Harp Sayings And Quotes

King Edmund of East Anglia is now remembered as a saint, as one of those blessed souls who live forever in the shadow of God. Or so the priests tell me. In heaven, they say, the saints occupy a privileged place, living on the high platform of God’s great hall where they spend their time singing God’s praises. Forever. Just singing. Beocca always told me that it would be an ecstatic existence, but to me it seems very dull. The Danes reckon their dead warriors are carried to Valhalla, the corpse hall of Odin, where they spend their days fighting and their nights feasting and swiving, and I dare not tell the priests that this seems a far better way to endure the afterlife than singing to the sound of golden harps. I once asked a bishop whether there were any women in heaven. “Of course there are, my lord,” he answered, happy that I was taking an interest in doctrine. “Many of the most blessed saints are women.” “I mean women we can hump, bishop.” He said he would pray for me. Perhaps he did.

And those women were sneaky. They understood that including fantastical elements in their tales- golden eggs, signing harps, talking frogs- worked to mask a deeper purpose....it made the stories look on the surface like 'a mere bubble of nonsense' within which it was possible to 'utter harsh truths, to say what you dare' about the state of women's lives. Because they were just stories, right? Harmless little fantasies?

Any time I let it, the weight of living creeps in and starts to drag her down. It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored. People talk to her, but it feels like they are outside a house, talking through the walls. There are friends, but they are people to spend time with, not people to share time with. There's a false beast that takes the form of instinct and harps on the pointlessness of everything that happens.

There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of ‘Heaven’ ridiculous by saying they do not want ‘to spend eternity playing harps’. The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. Musical instruments are mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity share His splendour and power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.

What one says hardly matters, only the trust with which it is said, the sympathy with which it is received.

Calo bit the inside of his cheek, retuned his harp, and then began again: "Said the reeve to the maid who was fresh to the farm 'Let me show you the beasts of the yard!’ Here’s a cow that gives milk, and a pig that’s for ham Here’s a cur and a goat and a lamb; Here’s a horse tall and proud, and a well-trained old hawk, But the thing you should see is this excellent cock!" “Where could you possibly have learned that?” shouted Chains. Calo broke up in a fit of giggles, but Galdo picked up the song with a deadpan expression on his face: "Oh, some cocks rise early and some cocks stand tall, But the cock now in question works hardest of all! And they say hard’s a virtue, in a cock’s line of work So what say you, lovely, will you give it a—

This was not to say, however, that she did not long, at times, for some greater change, that she did not experience some of those exceptional moments when one thirsts for something other than what is, and when those who, through lack of energy or imagination, are unable to generate any motive power in themselves, cry out, as the clock strikes or the postman knocks, for something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when the heartstrings, which contentment has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, however rough, even if it should break them; when the will, which has with such difficulty won the right to indulge without let or hindrance in its own desires and woes, would gladly fling the reins into the hands of imperious circumstance, however cruel.

One of the Franciscans says later, "A monk should own nothing but his harp"; meaning, I suppose, that he should value nothing but his song, the song with which it was his business as a minstrel to serenade every castle and cottage, the song of the joy of the Creator in His creation and the beauty of the brotherhood of men.

Oh, Vivian Apple," Harp says. "You beautiful, crazy bitch.

Rest you here, enchanter, while the light fades, Vision narrows, and the far Sky-edge is gone with the sun. Be content with the small spark Of the coal, the smell Of food, and the breath Of frost beyond the shut door. Home is here, and familiar things; A cup, a wooden bowl, a blanket, Prayer, a gift for the god, and sleep. (And music, says the harp, And music.) Rest here, enchanter, while the fire dies. In a breath, in an eyelid's fall, You will see them, the dreams; The sword and the young king, The white horse and the running water, The lit lamp and the boy smiling. Dreams, dreams, enchanter! Gone with the harp's echo when the strings Fall mute; with the flame's shadow when the fire Dies. Be still, and listen. Far on the black air Blows the great wind, rises The running tide, flows the clear river. Listen, enchanter, hear Through the black air and the singing air The music….

Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred Bard who had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, Teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man's neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled!

People say that certain sounds can melt a heart of stone. If there is anyone who has that sort of a heart―which I doubt (as far as I am aware hearts are made of fibrous materials, fluid sacs and pumping mechanisms)―if anyone does have a heart composed of granite or flint and therefore not at all prone to melting but just conceivably meltable when exposed to very beautiful sounds, then the sounds made by my cherrywood harp, I am confident, would do it. However, I had a feeling the heart of Ellie the Exmoor Housewife was completely lacking in stony components. I had a feeling it was made of much softer stuff.

Early Summer, loveliest season, The world is being colored in. While daylight lasts on the horizon, Sudden, throaty blackbirds sing. The dusty-colored cuckoo cuckoos. "Welcome, summer" is what he says. Winter's unimaginable. The wood's a wickerwork of boughs. Summer means the river's shallow, Thirsty horses nose the pools. Long heather spreads out on bog pillows. White bog cotton droops in bloom. Swallows swerve and flicker up. Music starts behind the mountain. There's moss and a lush growth underfoot. Spongy marshland glugs and stutters. Bog banks shine like ravens' wings. The cuckoo keeps on calling welcome. The speckled fish jumps; and the strong Swift warrior is up and running. A little, jumpy, chirpy fellow Hits the highest note there is; The lark sings out his clear tidings. Summer, shimmer, perfect days.

How do I feel?' he cried. ' Well, I don't know how to say it. I feel, I feel' – he waved his arms in the air – 'I feel like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!' He stopped and he turned towards his master.

There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of ‘Heaven’ ridiculous by saying they do not want ‘to spend eternity playing harps’. The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them.

To-day, when the crisis calls you, will you go off and display your recitation and harp on, 'How cleverly I compose dialogues'? Nay, fellow man, make this your object, 'Look how I fail not to get what I will. Look how I escape what I will to avoid. Let death come and you shall know; bring me pains, prison, dishonour, condemnation.' This is the true field of display for a young man come from school. Leave those other trifles to other men; let no one ever hear you say a word on them, do not tolerate any compliments upon them; assume the air of being no one and of knowing nothing. Show that you know this only, how not to fail and how not to fall.

Hearing Mr. Meister say he sometimes got flustered was kind of like hearing a rainbow say it sometimes got depressed.

I’ll say this for the celestial spheres, though: great acoustics. We’re talking Platonic ideals here. Pythagoras would have smashed his corny little harp across his knee if he’d heard it.

believe she became what he’d wanted, the one person in the world—to whom, as he’d described it, everything can be said. But when everything can be said perhaps there is nothing more to say.

Silence. Montag sat like a carved white stone. The echo of the final hammer on his skull died slowly away into the black cavern where Faber waited for the echoes to subside. And then when the startled dust had settled down about Montag's mind, Faber began, softly, "All right, he's had his say. You must take it in. I'll say my say, too, in the next hours. And you'll take it in. And you'll try to judge them and make your decisions as to which way to jump, or fall. But I want it to be your decision, not mine, and not the Captain's. But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. We all have our harps to play. And it's up to you now to know with which ear you'll listen.

I’m terrified. Even more terrified than this morning, when I thought he was going to roll over in bed, pinch me on the cheek, and say, “Fun times, Harp. Thanks for the memories.” Wink. “Catch ya later.

After a long and happy life, I find myself at the pearly gates (a sight of great joy; the word for “pearl” in Greek is, by the way, margarita). Standing there is St. Peter. This truly is heaven, for finally my academic questions will receive answers. I immediately begin the questions that have been plaguing me for half a century: “Can you speak Greek? Where did you go when you wandered off in the middle of Acts? How was the incident between you and Paul in Antioch resolved? What happened to your wife?” Peter looks at me with some bemusement and states, “Look, lady, I’ve got a whole line of saved people to process. Pick up your harp and slippers here, and get the wings and halo at the next table. We’ll talk after dinner.” As I float off, I hear, behind me, a man trying to gain Peter’s attention. He has located a “red letter Bible,” which is a text in which the words of Jesus are printed in red letters. This is heaven, and all sorts of sacred art and Scriptures, from the Bhagavad Gita to the Qur’an, are easily available (missing, however, was the Reader’s Digest Condensed Version). The fellow has his Bible open to John 14, and he is frenetically pointing at v. 6: “Jesus says here, in red letters, that he is the way. I’ve seen this woman on television (actually, she’s thinner in person). She’s not Christian; she’s not baptized - she shouldn’t be here!” “Oy,” says Peter, “another one - wait here.” He returns a few minutes later with a man about five foot three with dark hair and eyes. I notice immediately that he has holes in his wrists, for when the empire executes an individual, the circumstances of that death cannot be forgotten. “What is it, my son?” he asks. The man, obviously nonplussed, sputters, “I don’t mean to be rude, but didn’t you say that no one comes to the Father except through you?” “Well,” responds Jesus, “John does have me saying this.” (Waiting in line, a few other biblical scholars who overhear this conversation sigh at Jesus’s phrasing; a number of them remain convinced that Jesus said no such thing. They’ll have to make the inquiry on their own time.) “But if you flip back to the Gospel of Matthew, which does come first in the canon, you’ll notice in chapter 25, at the judgment of the sheep and the goats, that I am not interested in those who say ‘Lord, Lord,’ but in those who do their best to live a righteous life: feeding the hungry, visiting people in prison . . . ” Becoming almost apoplectic, the man interrupts, “But, but, that’s works righteousness. You’re saying she’s earned her way into heaven?” “No,” replies Jesus, “I am not saying that at all. I am saying that I am the way, not you, not your church, not your reading of John’s Gospel, and not the claim of any individual Christian or any particular congregation. I am making the determination, and it is by my grace that anyone gets in, including you. Do you want to argue?” The last thing I recall seeing, before picking up my heavenly accessories, is Jesus handing the poor man a Kleenex to help get the log out of his eye.

