Strange Ox Quotes

Do you know who 'twas that first knew our Lord had caused Himself to be born? 'Twas the cock; he saw the star, and so he said–all the beasts could talk Latin in those days; he cried: 'Christus natus est!' " He crowed these words so like a cock that Kristin fell to laughing heartily. And it did her good to laugh, for all the strange things Brother Edvin had just been saying had laid a burden of awe on her heart. The monk laughed himself: "Ay, and when the ox heard that, he began to low: 'Ubi, ubi, ubi.' "But the goat bleated, and said: 'Betlem, Betlem, Betlem.' "And the sheep so longed to see Our Lady and her Son that she baa-ed out at once: 'Eamus, eamus!' "And the new-born calf that lay in the straw, raised itself and stood upon its feet. 'Volo, volo, volo!' it said.

Yoga is not something a person practices with music or mirrors or any other distraction. It's purpose is less about samyoga than it is about viyoga, which is to say, it is more about disconnecting than it is about connecting which many Westerners find strange, until they hear it explained. The reason a person practices every day is to disconnect from their deep connection to suffering. The author of the ancient Yogatattva Upanishad believed that without the practice of yoga, it was entirely impossible to set the atman free. The atman, of course, is the soul. And just as the rani said, we are so burdened down by our daily worries that many of us have become no different than beasts. We walk around eating and drinking and caring very little about our purpose in this life. Some of us are not even very clever beasts. We are merely trudging through our work, yoked to some terrible master or job. The goal of yoga is to changed all of this; to remind the human who has become like an ox that their yoke and harness can be taken off, even if it's only for a few minutes a day, and that through silencing the mind, we can silence greed, and hunger, and desire as well.

And then. Astonishing. Again. As she was skipping up the back stairs on her way to the attic bedroom to fetch something, something innocent - a book, a handkerchief, afterwards she would never remember what - she was almost sent flying by Howie on his way down. 'I was looking for a bathroom,' he said. 'Well, we only have one,' Ursula said, 'and it's not up these-' but before the sentence was finished she found herself pinned awkwardly against the neglected floral wallpaper of the backstairs, a pattern that had been up since the house was built. 'Pretty girl,' he said. His breath smelt of mint. And then again she was again subjected to pushing and shoving from the outsized Howie. But this time it was not his tongue trying to jam its way into her mouth but something inexpressibly more intimate. She tried to say something but before a sound came out his hand clamped over her mouth, over half her face in fact, and he grinned and said 'Ssh,' as if they were conspirators in a game. With his other hand he was fiddling with her clothes and she squealed in protest. Then he was butting up against her, the way the bullocks in the Lower Field did against the gate. She tried to struggle but he was twice, three times her size even and she might as well have been a mouse in Hattie's jaws. She tried to see what he was doing but he was pressed so tightly against her that all she could see was his big square jaw and the slight brush of stubble, unnoticeable from a distance. Ursula had seen her brothers naked, knew what they had between their legs - wrinkled cockles, a little spout - and it seemed to have little to do with this painful piston-driven thing that was now ramming inside her like a weapon of war. Her own body breached. The arch that led to womanhood did not seem so triumphal any more, merely brutal and completely uncaring. And then Howie gave a great bellow, more ox than Oxford man, and was hitching himself back together and grinning at her. 'English girls,' he said, shaking his head and laughing. He wagged his finger at her, almost disapproving, as if she had engineered the disgusting thing that had just happened and said, 'You really are something!' He laughed again and bounded down the stairs, taking them three at a time, as though his descent had been barely interrupted by their strange tryst. Ursula was left to stare at the floral wallpaper. She had never noticed before that the flowers were wisteria, the same flower that grew on the arch over the back porch. This must be what in literature was referred to as 'deflowering', she thought. It had always sounded like a rather pretty word. When she came back downstairs a half-hour later, a half-hour of thoughts and emotions considerably more intense than was usual for a Saturday morning, Sylvie and Hugh were on the doorstep waving a dutiful goodbye to the disappearing rear end of Howie's car. 'Thank goodness they weren't staying,' Sylvie said. 'I don't think I could have been bothered with Maurice's bluster.' 'Imbeciles,' Hugh said cheerfully. 'All right?' he said, catching sight of Ursula in the hallway. 'Yes,' she said. Any other answer would have been too awful.

I'm actually something of an aficionado in the "waking up in strange places" department. I've woken up in hay lofts, under a buttern churn, on roofs, in a choir loft (twice), under tables, on tables, in trees, in ditches, and half-pinned under a sleeping ox. One time in Bombay, I woke up to find myself lashed to a yak.

They were panting dwarfs, imps gasping for breath, and their beards dragged along the ground. Each carried a strange implement of torture. Some held bloody leather belts studded with iron, some clasp knives and ox goads, some thick, wide-headed nails. Three midgets whose behinds nearly scraped the ground carried a massive, unwieldy cross; and last of all came the vilest of the lot, a cross-eyed pygmy holding a crown of thorns.

There runs a strange law through the length of human history—that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves. The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible humility. This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself. This is the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall. It is a strange thing that many truly spiritual men, such as General Gordon, have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.

Brennan often cited Goodbye, My Lady as one of his favorite films. Certainly it was a labor of love in the close collaboration with the director, William Wellman, better known for his action films and for The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). Skeeter (Brandon DeWilde) lives with his none too ambitious uncle Jesse (Brennan) in a swamp, where they find a strange dog with a hyena-like laugh. (It is, in fact a basenji, bred in Africa). Jesse realizes the dog must have escaped from a very different environment, but Skeeter adopts the dog without thinking about the consequences should the dog’s true owner show up. Much of the picture is taken up with Skeeter training the dog to hunt better than other hounds. The deliberate and careful way Wellman paces the film makes it utterly absorbing, even as Brennan delivers one of his best understated performances. With its emphasis on rapport with nature and the land and taking responsibility for other animals, the inspirational script serves as Walter Brennan’s credo. And when the dog’s owner shows up, Skeeter has to learn how to let go of his creation, making for an ending far more real than those of most family films. Sidney Poitier has a small role as a neighbor, and though this story is set in Georgia, there is no evidence of segregation. To the contrary, Poitier’s character appears quite at home with his white neighbors, with whom he shares a bond with the land and its creatures.

Labeling an animal mad was not only a way of explaining irrational anger, it also described creatures' strange behavior, aggression, or some other form of insanity, such as hysteria, melancholia, depression, or nostalgia. One small dog, for example, discovered with a pig on a shipwreck afloat in midocean in 1890 was said to have gone mad with loss. Animals could also go mad from a lifetime of abuse, such as Smiles, the Central Park rhinoceros, who reportedly did so in 1903. Maddened horses, as they were known, could simply take off running through Central Park or Williamsburg, Virginia, or anywhere at all, still attached to their carriages or dragging their riders behind, often with fatal consequences. Other horses, suffering from equine insanity, could, in a flash, turn on their grooms or riders and stomp them to death. Madness was also used to explain other seemingly bizarre animal actions. In 1909 Henry, the monkey mascot of a New Orleans baseball team, supposedly went mad when fans of the opposing team taunted him past his breaking point. He broke free from his cage at the stadium and climbed into the grandstand, creating a stampede and causing the game to be called in the seventh inning. As late as the 1920s and 1930s there were mad cats yowling in madder orgies, cows gone mad on the way to slaughter, at least one mad parrot, and some unruly Hollywood primates. In 1937, just a few months before forging an alliance with Hitler, Mussolini made international news when he was attacked by a mad ox during a parade to welcome him to Libya. He escaped unharmed and commended Libyans for their support of fascist Italy.