I would like for this blog to inspire… For it to flicker and glow beyond this page. And to be honest, when I write, I’m usually picking up where somebody else left off. It’s my own take, but the seeds have dropped from another place.

So, I would like to include occasional passages from that place, whether it be a book, a song, or a story remembered. Some things are just too good not to share.

East Of Eden – John Steinbeck – Ch. 34

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly re-spawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.