We which were Ovids five books, now are three, For these before the rest preferreth he: If reading five thou plainst of tediousnesse, Two tane away, thy labor will be lesse: With Muse upreard I meant to sing of armes, Choosing a subject fit for feirse alarmes: Both verses were alike till Love (men say) Began to smile and tooke one foote away. Rash boy, who gave thee power to change a line? We are the Muses prophets, none of thine. What if thy Mother take Dianas bowe, Shall Dian fanne when love begins to glowe? In wooddie groves ist meete that Ceres Raigne, And quiver bearing Dian till the plaine: Who'le set the faire treste sunne in battell ray, While Mars doth take the Aonian harpe to play? Great are thy kingdomes, over strong and large, Ambitious Imp, why seekst thou further charge? Are all things thine? the Muses Tempe thine? Then scarse can Phoebus say, this harpe is mine. When in this workes first verse I trod aloft, Love slackt my Muse, and made my numbers soft. I have no mistris, nor no favorit, Being fittest matter for a wanton wit, Thus I complaind, but Love unlockt his quiver, Tooke out the shaft, ordaind my hart to shiver: And bent his sinewy bow upon his knee, Saying, Poet heers a worke beseeming thee. Oh woe is me, he never shootes but hits, I burne, love in my idle bosome sits. Let my first verse be sixe, my last five feete, Fare well sterne warre, for blunter Poets meete. Elegian Muse, that warblest amorous laies, Girt my shine browe with sea banke mirtle praise. -- P. Ovidii Nasonis Amorum Liber Primus ELEGIA 1 (Quemadmodum a Cupidine, pro bellis amores scribere coactus sit)

There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of “Heaven” ridiculous by saying they do not want “to spend eternity playing harps.” The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. Musical instruments are mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity share His splendour and power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.

You don’t have to apologize,” Treston said. “I know where I work, I know what I do to make a living, and I know it’s not the most respectable place in Vegas. But frankly, Chad, if you don’t mind my saying so, I think you have a lot to learn about good manners.” Chad blinked. “What do you mean?” Treston reached for his wine glass, finished off what was left to wash down the last forkful of chewy escargot, and said, “All I’m saying is you haven’t stopped harping about that blond, and I have to tell you it’s getting a little tired now. Seriously, man. It’s a little insulting, too.” He leaned forward, looked into Chad’s eyes, and held his hand. “Look, I know how hard it is for selfish men like you to understand empathy. Lord knows I’ve been with enough of them.

They wish to keep the weapons, and the harps, and everything else save for the suffering of childbirth and the toil of the cooking pot and the loom. I dare say they would like to say women cannot serve the gods, but no one would be foolish enough to believe that.

When once to a man the human face is the human face divine, and the hand of his neighbour is the hand of a brother, then will he understand what St Paul meant when he said, "I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren." But he will no longer understand those who, so far from feeling the love of their neighbour an essential of their being, expect to be set free from its law in the world to come. There, at least, for the glory of God, they may limit its expansive tendencies to the narrow circle of their heaven. On its battlements of safety, they will regard hell from afar, and say to each other, "Hark! Listen to their moans. But do not weep, for they are our neighbours no more." St Paul would be wretched before the throne of God, if he thought there was one man beyond the pale of his mercy, and that as much for God's glory as for the man's sake. And what shall we say of the man Christ Jesus? Who, that loves his brother, would not, upheld by the love of Christ, and with a dim hope that in the far-off time there might be some help for him, arise from the company of the blessed, and walk down into the dismal regions of despair, to sit with the last, the only unredeemed, the Judas of his race, and be himself more blessed in the pains of hell, than in the glories of heaven? Who, in the midst of the golden harps and the white wings, knowing that one of his kind, one miserable brother in the old-world-time when men were taught to love their neighbour as themselves, was howling unheeded far below in the vaults of the creation, who, I say, would not feel that he must arise, that he had no choice, that, awful as it was, he must gird his loins, and go down into the smoke and the darkness and the fire, travelling the weary and fearful road into the far country to find his brother?—who, I mean, that had the mind of Christ, that had the love of the Father?

Joe plays guitar. He says he doesn’t play well, but he does. My sister plays harp and my younger brother plays drums. I always thought it would be brilliant to make one album together and call it Fuck the Corrs. But the fights would have made Liam and Noel Gallagher seem like pussycats.

But, to return to my design, what power was it that drew those stony, oaken, and wild people into cities but flattery? For nothing else is signified by Amphion and Orpheus' harp. What was it that, when the common people of Rome were like to have destroyed all by their mutiny, reduced them to obedience? Was it a philosophical oration? Least. But a ridiculous and childish fable of the belly and the rest of the members. And as good success had Themistocles in his of the fox and hedgehog. What wise man's oration could ever have done so much with the people as Sertorius' invention of his white hind? Or his ridiculous emblem of pulling off a horse's tail hair by hair? Or as Lycurgus his example of his two whelps? To say nothing of Minos and Numa, both which ruled their foolish multitudes with fabulous inventions; with which kind of toys that great and powerful beast, the people, are led anyway.

This was to say, however, that she did not long, at times, for some even greater variation, that she did not pass through those abnormal hours in which one thirsts for something different from what one has, when those people who, through lack of energy or imagination, are unable to generate any motive power in themselves, cry out, as the clock strikes or the postman knocks, in their eagerness for news (even if it be bad news), for some emotion (even that of grief); when the heartstrings, which prosperity has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, even a brutal hand, even if it shall break them; when the will, which has with such difficulty brought itself to subdue to its impulse, to renounce its right to abandon itself to its own uncontrolled desires, and consequent sufferings, would fain cast its guiding reins into the hands of circumstances, coercive and, it may be, cruel.

There is so much silence all around that I think I can hear moonlight crashing against the windows. A foreign voice awakes inside my breast, singing a longing which is not my own. They say that ancestors, who died before their time, with young blood in their veins, with great passions in their blood, with living sun in passions, return, return to live inside us their unspent lives. There is so much silence all around that I think I can hear moonlight crashing against the windows. Oh, who knows, my soul -in whose breast you too will sing, in centur- ies to come, on sweet strings of silence on a harp of darkness, your smothered longing and your broken joy of life? Who knows? Who knows?

My Aunt Libby's husband had made a joke once, about a nun that a nunnery sent to Teresa for a checkup. This nun kept hearing harp notes in her ears and a voice saying over and over, "Alleluia!" Only she wasn't sure, on being closely questioned, whether the voice was saying Alleluia or Arizona. The nun had been born in Arizona. I think she ended up in some asylum.

Dagonet, the fool, whom Gawain in his moods  Had made mock-knight of Arthur's Table Round,  At Camelot, high above the yellowing woods,  Danced like a wither'd leaf before the Hall.  And toward him from the Hall, with harp in hand,  And from the crown thereof a carcanet  Of ruby swaying to and fro, the prize  Of Tristram in the jousts of yesterday,  Came Tristram, saying, "Why skip ye so, Sir Fool?

sprint, woodwinds fluttering behind. More instruments join in. Flutes? Harps? The song races, seems to loop back over itself. “Werner?” Jutta whispers. He blinks; he has to swallow back tears. The parlor looks the same as it always has: two cribs beneath two Latin crosses, dust floating in the open mouth of the stove, a dozen layers of paint peeling off the baseboards. A needlepoint of Frau Elena’s snowy Alsatian village above the sink. Yet now there is music. As if, inside Werner’s head, an infinitesimal orchestra has stirred to life. The room seems to fall into a slow spin. His sister says his name more urgently, and he presses the earphone to her ear. “Music,” she says. He holds the pin as stock-still as he can. The signal is weak enough that, though the earphone is six inches away, he can’t hear any trace of the song. But he watches his sister’s face, motionless except for her eyelids, and in the kitchen Frau Elena holds her flour-whitened hands in the air and cocks her head, studying Werner, and two older boys rush in and stop, sensing some change in the air, and the little radio with its four terminals and trailing aerial sits motionless on the floor between them all like a miracle.

