NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
Gerard Manley HopkinsRead
Time has three dimensions and one positive pitch or direction. It is therefore not so much like any river or any sea as like the Sea of Galilee, which has the Jordan running through it and giving a current to the whole.
Interpretation
Time is dynamic and shaped by events, akin to a body of water with a flowing current.
In this quote, Gerard Manley Hopkins presents a nuanced view of time, comparing it not to a simple, unchanging river, but rather to the Sea of Galilee, which is enriched and given direction by the flowing Jordan River. This metaphor suggests that time is influenced by moments and experiences that provide it with purpose and momentum, highlighting the interconnectedness of events in shaping our lives.
In practice
In a philosophical discussion about the nature of time, one might reference this quote to illustrate the dynamic quality of our experiences.
NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies! Oh look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Let Him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east.
Birds buildbut not I build; no, but strain, Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine,O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
Nothing is so beautiful as spring - when weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring the ear, it strikes like lightning to hear him sing.
Ugly is attractive, ugly is exciting. Maybe because it is newer. The investigation of ugliness is, to me, more interesting than the bourgeois idea of beauty. And why? Because ugly is human.
Everything is deception: seeking the minimum of illusion, keeping within the ordinary limitations, seeking the maximum. In the first case one cheats the Good, by trying to make it too easy for oneself to get it, and the Evil by imposing all too unfavorable conditions of warfare on it. In the second case one cheats the Good by keeping as aloof from it as possible, and the Evil by hoping to make it powerless through intensifying it to the utmost.
The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human.
I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.
There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.
Money is power, money is force, money will do good as harm. In the hands of good men and women it could accomplish, and it has accomplished, good.
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