. . .

The depths of the sea resound in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and your breakers sweep over me

Tennessee Williams

  

  The Winfield apartment is in the rear of the building, one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centers of lower middle-class population and are symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfuse mass of automatism.

  The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation. The fire escape is part of what we see -- that is, the landing of it and steps descending from it.

   The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.

. . .

"The Glass Menagerie", Scene One

Reverend Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

    Excerpt from the poem "Each and All"

Anton Chekhov

 ...  Dear, honored bookcase, I salute thy existence, which for over one hundred years has served the glorious ideals of goodness and justice; thy silent appeal to fruitful endeavor, unflagging in the course of a hundred years, tearfully sustaining through generations of our family, courage and faith in a better future, and fostering in us ideals of goodness and social consciousness.  ...

 

GAYEV  -  The Cherry Orchard, Act I

Shakespeare's 88

 ...

That thou in loosing me, shall win much glory,

And I by this will be a gainer too,

For bending all my loving thoughts on thee,

The injuries that to myself I do,

Doing thee vantage, double vantage me.

     Such is my love, to thee I so belong,
    That, for thy right, myself will bear all wrong.

W. S. Merwin: "Grace Note"

It is at last any morning

not answering to a name

I wake before there is light

hearing once more that same 

music without repetition

or beginning playing

away into myself

in silence like a wave

a unison in its own

key that I seem 

to have heard before I

was listening but by the time

I hear it now it is gone

as when on a morning

alive with sunlight

almost at the year's end

a feathered breath a bird

flies in at the open window

then vanishes leaving me

believing what I do not see

Conversazione

Allora il SIGNORE dal seno della tempesta disse:

   Chi e costui che oscura i miei disegni con parole prive di senno? Cingiti i fianchi come un prode; io ti faro delle domande e tu insegnami!

   Dov' eri tu quando io fondavo la terra? Dillo, se hai tanta intelligenza. 

   Chi ne fisso le dimensioni, se lo sai, o chi tiro sopra di essa la corda da misurare?   

   Su che furono poggiate le sue fondamenta, o chi ne pose la pietra angolare, quando le stelle del mattino cantavano tutte assieme e tutti i figli di Dio alzavano grida di gioia?

. . .

   Lo sai di sicuro! Perche tu eri allora gia nato e il numero dei tuoi giorni e grande!

Nelle Tue Mani

 

Padre Clementissime,

nelle Tue mani

 rimetto

 il mio spirito.