People always say they want to know the truth. They make big speeches about how important it is to them and they harp on about the consequence of deceit, but when they’re faced with the truth, they suddenly don’t want it anymore. The truth requires you to be brave. The truth requires you to face awkward situations. The truth requires you to stand your ground, to bear it, not run away and hide from it.

… in these new days and in these new pages a philosophical tradition of the spontaneity of speculation kind has been rekindled on the sacred isle of Éire, regardless of its creative custodian never having been taught how to freely speculate, how to profoundly question, and how to playfully define. Spontaneity of speculation being synonymous with the philosophical-poetic, the philosophical-poetic with the rural philosopher-poet, and by roundelay the rural philosopher-poet thee with the spontaneity of speculation be. And by the way of the rural what may we say? A philosopher-poet of illimitable space we say. Iohannes Scottus Ériugena the metaphor of old salutes you; salutes your lyrical ear and your skilful strumming of the rippling harp. (Source: Hearing in the Write, Canto 19, Ivy-muffled)

And now I am fit for rivalship with your clocks, papa having given me an Aeolian harp for the purpose. Do you know the music of an Aeolian harp, and that nothing below the spherical harmonies is so sweet and soft and mournfully wild? The amusing part of it is (after the poetical) that Flushie is jealous and thinks it is alive, and takes it as very hard that I should say ‘beautiful’ to anything except his ears!

My name is Carana, now get on or by Davalar I’ll leave you here.” He jumped up and slowly floated down onto the horse behind her, slowly sliding his arms around her waist as a lover might. “So do I hold on to you...here?” “Have you ever tried playing the harp without fingers? “Can’t say that I have, although there was this one time in Alrin when I only had one hand so...” “Oh gods above what have I got myself into

Say it,” Cassian whispered against her skin. She knew what he meant. Somehow, she knew what he meant. Nesta waited until he’d thrust again, driving as deep into her as he’d ever gone, and whispered, “You’re mine.” He groaned, thrusting hard. She whispered, “And I am yours.” Those golden threads between their very souls shone with the words, as if they formed a harp strummed by a heavenly hand. For it was music between their souls. Always had been. And his voice was her favorite melody.

By the Rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.

There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of ‘Heaven’ ridiculous by saying they do not want ‘to spend eternity playing harps’. The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible... People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.

I am short, so I like the little guy/underdog stories, but they are not straightforwardly about one size versus another. Think about, say, Jack and the Beanstalk, which is basically a big ugly stupid giant, and a smart little Jack who is fast on his feet. OK, but the unstable element is the beanstalk, which starts as a bean and grows into a huge tree-like thing that Jack climbs to reach the castle. This bridge between two worlds is unpredictable and very surprising. And later, when the giant tries to climb after Jack, the beanstalk has to be chopped down pronto. This suggests to me that the pursuit of happiness, which we may as well call life, is full of surprising temporary elements -- we get somewhere we couldn't go otherwise and we profit from the trip, but we can't stay there, it isn't our world, and we shouldn't let that world come crashing down into the one we can inhabit. The beanstalk has to be chopped down. But the large-scale riches from the 'other world' can be brought into ours, just as Jack makes off with the singing harp and the golden hen. Whatever we 'win' will accommodate itself to our size and form -- just as the miniature princesses and the frog princes all assume the true form necessary for their coming life, and ours. Size does matter.

Very carefully he put up his hands and took off his hat saying CHIEF and while everyone watched he walked slowly down the steps and over to the fire engine and set his hat down on the front seat. Then he bent down, searching thoughtfully, and finally, while everyone watched, he took up a rock. In complete silence he turned slowly and then raised his arm and smashed the rock through one of the great tall windows of our mother's drawing room. A wall of laughter rose and grew behind him and then, first the boys on the steps and then the other men and at last the women and the smaller children, they moved like a wave at our house... I heard Constance's harp go over with a musical cry, and a sound which I knew was a chair being smashed against the wall.

This was not say, however, that she did not long, at times, for some greater change, that she did not experience some of those exceptional moments when one thirsts for something other than what is, and when those who, through lack of energy or imagination, are unable to generate any motive power in themselves, cry out, as the clock strikes or the postman knocks, for something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when the heartstrings, which contentment has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, however rough, even if it should break them; when the will, which has with such difficulty won the right to indulge without let or hindrance in its own desires and woes, would gladly fling the reins into the hands of imperious circumstance, however cruel.

This was not to say, however, that she did not long, at times, for some greater change, that she did not experience some of those exceptional moments when one thirsts for something other than what is, and when those who, through lack of energy or imagination, are unable to generate any motive power in themselves, cry out, as the clock strikes or the postman knocks, for something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when the heartstrings, which contentment has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, however rough, even if it should break them; when the will, which has with such difficulty won the right to indulge without let or hindrance in its own desires and woes, would gladly fling the reigns into the hands of imperious circumstance, however cruel.

April 29 MORNING “Thou art my hope in the day of evil.” — Jeremiah 17:17 THE path of the Christian is not always bright with sunshine; he has his seasons of darkness and of storm. True, it is written in God’s Word, “Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace;” and it is a great truth, that religion is calculated to give a man happiness below as well as bliss above; but experience tells us that if the course of the just be “As the shining light that shineth more and more unto the perfect day,” yet sometimes that light is eclipsed. At certain periods clouds cover the believer’s sun, and he walks in darkness and sees no light. There are many who have rejoiced in the presence of God for a season; they have basked in the sunshine in the earlier stages of their Christian career; they have walked along the “green pastures” by the side of the “still waters,” but suddenly they find the glorious sky is clouded; instead of the Land of Goshen they have to tread the sandy desert; in the place of sweet waters, they find troubled streams, bitter to their taste, and they say, “Surely, if I were a child of God, this would not happen.” Oh! say not so, thou who art walking in darkness. The best of God’s saints must drink the wormwood; the dearest of His children must bear the cross. No Christian has enjoyed perpetual prosperity; no believer can always keep his harp from the willows. Perhaps the Lord allotted you at first a smooth and unclouded path, because you were weak and timid. He tempered the wind to the shorn lamb, but now that you are stronger in the spiritual life, you must enter upon the riper and rougher experience of God’s full-grown children. We need winds and tempests to exercise our faith, to tear off the rotten bough of self-dependence, and to root us more firmly in Christ. The day of evil reveals to us the value of our glorious hope.

There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of 'Heaven' ridiculous by saying they do not want 'to spend eternity playing harps.' The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. Musical instruments are mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity share His splendour and power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.

A feeling of slow motion came upon me then, and parts of my bike scratched against bits of my body. Slimy seaweed tangled around my ankles and my shoes slipped off my feet. My arms and legs were dragged in different directions as if there was an underwater force making me dance to a morbid tune. I felt light. I felt slow. I felt fast - all in quick succession, but I couldn't think of anything except the quite relaxing idea that soon everything was going to be over. I was alone. All around the wet rocks were silent and slimy. I couldn't feel any pleasure or any purpose. My decision seemed to make a terrible kind of sense My panic had gone. I was finished making decisions. I didn't think I'd ever have any more to make. I'm not exactly sure what I'd been hoping for next. Brightness and song possibly. Beautiful music perhaps, say a harp or something playing in the distance and warmth to soothe my numb, frozen, sopping, scraped body. I definitely wasn't expecting what happened next.

And what shall we say of the man Christ Jesus? Who, that loves his brother, would not, upheld by the love of Christ, and with a dim hope that in the far-off time there might be some help for him, arise from the company of the blessed, and walk down into the dismal regions of despair, to sit with the last, the only unredeemed, the Judas of his race, and be himself more blessed in the pains of hell, than in the glories of heaven? Who, in the midst of the golden harps and the white wings, knowing that one of his kind, one miserable brother in the old-world-time when men were taught to love their neighbor as themselves, was howling unheeded far below in the vaults of the creation, who, I say, would not feel that he must arise, that he had no choice, that, awful as it was, he must gird his loins, and go down into the smoke and the darkness and the fire, traveling the weary and fearful road into the far country to find his brother?—who, I mean, that had the mind of Christ, that had the love of the Father?

