Outside on the deck of my earthbound ship as I stared up into a clear blue sky a beautiful puffy white cloud sailed overhead. It seemed to move as if on the surface of an invisible ocean, and for a moment I thought I saw a cabin near the center top with a captain aboard yelling silent commands or maybe he was just singing.
I don’t know, sometimes I feel so free out here in California that, yes, it’s possible that I might be going crazy. But what a way to go! I’ve always had a fascination with clouds—doesn’t everybody? For some reason I usually think of the seven months I spent at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina training for the infantry and, for awhile, being the base sign painter. There were afternoons between duty of time spent on a lawn on a small hillside reading books by Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell and their friends—I can’t remember who. When a cloud came into view I’d space out, put down whatever the book I was reading and become entranced by a most perfect shape—better, I always thought, than anything a man or woman could make.
It’s as if God just tosses these most perfect objects off the end of his paintbrush just to remind us, or something, how cool He really is. Or maybe God doesn’t even think about it. Maybe clouds are just clouds—puffs of condensation that change color depending on the time of day.
Some other clouds that come to mind were these long, thin and very ominous black ones that used to form early in the morning in Vietnam—over the War in Vietnam, I should say. (Can’t get away from that place!) But those clouds did seem eerily ominous—like sharks on the horizon. I’d heard people say Vietnam has an inordinate amount of demons hanging out there. Maybe the clouds there reflect that.
As I’ve written this, the sky has turned cloudy. Filled with clouds. One big cloud. Now that this has happened, clouds no longer interest me. Go figure!
Tony,
Thinking of you I picked out some quotes:
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QUOTATION: There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature. ATTRIBUTION: Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)
QUOTATION: Standing on the bare ground,-my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,-all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God. ATTRIBUTION: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher.
This is perhaps Emerson’s most famous passage and an index to his notion of the individual’s connection to the Divine as well as to his ultimate vision of true knowing. The image of the transparent eyeball is perhaps difficult to summarize, but it clearly ought to dissuade any simplistic ideas of Emersonian individualism
QUOTATION: Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. ATTRIBUTION: Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist.
QUOTATION: The principal difference between childhood and the stages of life into which it invariably dissolves is that as children we occupy a limitless present. The past has scarcely room to exist, since, if it means anything at all, it means only the previous day. Similarly, the future is in abeyance; we are not meant to do anything at all until we reach a suitable size. Correspondingly, the present is enormous, mainly because it is all there is.... Walks are dizzying adventures; the days tingle with unknowns, waiting to be made into wonders. Living so utterly in the present, children have an infinite power to transform; they are able to make the world into anything they wish, and they do so, with alacrity. There are no preconceptions, which is why, when a child tells us he is Napoleon, we had better behave with the respect due to a small emperor. Later in life, the transformations are forbidden; they may prove dangerous. By then, we move into a context of expectations and precedents of past and future, and the present, whenever we manage to catch it and realize it, is a shifting, elusive question mark, not altogether comfortable, an oddness that the scheme of our lives does not allow us to indulge. Habit takes over, and days tend to slip into pigeonholes, accounted for because everything has happened before, because we know by then that life is long and has to be intelligently endured. ATTRIBUTION: Alastair Reid (b. 1926), Scottish poet, essayist.
QUOTATION: He that will consider the infinite power, wisdom, and goodness of the Creator of all things, will find reason to think it was not all laid out upon so inconsiderable, mean, and impotent a creature as he will find man to be; who, in all probability, is one of the lowest of all intellectual beings. ATTRIBUTION: John Locke (1632-1704), British philosopher. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
QUOTATION: Let the will embrace the highest ideals freely and with infinite strength, but let action first take hold of what lies closest. ATTRIBUTION: Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872), Austrian author. “Rule of Life,” Poems (1815).
QUOTATION: The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is inpenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms-this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men. ATTRIBUTION: Albert Einstein (1879-1955), German-born U.S. theoretical physicist. quoted in Einstein: His Life and Times, ch. 12, sct. 5, Philipp Frank (1947).
QUOTATION: The tide which, after our former relaxed government, took a violent course towards the opposite extreme, and seemed ready to hang every thing round with the tassils and baubles of monarchy, is now getting back as we hope to a just mean, a government of laws addressed to the reason of the people, and not to their weaknesses. ATTRIBUTION: Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), U.S. president. Letter, January 7, 1793, to Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr.. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson
QUOTATION: A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. ATTRIBUTION: William Wordsworth (1770–1850), British poet. Preface, Lyrical Ballads, 2nd edition (1801).
Among the causes Wordsworth perceived were, “the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.”
QUOTATION: All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life, revolution, starvation, devaluation of currency and terror, epidemics, emigration; I have seen the great ideologies of the masses grow and spread out before my eyes. Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and, above all, that archpestilence, nationalism, which poisoned our flourishing European culture. I had to be a defenseless, powerless witness to the most inconceivable setback of humanity, its return to a barbarism we had thought had long since passed into oblivion with its deliberate and programmatic antihumane dogma.... (We had to witness) wars ... concentration camps, tortures, mass pillaging and bombings of defenseless cities ... bestialities (which had not been known for fifty generations).... But, paradoxically, I also saw the same human race rise to technical and intellectual heights never even dreamt of ... the conquest of the air through the airplane, the one-second transmission of the human word across the globe and, thus the conquest of space, the splitting of the atom, the conquest of the most treacherous diseases ... almost daily progress in making possible what was still impossible yesterday. Never before our time did humanity as a whole act more satanically and never did it accomplish such godlike deeds. ATTRIBUTION: Stefan Zweig (18811942), Austrian writer. Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday
QUOTATION: As we begin to comprehend that the earth itself is a kind of manned spaceship hurtling through the infinity of space—it will seem increasingly absurd that we have not better organized the life of the human family. ATTRIBUTION: Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978), U.S. Democratic politician, vice president. Speech, September 26, 1966, San Fernando Valley State College, California.
I too ,after seeing the Joni Mitchell biography at the Director's view Film Festival in Stamford--
have looked at clouds form both sides now
and happy that ol Ton is keeping track of them out there on the left coast
keeping them in perspective.
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