Change and Transformation

The time cracks into furious flower. Lifts its face all unashamed. And sways in wicked grace.

Perhaps my best years are gone … but I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire that’s in me now.

The seasons are no longer what they once were, But it is the nature of things to be seen only once, As they happen along, bumping into other things, getting along Somehow. That’s where Orpheus made his mistake.

The moment of change is the only poem.

Nothing is more difficult to transact, nor more dubious to succeed, nor more dangerous to manage, than to make oneself chief to introduce new orders. Because the introducer has for enemies all those whom the old orders benefit, and has for lukewarm defenders all those who might benefit by the new orders.

The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature’s inexorable imperative.

Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen. Der Mensch ist Etwas, das überwunden werden soll .

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.

Grant me an old man’s frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call.

O seasons, O châteaux, What soul is without flaws? 12

A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

Potential has a shelf-life.

All customs and traditions, all our way of life, everything to do with home and order, has crumbled into dust in the general upheaval and reorganization of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that’s left is the naked human soul stripped to the last shred, for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Marrying left your maiden name disused.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner.

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.

The world changes, and all that once was strong now proves unsure. J. R. R.