Archibald MacLeish; from Art and Law, Riders on Earth (1978)
I will give everything from myself to make sure that
Yugoslavia is great, not just geographically but great in spirit, and that it
hold firmly to its neutrality and sovereignty that has been established through
great sacrifice in the last battle [referring to World War II].
Josip Broz Tito, leader of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from
1945 until his death in 1980, born on May 7, 1892
A decade ago young people en masse began declaring themselves as
Yugoslavs. It was a form of
rising Yugoslav nationalism, which was a reaction to brotherhood and unity and a
feeling of belonging to a single socialist, self-managing society. This pleased
me a lot.
Josip Broz Tito
During the war, a battle was fought here, not only for the creation of a
new Yugoslavia, but also a battle for Bosnia and Herzegovina as a sovereign
republic. To some generals and leaders their position on this was not quite
clear. I never once doubted my stance on Bosnia. I always said that Bosnia and
Herzegovina cannot belong to this or that, only to the people that lived there
since the beginning of time.
Josip Broz Tito
Yugoslavia is a nation of six states, five cultures, four languages,
three religions, two alphabets, but one political party.
Josip Broz Tito
We study and take as an example the Soviet system, but we are developing
socialism in our country in somewhat different forms.
Josip Broz Tito
I could
have been a President's wife in the same way that others were. It is a
simple and agreeable role: appear on holidays, receive honors,
"dress up" and follow protocol which is almost what I did
before, and I believe more or less well, in the theater and the
cinema. As far as the hostility of the oligarchs goes, I can't help
but smile. And I ask: why would the oligarchs reject me? Because of my
humble origins? Because of my career as an actress? But has that class
of persons ever taken those reasons into account, here or in any part
of the world, when it is the case of the wife of the President? The
oligarchy was never hostile to anyone who could be useful. Power and
money are never bad advantages for a genuine oligarch ... But I was
not just the spouse of the President of the Republic, I was also the
wife of the leader of the Argentine people.
Peron had a double personality and I would need to have
one also: I am Eva Peron, the wife of the President, whose work is
simple and agreeable ... and I am also Evita, the wife of the leader
of a people who have deposited in him all their faith, hope and love.
Evita Perón, actress and Argentinian first lady, born on May 7,
1919
Everything,
absolutely everything in our contemporary world has been tailored to the
measure of men. We are absent from governments. We are absent from
Parliaments. From international organizations. We are neither in the
Vatican nor the Kremlin. We are not part of the upper echelons of the
imperialist countries. We are not in the atomic energy commissions. Nor in
the great multinational corporations. Nor in freemasonry nor in any secret
societies. We are not in any of the great power centres of the world.
Evita Perón
I let down my friends, I
let down my country, I let down our system of government.
Richard Nixon, speaking on May 7,
1977
Let no man boast himself
that he has got through the perils of winter till at least the seventh of
May.
Anthony Trollope
(1815 - 1882), English
novelist;
Doctor Thorne, ch. 47
May
7
is
the 127th
day of the year in the Gregorian
Calendar (128th in leap years), with 238
days remaining.
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Feast
day of St John of
Beverley
(Asiatic globeflower,
Trollius asiaticus, is
today's
plant, dedicated to this saint.)
Famed Beverly Hills and those named Beverley or Beverly, owe their names to the humble European Beaver in Britain – before they were hunted to extinction in that nation in the 16th Century (sadly, only a few thousand remain in continental Europe).
John of Beverley (c.
640 - May 7, 721) was
Bishop of Hexham, England and subsequently Archbishop of York, and the
famous Catholic historian, the Venerable
Bede was a pupil of his. John of Beverley was said to possess healing
gifts. He founded Beverley Minster: there his shrine was a favourite
resort of pilgrims.
Born at Harpham, England (Yorkshire), John preferred solitude and contemplation to the public life. He lived in a cell in the midst of woods near a stream in which beavers lived, called in Anglo-Saxon (Old English) Beofor-leagh, or 'lea of beavers' – a name that changed over years to Beverley. ('Lea' is an Old English word meaning a clearing, an open piece of grassland or a grove. It is common in English town names, in the north it generally uses the pure form of '-lea' whilst in the south it generally uses a changed spelling such as '-ley' or '-leigh' – Wikipedia.) In 718, he retired there in solitude and died in 721, his cell in the forest soon becoming a celebrated monastery. The flourishing town of Beverley grew up nearby; miracles and cures were performed at the shrine. His power as a saint was so great, "St John!" was the war cry of the Northern English in their wars against the Scots, as "Santiago!" (Saint James!) was the cry of the Spanish.
"The fiercest bulls being dragged with the strongest
ropes, by the lustiest men, into his church-yard, lose their fury, become
as gentle as lambs ..." wrote one chronicler.
In 1312, at the feast of St Bernard, wonderful oil
miraculously issued from St John's sepulchre, and was a cure for many
diseases. Or, so it is said.
"According to the Venerable Bede in Ecclesiastical History, who was ordained both deacon and priest by John when he was bishop of Hexham, John of Beverley possessed the gift of healing. He cured a youth of dumbness, even though the boy had never utter [sic] a single word. (The boy was apparently bald from a terrible scalp disease also.) On the second Sunday of Lent, John made the sign of the cross upon the youth's tongue, and loosed it. Bede tells of how the saint patiently taught the boy the alphabet. He taught him to say 'gea,' which signifies in Saxon 'Yea'; then the letters of the alphabet, and afterwards syllables. Thus the youth miraculously obtained his speech. Moreover, by the saint's blessing and the remedies prescribed by a physician whom he employed, his head was entirely healed, and became covered with hair." Source
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