They say the Dark Mother loved him, when he was young, and set a seal upon his lips and showed him her mysteries beneath the earth. He crossed the river of blood, and the river of weeping; but Lethe’s stream he would not drink of, and seven years passed over him like a single day. When the appointed time drew near, for her to let him back to the upper air, she tempted him to speak while he was still in bonds to her; but he would not break the seal of silence, nor taste her apples and her pomegranates that bind a man for ever, because he was vowed to Apollo and the gods of light. So she had to set him free. All the way up to the mouth of her dark cave she followed him, listening to his harp as he sang upon his way, and crying, ‘Look back! Look back!’ But he did not turn till he had stepped forth into the sunlight; and she sank into the earth, weeping for her stolen secrets and lost love. So people say.” When this tale was done, I said, “He did not speak of it. Is it true?” “There is truth and truth,” said the priest of Delos. “It is true after its kind.

On this side of eternity, Christmas is still a promise. Yes, the Savior has come, and with him peace on earth, but the story is not finished. Yes, there is peace in our hearts, but we long for peace in our world. Every Christmas is still a “turning of the page” until Jesus returns. Every December 25 marks another year that draws us closer to the fulfillment of the ages, that draws us closer to . . . home. When we realize that Jesus is the answer to our deepest longing, even Christmas longings, each Advent brings us closer to his glorious return to earth. When we see him as he is, King of kings and Lord of lords, that will be “Christmas” indeed! Talk about giving Christmas gifts! Just think of this abundance . . . You do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed. (1 Cor. 1:7) And carols? You’re about to hear singing like you’ve never heard before. Listen . . . Then I heard something like the voice of a great multitude and like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, saying, “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns.” (Rev. 19:6, nasb) Christmas choirs? Never was there a choir like the one about to be assembled . . . They held harps given them by God and sang . . . the song of the Lamb: “Great and marvelous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty. Just and true are your ways, King of the ages.” (Rev. 15:2–3) True, Main Street in your town may be beautifully decorated for the season, but picture this . . . The twelve gates [of the city] were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of pure gold, like transparent glass. (Rev. 21:21) Oh, and yes, we love the glow of candles on a cold winter’s night and the twinkling of Christmas lights in the dark, but can you imagine this? There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever. (Rev. 22:5) Heaven is about to happen. The celebration is about to burst on the scene. We stand tiptoe at the edge of eternity, ready to step into the new heaven and the new earth. And I can hardly wait.

Keep a clear conscience. Contentment is the manna that is laid up in the ark of a good conscience: O take heed of indulging any sin! it is as natural for guilt to breed disquiet, as for putrid matter to breed vermin. Sin lies as Jonah in the ship, it raiseth a tempest. If dust or motes be gotten into the eye, they make the eye water, and cause a soreness in it; if the eye be clear, then it is free from that soreness; if sin be gotten into the conscience, which is as the eye of the soul, then grief and disquiet breed there; but keep the eye of conscience clear, and all is well. What Solomon saith of a good stomach, I may say of a good conscience, "to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet:"Pr. 27. 7 so to a good conscience every bitter thing is sweet; it can pick contentment out of the cross. A good conscience turns the waters of Marah into wine. Would you have a quiet heart? Get a smiling conscience. I wonder not to hear Paul say he was in every state content, when he could make that triumph, "I have lived in all good conscience to this day." When once a man's reckonings are clear, it must needs let in abundance of contentment into the heart. Good conscience can suck contentment out of the bitterest drug, under slanders; "our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience."2 Cor. 1. 12 In case of imprisonment, Paul had his prison songs, and could play the sweet lessons of contentment, when his feet were in the stocks.Ac. 16. 25 Augustine calls it "the paradise of a good conscience;" and if it be so, then in prison we may be in paradise. When the times are troublesome, a good conscience makes a calm. If conscience be clear, what though the days be cloudy? is it not a contentment to have a friend always by to speak a good word for us? Such a friend is conscience. A good conscience, as David's harp, drives away the evil spirit of discontent. When thoughts begin to arise, and the heart is disquieted, conscience saith to a man, as the king did to Nehemiah, "why is thy countenance sad?" so saith conscience, hast not thou the seed of God in thee? art not thou an heir of the promise? hast not thou a treasure that thou canst never be plundered of? why is thy countenance sad? O keep conscience clear, and you shall never want contentment! For a man to keep the pipes of his body, the veins and arteries, free from colds and obstructions, is the best way to maintain health: so, to keep conscience clear, and to preserve it from the obstructions of guilt, is the best way to maintain contentment. First, conscience is pure, and then peaceable.

remember the evening as a wonderful blur of warm emotion, tinged in bitter. Fiddles, lutes, and drums, everyone played and danced and sang as they wished. I dare say we rivaled any faerie revel you can bring to mind. I got presents. Trip gave me a belt knife with a leather grip, claiming that all boys should have something they can hurt themselves with. Shandi gave me a lovely cloak she had made, scattered with little pockets for a boy’s treasures. My parents gave me a lute, a beautiful thing of smooth dark wood. I had to play a song of course, and Ben sang with me. I slipped a little on the strings of the unfamiliar instrument, and Ben wandered off looking for notes once or twice, but it was nice. Ben opened up a small keg of mead he had been saving for “just such an occasion.” I remember it tasting the way I felt, sweet and bitter and sullen. Several people had collaborated to write “The Ballad of Ben, Brewer Supreme.” My father recited it as gravely as if it were the Modegan royal lineage while accompanying himself on a half harp. Everyone laughed until they hurt, and Ben twice as much as everyone else. At some point in the night, my mother swept me up and danced around in a great spinning circle. Her laughter sang out like music trailing in the wind. Her hair and skirt spun around me as she twirled. She smelled comforting, the way only mothers do. That smell, and the quick laughing kiss she gave me did more to ease the dull ache of Ben’s leaving than all the entertainments combined.

He began by expressing his gratitude to those “whom no partizan malice, or partizan hope, can make false to the nation’s life,” then passed at once, since peace seemed uppermost in men’s minds nowadays, to a discussion of “three conceivable ways” in which it could be brought about. First, by suppressing the rebellion; “This I am trying to do. Are you for it? If you are, so far we are agreed.” Second, by giving up the Union; “I am against this. Are you for it? If you are, you should say so plainly.” Third, by negotiating some sort of armistice based on compromise with the Confederates; but “I do not believe any compromise, embracing the maintenance of the Union, is now possible. All I learn leads to a directly opposite belief.” After disposing thus, to his apparent satisfaction, of the possibility of achieving peace except by force of arms, he moved on to another matter which his opponents had lately been harping on as a source of dissatisfaction: Emancipation. “You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but no matter. Fight you, then, exclusively to save the Union. I issued the Proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union. Whenever you shall have conquered all resistance to the Union, if I shall urge you to continue fighting, it will be an apt time then for you to declare you will not fight to free negroes. I thought that in your struggle for the Union, to whatever extent the negroes should cease helping the enemy, to that extent it weakened the enemy in his resistance to you. Do you think differently? I thought that whatever negroes can be got to do, as soldiers, leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do in saving the Union. Does it appear otherwise to you? But negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise, being made, must be kept.

My intellectual depravity kept me from completely enjoying what surrounded me. I am sure that, in what little I might have tried to say, I was going to ridicule, diminish and materialize everything. In that strange and almost indescribable scenery, so superior to what I was normally able to see, I imagined—obviously an effect of my blind rudeness—that I came across things that faintly resembled the most beautiful things I had contemplated on the sublunary globe. I believed I saw a flower: I beheld something like large woods whose trees were only flowers; nothing but petals, corollas and calyces, fragrant and cradled by a breeze that itself was plainly perfumed with floral breaths—and just as sweet. All the nuances of the rose adorned these gigantic fluttering bouquets. Some of the roses, brown-lipped roses, were so unbelievably arousing and voluptuous—if I can speak like this—that I felt like they rejuvenated my soul. A flower often stood alone, as big as a tree—and with such a divine form, such an embracing scent—that’s the only word that translates, a little ridiculously, what I felt—that the air wafting around it would kill a normal human being with excessive pleasure. Because I was disembodied, I could breath it in with no harm—and even blend myself, overcome by joy, with its intoxicating, incarnadine cloud. Large, flashy birds flew among the heights of the flower-trees where they sometimes alit like snuggling light. Their slow-noted songs evoked a magical past more enticing even than this splendid present. The sky was pink and gold. Pink fountains flowed there, flashing with gold—whose music could only be compared to harps that had —absurdly—crystal strings—and to go further in absurdity: living crystal. All this nature seemed enshrouded—and at the same time penetrated—with a tender cheerfulness. I floated in the pink perfumes of the woods, in the soothing radiance of the glades, in all that gentleness and beauty that felt like an infinite bounty manifested by transportive images and by an immaterial well being… And even though I desperately did not want to leave this atmosphere of delights—which I can give no real idea of—I felt unbalanced, brutal and out of place among the ethereal sweetness. A charitable, sorrowful force (I felt it) chased me away almost in spite of itself in order to cut me off from these joys I was unworthy of.

