I am yours for everything

To Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

...would I, if I could, supplant one of any of the affections that I know to have taken root in you - that great and solemn one, for instance.

I feel that if I could get myself remade, as if turned to gold, I WOULD not even then desire to become more than the mere setting to that diamond you must always wear.

The regard and esteem you now give me, in this letter, and which I press to my heart and bow my head upon, is all I can take and all too embarrassing, using all my gratitude.

- Robert Browning

To Robert Browning:

And now listen to me in turn.
You have touched me more profoundly than I thought even you could have touched me

- my heart was full when you came here today.
Henceforward I am yours for everything.

- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

My angel, my all, my very self -

July 6, in the morning

My angel, my all, my very self -

Only a few words today and at that with pencil (with yours) - Not till tomorrow will my lodgings be definitely determined upon - what a useless waste of time -
Why this deep sorrow when necessity speaks - can our love endure except through sacrifices, through not demanding everything from one another; can you change the fact that you are not wholly mine, I not wholly thine -
Oh God, look out into the beauties of nature and comfort your heart with that which must be -
Love demands everything and that very justly - thus it is to me with you, and to you with me.
But you forget so easily that I must live for me and for you; if we were wholly united you would feel the pain of it as little as I -
My journey was a fearful one; I did not reach here until 4 o'clock yesterday morning. Lacking horses the post-coach chose another route, but what an awful one; at the stage before the last I was warned not to travel at night; I was made fearful of a forest, but that only made me the more eager - and I was wrong.
The coach must needs break down on the wretched road, a bottomless mud road.
Without such postilions as I had with me I should have remained stuck in the road.
Esterhazy, traveling the usual road here, had the same fate with eight horses that I had with four - Yet I got some pleasure out of it, as I always do when I successfully overcome difficulties -
Now a quick change to things internal from things external.
We shall surely see each other soon; moreover, today I cannot share with you the thoughts I have had during these last few days touching my own life -
If our hearts were always close together, I would have none of these.
My heart is full of so many things to say to you - ah - there are moments when I feel that speech amounts to nothing at all -
Cheer up - remain my true, my only treasure, my all as I am yours.
The gods must send us the rest, what for us must and shall be -

Your faithful LUDWIG

- Beethoven to His Immortal Beloved

Snow over the temple's roof

In a lonely place

 

In a lonely place,
I encountered a sage
Who sat, all still,
Regarding a newspaper.
He accosted me:
"Sir, what is this?"
Then I saw that I was greater,
Aye, greater than this sage.
I answered him at once,
"Old, old man, it is the wisdom of the age."
The sage looked upon me with admiration.

- Stephen Crane

My Unattainable

"Warm light rain falls, trickled down by tear-drops on my window and? 

I long for you, my unattainable."

花鳥風月

花鳥風月 (Kachou Fuugetsu)

Literally: Flower, Bird, Wind, Moon

This means: Experience the beauties of nature, and in doing so learn about yourself.

 

門前の小僧習わぬ経を読む。

門前の小僧習わぬ経を読む。 (Mon zen no kozō narawanu kyō wo yomu) 

 

Literally: An apprentice near a temple will recite the scriptures untaught.

This means: The environment makes our characters.

Kobayashi Issa

"New Year's Day-- everything is in blossom! I feel about average."

"What a strange thing! To be alive beneath cherry blossoms."

"No doubt about it, the mountain cuckoo is a crybaby."

 "In this world, we walk on the roof of hell, gazing at flowers."

"Asked how old he was, the boy in the new kimono stretched out all five fingers."

"At my daughter's grave, thirty days after her death:

Windy fall-- these are the scarlet flowers she liked to pick."

- Kobayashi Issa

Matsuo Basho

"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought."

 

 

"A field of cotton-- as if the moon had flowered."

 

 

"The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers."

- Matsuo Basho

Vintage Stuff

I've been here in another Life

 

How easy one can be forgotten

La Vie Parisienne

Wisdom of a Mustache

"Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers.

In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a Godis not

disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache."

 

- Gilbert K. Chesterton

Audrey Hepburn

"As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands,

one for helping yourself, the other for helping others."

- Audrey Hepburn

 

 

In Childhood - a japanese poem

Things don't die or remain damaged
but return: stumps grow back hands,
a head reconnects to a neck,
a whole corpse rises blushing and newly elastic.
Later this vision is not True:
the grandmother remains dead
not hibernating in a wolf's belly.
Or the blue parakeet does not return
from the little grave in the fern garden
though one may wake in the morning
thinking mother's call is the bird.
Or maybe the bird is with grandmother
inside light. Or grandmother was the bird
and is now the dog
gnawing on the chair leg.
Where do the gone things go
when the child is old enough
to walk herself to school,
her playmates already
pumping so high the swing hiccups?

- Kimiko Hahn