clear medieval insight

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• Without fail, [the vice of sodomy] brings death to the body and destruction to the soul. It pollutes the flesh, extinguishes the light of the mind, expels the Holy Spirit from the temple of the human heart, and gives entrance to the devil, the stimulator of lust.

                                          

         St Peter Damian,  
                11th century benedictine theologian

                                     

why bother

If fate--and they say there is such a law--
punishes criminals,  
it has its penalty also for the lovers of good.
The former it throttles,
the latter it spits upon.
The former end in bitter torment,
the latter---in ignominy.


                   Lev Shestov





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lyrical ontological proof

I don't know if you or I exist
but somewhere there are poems about us

                                  Linh Dinh






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utilitarian survival course

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.


—Theodore Roosevelt.







....

exquisite pathos

Anybody can sympathise 
with the sufferings of a friend,
 but it requires a very fine nature 
to sympathise with a friend's success.

  Oscar Wilde

anything is indeed possible

 A man of 20 in Queretaro, Mexico, 
a drug addict named  Juan José Barragán Silva,
was having a quarrel with his mother,
Esperanza, and threatening to commit suicide. 

He stabbed himself and then tried to
 hurl himself off a building. 
 She grabbed his feet but could not hold on.
The man fell almost 40 feet directly on his head 
(at a 70-degree angle, the records say), 
hitting pavement.

As he fell the mother prayed to 
Juan Diego and Our Lady,
 “Give me a proof . . . save this son of mine!
And you, my Mother
 listen to Juan Diego.” 
 He was rushed to Durango hospital
 with a broken skull and crushed vertebrae, 
 on the point of death. 
 Yet his body inexplicably and spontaneously healed. 
He walked out the hospital,
 healthy, three days later.
His fall, and the mother’s prayer, 
took place on May 6, 1990,
 at the very time when Pope John Paul II
was celebrating the Mass of beatification
 of Juan Diego in the shrine
of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. 
 An extraordinary miracle, too good to be true?  
Yes, but true.

.........milagro mas bueno

/

a perennial riddle

The deepest bias 
in the history of the American people, 
according to  (   sic  ). 
The most luxuriant, 
tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation 
in American history.




                ....a collective scourge impulse




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