Sylphid was beginning to play professionally, and she was subbing as second harpist in the orchestra at Radio City Music Hall. She was called pretty regularly, once or twice a week, and she’d also got a job playing at a fancy restaurant in the East Sixties on Friday night. Ira would drive her from the Village up to the restaurant with her harp and then go and pick her and the harp up when she finished. He had the station wagon, and he’d pull up in front of the house and go inside and have to carry it down the stairs. The harp is in its felt cover, and Ira puts one hand on the column and one hand in the sound hole at the back and he lifts it up, lays the harp on a mattress they keep in the station wagon, and drives Sylphid and the harp uptown to the restaurant. At the restaurant he takes the harp out of the car and, big radio star that he is, he carries it inside. At ten-thirty, when the restaurant is finished serving dinner and Sylphid’s ready to come back to the Village, he goes around to pick her up and the whole operation is repeated. Every Friday. He hated the physical imposition that it was—those things weigh about eighty pounds—but he did it. I remember that in the hospital, when he had cracked up, he said to me, ‘She married me to carry her daughter’s harp! That’s why the woman married me! To haul that fucking harp!’ “On those Friday night trips, Ira found he could talk to Sylphid in ways he couldn’t when Eve was around. He’d ask her about being a movie star’s child. He’d say to her, ‘When you were a little girl, when did it dawn on you that something was up, that this wasn’t the way everyone grew up?’ She told him it was when the tour buses went up and down their street in Beverly Hills. She said she never saw her parents’ movies until she was a teenager. Her parents were trying to keep her normal and so they downplayed those movies around the house. Even the rich kid’s life in Beverly Hills with the other movie stars’ kids seemed normal enough until the tour buses stopped in front of her house and she could hear the tour guide saying, ‘This is Carlton Pennington’s house, where he lives with his wife, Eve Frame.’ “She told him about the production that birthday parties were for the movie stars’ kids—clowns, magicians, ponies, puppet shows, and every child attended by a nanny in a white nurse’s uniform. At the dining table, behind every child would be a nanny. The Penningtons had their own screening room and they ran movies. Kids would come over. Fifteen, twenty kids.

How do I feel?’ he cried. ‘Well, I don’t know how to say it. I feel, I feel’ – he waved his arms in the air – ‘I feel like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!

King Edmund of East Anglia is now remembered as a saint, as one of those blessed souls who live forever in the shadow of God. Or so the priests tell me. In heaven, they say, the saints occupy a privileged place, living on the high platform of God’s great hall where they spend their time singing God’s praises. Forever. Just singing. Beocca always told me that it would be an ecstatic existence, but to me it seems very dull. The Danes reckon their dead warriors are carried to Valhalla, the corpse hall of Odin, where they spend their days fighting and their nights feasting and swiving, and I dare not tell the priests that this seems a far better way to endure the afterlife than singing to the sound of golden harps. I once asked a bishop whether there were any women in heaven. “Of course there are, my lord,” he answered, happy that I was taking an interest in doctrine. “Many of the most blessed saints are women.” “I mean women we can hump, bishop.” He said he would pray for me. Perhaps he did.” ― Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom 42 likes Like “The bards sing of love, they celebrate slaughter, they extol kings and flatter queens, but were I a poet I would write in praise of friendship.” ― Bernard Cornwell, The Winter King tags: friendship 40 likes Like “The preachers tell us that pride is a great sin, but the preachers are wrong. Pride makes a man, it drives him, it is the shield wall around his reputation... Men die, they said, but reputation does not die.” ― Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom tags: preachers, pride, reputation, shield-wall 39 likes Like “I am no Christian. These days it does no good to confess that, for the bishops and abbots have too much influence and it is easier to pretend to a faith than to fight angry ideas. I was raised a Christian, but at ten years old, when I was taken into Ragnar’s family, I discovered the old Saxon gods who were also the gods of the Danes and of the Norsemen, and their worship has always made more sense to me than bowing down to a god who belongs to a country so far away that I have met no one who has ever been there. Thor and Odin walked our hills, slept in our valleys, loved our women and drank from our streams, and that makes them seem like neighbours. The other thing I like about our gods is that they are not obsessed with us. They have their own squabbles and love affairs and seem to ignore us much of the time, but the Christian god has nothing better to do than to make rules for us. He makes rules, more rules, prohibitions and commandments, and he needs hundreds of black-robed priests and monks to make sure we obey those laws. He strikes me as a very grumpy god, that one, even though his priests are forever claiming that he loves us. I have never been so stupid as to think that Thor or Odin or Hoder loved me, though I hope at times they have thought me worthy of them.” ― Bernard Cornwell, Lords of the North

Charlotte Richmond says of herself: “I have few ladylike accomplishments. I cannot sing, I cannot draw, I cannot play the pianoforte or the harp and I cannot produce delicately beautiful embroideries. Sadly, the ability to do quantities of mending, to cook a good plain dinner and to shoot a marauding crocodile as I once did, is not appreciated in Polite Society.

The pragmatic mood is already visible in the Odyssey. The poem opens with Odysseus living on a remote island ruled by a nymph who offers him immortality if he will remain as her consort. A bit surprisingly to anyone steeped in the orthodox Western religio-philosophical-scientific tradition, he refuses, preferring mortality and a dangerous struggle to regain his position as the king of a small, rocky island and be reunited with his son, aging wife, and old father. He turns down what the orthodox tradition says we should desire above all else, the peace that comes from overcoming the transience and vicissitudes of mortality, whether that peace takes the form of personal immortality or of communing with eternal verities, moral or scientific—in either case ushering us to the still point of the turning world. Odysseus prefers going to arriving, struggle to rest, exploring to achieving—curiosity is one of his most marked traits—and risk to certainty. The Odyssey situates Calypso’s enchanted isle in the far west, the land of the setting sun, and describes the isle in images redolent of death. In contrast, Odysseus’s arrival at his own island, far to the east, a land of the rising sun, is depicted in imagery suggestive of rebirth. Another thing that is odd about the protagonist, and the implicit values, of the Odyssey from the orthodox standpoint is that Odysseus is not a conventional hero, the kind depicted in the Iliad. He is strong, brave, and skillful in fighting, but he is no Achilles (who had a divine mother) or even Ajax; and he relies on guile, trickery, and outright deception to a degree inconsistent with what we have come to think of as heroism or with its depiction in the Iliad. His dominant trait is skill in coping with his environment rather than ability to impose himself upon it by brute force. He is the most intelligent person in the Odyssey but his intelligence is thoroughly practical, adaptive. Unlike Achilles in the Iliad, who is given to reflection, notably about the heroic ethic itself, Odysseus is pragmatic. He is an instrumental reasoner rather than a speculative one. He is also, it is true, distinctly pious, a trait that the Odyssey harps on and modern readers tend to overlook. But piety in Homeric religion is a coping mechanism. Homeric religion is proto-scientific; it is an attempt to understand and control the natural world. The gods personify nature and men manipulate it by “using” the gods in the proper way. One sacrifices to them in order to purchase their intervention in one’s affairs—this is religion as magic, the ancestor of modern technology—and also to obtain clues to what is going to happen next; this is the predictive use of religion and corresponds to modern science. The gods’ own rivalries, mirroring (in Homeric thought, personifying or causing) the violent clash of the forces of nature, prevent human beings from perfecting their control over the environment. By the same token, these rivalries underscore the dynamic and competitive character of human existence and the unrealism of supposing that peace and permanence, a safe and static life, are man’s lot. Odysseus’s piety has nothing to do with loving God as creator or redeemer, or as the name, site, metaphysical underwriter, or repository of the eternal or the unchanging, or of absolutes (such as omniscience and omnipotence) and universals (numbers, words, concepts). Odysseus’s piety is pragmatic because his religion is naturalistic—is simply the most efficacious means known to his society for controlling the environment, just as science and technology are the most efficacious means by which modern people control their environment.

Chichester Psalms by Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) Psalm 108, verse 2 Awake, psaltery and harp! I will rouse the dawn! Psalm 100 Make a joyful noise unto the Lord all ye lands. Serve the Lord with gladness. Come before his presence with singing. Know ye that the Lord, He is God. It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves We are His people and the sheep of His pasture. Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, And into His courts with praise. Be thankful unto Him, and bless His name. For the Lord is good, His mercy is everlasting. And His truth endureth to all generations. Part II Psalm 23 The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, He leadeth me beside the still waters, He restoreth my soul, He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness, For His name's sake. Yea, though I walk Through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, For Thou art with me. Thy rod and Thy staff They comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me In the presence of mine enemies, Thou annointest my head with oil, My cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy Shall follow me all the days of my life, And I will dwell in the house of the Lord Forever. Psalm 2, verses 1-4 Why do the nations rage, And the people imagine a vain thing The kings of the earth set themselves, And the rulers take counsel together Against the Lord and against His annointed. Saying, let us break their bonds asunder, He that sitteth in the heavens Shall laugh, and the Lord Shall have them in derision! Psalm 131 Lord, Lord, My heart is not haughty, Nor mine eyes lofty, Neither do I exercise myself In great matters or in things Too wonderful for me to understand. Surely I have calmed And quieted myself, As a child that is weaned of his mother, My soul is even as a weaned child. Let Israel hope in the Lord From henceforth and forever. Psalm 133, verse 1 Behold how good, And how pleasant it is, For brethren to dwell Together in unity.

Starlight flared from Theia as she snatched the sword and knife out of the air, the blades glowing with their own starlight. My mother returned that day with only Pelias and my father’s blades. As she had helped Make them, they answered to the call in her blood. To her very power. Bryce knew that call. Had been hearing it since she arrived in this world. A chill rippled down her spine. And then she took the Trove for herself. Theia sat, enthroned, the Harp and Horn beside her, the Mask in her lap, and the Crown atop her head. Unchecked, limitless power sat upon that throne. Bryce could barely get a breath down. The Theia who Aidas had spoken so highly of … she was a murdering tyrant? As if in answer, Silene said, Our people bowed—what other option did they have in the face of such power? And for a short span, she ruled. I cannot say whether the years were kind to my people—but there was no war. At least there was that. “Yeah,” Bryce seethed, more to Silene than the others, “at least you guys had that.

We get that old familiar sting when they say Image is everything

Not simply being dunked in water, but putting Jesus on as a garment. This is why I harp on water baptism so much. It symbolizes being completely covered by Jesus and his blood. Water baptism isn’t the real thing any more than the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper are the literal blood and flesh of Christ. But saying that communion and baptism are symbolic of a greater truth isn’t to say they are unimportant.

That break comes for all of us, at different times and in different ways. The nourishment of food, the bonds of friendship, the occasions for celebration, and the delights of legitimate pleasure end in a matter of a moment for each life and each relationship. It is to this vulnerability of living that Jesus points His finger. The poet puts it in these words: Our life contains a thousand springs and dies if one be gone; Strange that a harp of a thousand strings can stay in tune so long. There is an old adage that says you can give a hungry man a fish, or better still, you can teach him how to fish. Jesus would add that you can teach a person how to fish, but the most successful fisherman has hungers fish will not satisfy. G

When anyone from seaboard or country caught leprosy, they left relatives and friends and went to Pratofungo to spend the rest of their lives waiting for the disease to devour them. There were rumours of great jollifications to greet each new arrival; from afar songs and music were to be heard coming from the lepers' houses till night-fall. Many things were said of Pratofungo, although no healthy person had ever been there; but all rumours were agreed in saying that life there was a perpetual party. Before becoming a leper colony the village had been a great place for prostitutes and visited by sailors of every race and religion; and the women there, it seemed, still kept the licentious habits of those times. The lepers did no work on the land. except for a vine-yard of strawberry grapes whose juice kept them the whole year round in a state of simmering tipsiness. The lepers spent most of their time playing strange instruments of their own invention, such as harps with little bells attached to the string, and singing in falsetto, and painting eggs with daubs of every colour as if for a perpetual Easter.

Wherefore it is fitting that ye also should run together in accordance with the will of the bishop who by God's appointment [515] rules over you. Which thing ye indeed of yourselves do, being instructed by the Spirit. For your justly-renowned presbytery, being worthy of God, is fitted as exactly to the bishop as the strings are to the harp. Thus, being joined together in concord and harmonious love, of which Jesus Christ is the Captain and Guardian, do ye, man by man, become but one choir; so that, agreeing together in concord, and obtaining [516] a perfect unity with God, ye may indeed be one in harmonious feeling with God the Father, and His beloved Son Jesus Christ our Lord. For, says He, "Grant unto them, Holy Father, that as I and Thou are one, they also may be one in us." [517] It is therefore profitable that you, being joined together with God in an unblameable unity, should be the followers of the example of Christ, of whom also ye are members. [515]

Prayer is a shelter to the soul, a sacrifice to God and a scourge to the devil. David's heart was often more out of tune than his harp. He prays, and then, in spite of the devil, cries, 'Return unto your rest, O my soul.' Prayer is the gate of heaven, a key to let us into paradise. There is nothing that renders Satan's plots fruitless like prayer; therefore says Christ: 'Watch and pray that you enter not into temptation' (Matt. 26:41).

I asked for you to come, so that we can discuss the merger of our ultimate goals, the downfall of western society, and the United States in particular. Your movement needs help from the Communists; we have the power, but no exact, to the point, specified goals. You Green’s have a specified goal, to rid the Earth of all sources of pollutants, but, you do not have the power. I think we should work together. What do you say?” “Do you have anything specific in mind, or are you always this vague?” “Ok, fine. We use the environmental movement to bring more power to both of our respective parties. Use the Earth Day celebrations, to have a constant drum beat into peoples’ heads, that they’re destroying Earth, and the only people who can save it, are you Green’s, and the power of the government. Keep harping on the Three Mile Island incident to remind people that nuclear power is dangerous.

Sin says, "Do you think that people get married with aspirations to divorce? Do you think that people try drugs with the motive to be addicted? No. It is not merely the act that you see taking place, but it is I that has taken their minds captive. I have played the lobes of their minds like the strings on a harp; soothing them and making them feel, see, and hear the images that they desire in their innermost being.

What greater stimulus to ambition than the promise that the goals of which we dream, the nobility of spirit to which we aspire, the indwelling of gods and the radiance of their power, are but waiting to be discovered in the consciousness of man? Play the harp enough times, an angel you become. This, at any rate, is what the handbook says.

With harps of God in their hands . . . they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying: “Great and amazing are your deeds, O Lord God the Almighty! Just and true are your ways, O King of the nations! Who will not fear, O Lord, and glorify your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship you, for your righteous acts have been revealed.” (Rev. 15:2–4)

During my tenure at Bradford College, located in Haverhill Massachusetts - Assemblies of God, and Northpoint Bible College had not yet taken over. The school was very prestigious and expensive, but was worth every penny spent, and left me with an experience of which I shall indeed never forget. I say this for a couple of reasons. First, my degree major was in creative arts (creative writing) and psychology as my minor. Later in life, I was able to use my degree to become an award-winning, and best-selling horror author, and producer. Something by the way for which I am very proud of today. I truly owe this all from what I learned at this remarkable school." "So indeed I have great things to speak of when harping back to my Bradford college days. In addition, I was also able to make wonderful connections with many famous people who's sons and daughters attended this school. One of my roommates was David Charles who is Bob Charle's son. Bob Charles was a famous professional golfer." "To date, pondering on my college days spent at Bradford College has given me an appreciation for which I am very grateful for. I wanted to say, "thank you" for being part of the reason why I have prospered." "I am a proud graduate of Bradford, and all others whom also attended should also be more than proud of their attendance there. Thank you again, and God Bless you. one of my other roommates was Japanese chap, and his father was some kind of high political ruler of the country at the time. Thinking back on all this makes me proud of having been affiliated with Bradford College. Thank you.

Nostradamus said, according to Archie, that the Gods sell the goods that they give us. We had been shown a fine instrument. But the bow could be overlong bent; the harp lose its voice if its strings were not loosened.’ ‘I hope he said so in Francis’s hearing. Poor Archie,’ said Marthe. ‘Did he say what should be loosened? His morals?

There were posters on the wall warning of some sort of wild monster man that Kylie keep harping on about it, saying it had attacked her one night a few weeks ago. I guessed it was just a way to try and get attention, but it hadn’t worked.

Sweetheart Like You" Well the pressure's down, the boss ain't here He gone North, for a while They say that vanity got the best of him But he sure left here in style By the way, that's a cute hat And that smile's so hard to resist But what's a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this ? You know, I once knew a woman who looked like you She wanted a whole man, not just a half She used to call me sweet daddy when I was only a child You kind of remind me of her when you laugh In order to deal in this game, got to make the queen disappear It's done with a flick of the wrist What's a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this ? You know, a woman like you should be at home That's where you belong Taking care for somebody nice Who don't know how to do you wrong Just how much abuse will you be able to take ? Well, there's no way to tell by that first kiss What's a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this ? You know you can make a name for yourself You can hear them tires squeal You can be known as the most beautiful woman Who ever crawled across cut glass to make a deal. You know, news of you has come down the line Even before ya came in the door They say in your father's house, there's many mansions Each one of them got a fireproof floor Snap out of it baby, people are jealous of you They smile to your face, but behind your back they hiss What's a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this ? Got to be an important person to be in here, honey Got to have done some evil deed Got to have your own harem when you come in the door Got to play your harp until your lips bleed. They say that patriotism is the last refuge To which a scoundrel clings Steal a little and they throw you in jail Steal a lot and they make you king There's only one step down from here, baby It's called the land of permanent bliss What's a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this ? Bob Dylan, Infidels (1983)

I first imagined each moment separate, inspired, consecutive. I could have cast the film—myself the female lead, you the star. I wore color—magenta. lavender, lime. You were in white, something textured that moved with your body. The music was sensuous, full orchestra scored for harp, piccolo, twelve double basses, a chime. The premiere, well-attended, prices high. Those who didn't like it find little to like in this world. The critics, through careful eyes, decided our performance was fresh, the location on the cliff above the ocean a splendid choice on someone's part, the humor warm. But time extracts. After the blast, the slow boil, the few grains cupped in the palm. The orchestra was really scored for wind and pelican, the dry flick of lizard. The lily, with petals like white tongues, appeared from nowhere, and the gull remained stone-still. as gulls do not do. The costumes were too simple: sun and salt on skin, and the actors kept changing roles, crawling into one another’s lines, saying the wrong words when they spoke at all, finding it hard to think in vertigo, their love clouded with a retinue of men and women, former actors who wanted the parts. The critics made no sense of the film, double-exposed, sprocket holes on either side and a garbled sound track that wove ‘always’ and ‘never’ into one word. The beginning appeared in the last scene, and the climax was a whorl of color, like looking too long at the sun through closed eyelids. One thing someone found to praise: a clear shot of a shining feather lying on a stone in the path.

No man has a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation; no man has a right to say to his country – thus far shalt thou go and no further.

The Mask,” Rhys murmured, “the Harp, and the Crown.” Nesta had a feeling none of them were good. Feyre frowned at her mate. “They’re different from the objects of power in the Hewn City? What can they do?” Nesta had tried her best to forget that night she and Amren had gone to test her so-called gift against the hoard within those unhallowed catacombs. The objects had been half-imprisoned in the stone itself: knives and necklaces and orbs and books, all shimmering with power. None of it pleasant. For the Dread Trove to be worse than what she’d witnessed … “The Mask can raise the dead,” Amren answered for Rhys. “It is a death mask, molded from the face of a long-forgotten king. Wear it and you may summon the dead to you, command them to march at your will. The Harp can open any door, physical or otherwise. Some say between worlds. And the Crown …” Amren shook her head. “The Crown can influence anyone, even piercing through the mightiest of mental shields. Its only flaw is that it requires close physical proximity to initially sink its claws into a victim’s mind. But wear the Crown, and you could make your enemies do your bidding. Could make a parent slaughter their child, aware of the horror but unable to stop themselves.” “And these things were lost?” Nesta demanded. Rhys threw her a frown. “Those who possessed them grew careless. They were lost in ancient wars, or to treachery, or simply because they were misplaced and forgotten.” “What does it have to do with the Cauldron?” Nesta pushed. “Like calls to like,” Feyre murmured, looking to Amren, who nodded. “Because the Trove was Made by the Cauldron, so might the Trove find its Maker.” She angled her head. “Briallyn was Made, though. Can’t she track the Cauldron herself?” Amren drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. “The Cauldron aged Briallyn to punish her.” A glance at Nesta. “Or punish you, I suppose.

There were more beautiful girls, too, who always seemed stickier than other people, easier to snare, as if made of Velcro—the pale-haired dancer whose feet twitched as she slept; the radish farmer who could say thread in seven languages; the anthropology student with exactly seventy-five brown freckles on each cheek. More and more and more small hooks on which his thread caught and stretched outward from his body. More harp strings that yanked him here or there, which grew tighter the farther he moved from whatever or whomever he was tied to. The Thread

Such a deep silence surrounds me, that I think I hear moonbeams striking on the windows. In my chest, a strange voice is awakens and a song plays inside me a longing that is not mine. They say that ancestors, dead before their time, with young blood still in their veins, with great passion in their blood, with the sun still burning in their blood come, come to continue to live within us their unfinished lives. Such a deep silence surrounds me, that I think I hear moonbeams striking on the windows. O, who knows, soul of mine, in which chest you will sing you also, after centuries, in soft ropes of silence, on harps of obscurity - the drowned longing and the pleasure of living torn? Who knows? Who knows? — Lucian Blaga, “Silence” (1919) Complete Poetical Works of Lucian Blaga (‎ Center for Romanian Studies, September 1, 2001)

Your kind have forgotten the old ways,” says Eirne. “You have forgotten the importance of the tales, the wisdom of the past, the strength that rises from tree and stone and stream, the bond between one world and the other.

Finally, you get to explain the way you are, and justify staying that way. This payoff, the strongest of the three, is directly connected to the “in order to” column of your Winning Strategy. Indeed, a racket can be thought of as the “dark side” of your Winning Strategy, the side that you would rather dismiss from sight, because you don’t want to acknowledge its hold on you. The film producer who never works up to her potential is running a racket. She can always say to herself, “I could have done more to make that work”—which becomes a handy justification for things staying the way they are. An executive named Jack identified his racket accurately when he said, “I keep telling my people what I want them to do, but in the deep recesses of my mind, I wonder, with a good deal of concern, what would happen if they really did all the things I requested. In my gut, I can’t help but feel I would no longer be necessary. Of course, that’s very human of me and not something that readily comes into my mind, but whether I am aware of it or not, it lives very viscerally for me. Do I really want to be dispensable? I tell myself and everyone else, I want to be dispensable—I harp on it all the time—and yet I have the ugly confrontation with the truth inside my thoughts. The recurring fear is: If I become dispensable, I’ll have to find something else to do.” Jack’s Winning Strategy was listening for “What is the largest possibility?” so as to act by “challenging and arguing,” in order to “be the best and avoid being ordinary.” When he looked at the unwanted condition of being indispensable, saw it as a racket, and asked, “What is the payoff?” he replied, “The payoff is to justify staying the way I am—that is, being indispensable. If I were dispensable, I would be like anyone else—ordinary. And in my Winning Strategy, being ordinary is something that I’m constitutionally unwilling to tolerate.

and wept with great love for Zion. Our music and mirth were no longer heard, only sadness. We hung up our harps on the willow trees. Our captors tormented us, saying, “Make music for us and sing one of your happy Zion-songs!” But how could we sing the song of the Lord in this foreign wilderness? May my hands never make music again if I ever forget you, O Jerusalem.

Alma said, "They seem to be greatly amused with something in there." "Me, probably," said Beaton. "I seem to amuse everybody to-night." "Don't you always?" "I always amuse you, I'm afraid, Alma." She looked at him as if she were going to snub him openly for using her name; but apparently she decided to do it covertly. "You didn't at first. I really used to believe you could be serious, once." "Couldn't you believe it again? Now?" "Not when you put on that wind-harp stop." "Wetmore has been talking to you about me. He would sacrifice his best friend to a phrase. He spends his time making them." "He's made some very pretty ones about you." "Like the one you just quoted?" "No, not exactly. He admires you ever so much. He says" She stopped, teasingly. "What?" "He says you could be almost anything you wished, if you didn't wish to be everything." "That sounds more like the school of Wetmore. That's what you say, Alma. Well, if there were something you wished me to be, I could be it." "We might adapt Kingsley: 'Be good, sweet man, and let who will be clever.'" He could not help laughing. She went on: "I always thought that was the most patronizing and exasperating thing ever addressed to a human girl; and we've had to stand a good deal in our time. I should like to have it applied to the other 'sect' a while. As if any girl that was a girl would be good if she had the remotest chance of being clever." "Then you wouldn't wish me to be good?" Beaton asked. "Not if you were a girl." "You want to shock me. Well, I suppose I deserve it. But if I were one-tenth part as good as you are, Alma, I should have a lighter heart than I have now. I know that I'm fickle, but I'm not false, as you think I am." "Who said I thought you were false?" "No one," said Beaton. "It isn't necessary, when you look it—live it." "Oh, dear! I didn't know I devoted my whole time to the subject." "I know I'm despicable. I could tell you something—the history of this day, even—that would make you despise me." Beaton had in mind his purchase of the overcoat, which Alma was getting in so effectively, with the money he ought to have sent his father. "But," he went on, darkly, with a sense that what he was that moment suffering for his selfishness must somehow be a kind of atonement, which would finally leave him to the guiltless enjoyment of the overcoat, "you wouldn't believe the depths of baseness I could descend to." "I would try," said Alma, rapidly shading the collar, "if you'd give me some hint." Beaton had a sudden wish to pour out his remorse to her, but he was afraid of her laughing at him. He said to himself that this was a very wholesome fear, and that if he could always have her at hand he should not make a fool of himself so often. A man conceives of such an office as the very noblest for a woman; he worships her for it if he is magnanimous. But Beaton was silent, and Alma put back her head for the right distance on her sketch. "Mr. Fulkerson thinks you are the sublimest of human beings for advising him to get Colonel Woodburn to interview Mr. Dryfoos about Lindau. What have you ever done with your Judas?" "I haven't done anything with it. Nadel thought he would take hold of it at one time, but he dropped it again. After all, I don't suppose it could be popularized. Fulkerson wanted to offer it as a premium to subscribers for 'Every Other Week,' but I sat down on that.

We dare not be original; our American Pine must be cut to the trim pattern of the English Yew, though the Pine bleed at every clip. This poet tunes his lyre at the harp of Goethe, Milton, Pope, or Tennyson. His songs might better be sung on the Rhine than the Kennebec. They are not American in form or feeling; they have not the breath of our air; the smell of our ground is not in them. Hence our poet seems cold and poor. He loves the old mythology; talks about Pluto—the Greek devil,—— the Fates and Furies—witches of old time in Greece,—-but would blush to use our mythology, or breathe the name in verse of our Devil, or our own Witches, lest he should be thought to believe what he wrote. The mother and sisters, who with many a pinch and pain sent the hopeful boyto college, must turn over the Classical Dictionary before they can find out what the youth would be at in his rhymes. Our Poet is not deep enough to see that Aphrodite came from the ordinary waters, that Homer only hitched into rhythm and furnished the accomplishment of verse to street talk, nursery tales, and old men’s gossip, in the Ionian towns; he thinks what is common is unclean. So he sings of Corinth and Athens, which he never saw, but has not a word to say of Boston, and Fall River, and Baltimore, and New York, which are just as meet for song. He raves of Thermopylae and Marathon, with never a word for Lexington and Bunkerhill, for Cowpens, and Lundy’s Lane, and Bemis’s Heights. He loves to tell of the Ilyssus, of “ smooth sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds,” yet sings not of the Petapsco, the Susquehannah, the Aroostook, and the Willimantick. He prates of the narcissus, and the daisy, never of American dandelions andbue-eyed grass; he dwells on the lark and the nightingale, but has not a thought for the brown thrasher and the bobolink, who every morning in June rain down such showers of melody on his affected head. What a lesson Burns teaches us addressing his “rough bur thistle,” his daisy, “wee crimson tippit thing,” and finding marvellous poetry in the mouse whose nest his plough turned over! Nay, how beautifully has even our sweet Poet sung of our own Green river, our waterfowl,of the blue and fringed gentian, the glory of autumnal days.

Language ​A mangle and an earthly remnant that the poet leans on more heavily than all others, is language.  At times he can rightly hate, accuse, and curse it—or rather himself, that he is born to work with this wretched tool.  With envy he thinks of the painter, whose language—the colors—speaks just as understandably to all mankind, from the North Pole down to Africa, or the musician, whose tones speak every human language as well, and which from the single-voiced melody to the polyphonic orchestra, from the horn to the clarinet, from the fiddle to the harp, must obey like many new, singular, fine, and differing languages.  ​But for one thing especially he envies the musician deeply and daily: that the musician has his language for himself alone, only for making music!  But for his activity the poet must use the same language in which you hold school and do business, in which you telegraph and hold court.  How poor he is, that for his art he owns no private organ, no personal abode, no private garden, no personal window to look out onto the moon—all and all he must partake in everyday life!  He says “heart” and means the pulsing core of life in man, his innermost capability and weakness; but then the word at the same time signifies a muscle.  He says “power”, then he must fight for the sense of his word with engineers and electricians; he says “bliss”, then something from theology gazes onto his imagination’s expression.  He can use no private word that doesn’t leer at once to another side, that doesn’t with a breath recall foreign, disturbed, hostile imaginations, that isn’t deceive by scruples and shortenings, and broken by narrow walls, from which a voice turns back unsounded and smothered. ​If a knave is someone who gives more than he has, then a poet can never be a knave.  There is not a tenth, not a hundredth of what he would like to give; he is satisfied if the hearer understands him from totally above him, then entirely from far, then completely incidentally, most importantly at least not grossly misunderstands.  He seldom reaches more.  And overall, where a poet reaps praise or criticism, where he makes effects or gets mocked, where someone loves him or rejects him, one speaks not from his thoughts and dreams alone, but only a hundredth that could squeeze through the narrow canal of language and through the no wider comprehension of reading.

Cowboy-Up is a way of Life. What this country needs are more people to inspire others with confidence, and fewer people to discourage any initiative in the right direction more to get into the thick of things, fewer to sit on the sidelines, merely finding fault more to point out what's right with the world, and fewer to keep harping on what's wrong with it and more who are interested in lighting candles, and fewer who blow them out.

Ah, Harp,’ her mother would say, smiling benignly, ‘it is a fruitless quest to try to blend in when you are created to stand out.

When a theme is harped on too much you get parody. When we make fun of a stale theme we say we’ve japed it.

A man cannot be convinced against his own convictions, but he can be talked into a state of uncertainty and indecision, which is even worse, for that means that he cannot trade with confidence and comfort. I cannot say that I got all mixed up, exactly, but I lost my poise; or rather, I ceased to do my own thinking. I cannot give you in detail the various steps by which I reached the state of mind that was to prove so costly to me. I think it was his assurances of the accuracy of his figures, which were exclusively his, and the undependability of mine, which were not exclusively mine, but public property. He harped on the utter reliability, as proved time and again, of all his ten thousand correspondents throughout the South. In the end I came to read conditions as he himself read them because we were both reading from the same page of the same book, held by him before my eyes. He has a logical mind. Once I accepted his facts it was a cinch that my own conclusions, derived from his facts, would agree with his own. When he began his talks with me about the cotton situation I not only was bearish but I was short of the market. Gradually, as I began to accept his facts and figures, I began to fear I had been basing my previous position on misinformation. Of course I could not - 128 -

I keep having dreams about a lad I met back when I was seventeen,” Bliss was saying. “Perfectly innocent afternoon in its way. One of those endless summers. You never remember it raining in your past, do you? Just summers. We collected blackberries. Then we sat on the beach and talked. He took his shirt off. I kept mine on. I was too ashamed of my body to do the same. He was beautiful. So piss-elegant in his way. All cheek-bones and wrists. Tanned hairless skin. I wanted to be the centre of his world forever.” Bliss smiled, his eyes somewhere in the distance, away from the heat of all these people and their mindless chatter. “It was just a kiss. That was all it was. A sweet, sweet kiss… I never saw him again, even though I went back to that place every afternoon for a week.” His eyes refocused and he glanced at Malcolm, at Oliver. His face was hard, his voice brittle. “I found out he’d been hit by a postal van not two hours after we’d kissed. Died later that night in hospital. I overheard my mother talking about it. She said his name and I had to run away to the beach. I wept for hours. All gone, gone, gone.

I can’t not be who I am meant to be, can I?

It was one of those speeches — the ones that use lots of words to say nothing.

Karanth notes that almost all major religions view this life and ‘Here’ with suspicion and that they harp upon the ‘other world’ and ‘Hereafter.’ But, ‘this life’ can neither be insignificant nor futile. In one of his interviews conducted when he was 91, he clarifies his position : "... this life is all that we have to live and to learn from. I am not saying that God doesn’t exist; just that I have not been able to tell myself that He exists.