[b]Robert Penn Warren
Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.[/b]
I can go along with that.
For the truth is a terrible thing. You dabble your foot in it and it is nothing. But you walk a little farther and you feel it pull you like an undertow or a whirlpool. First there is the slow pull so steady and gradual you scarcely notice it, then the acceleration, then the dizzy whirl and plunge into darkness. For there is a blackness of truth, too. They say it is a terrible thing to fall into the Grace of God. I am prepared to believe that.
Down here of course God being the least of it.
…by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it’s too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?
I know, I know: Not you.
Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They’re inexpensive and easy to procure.
Not only that, but, down there, they are closer to God.
For whatever you live is life.
After all, what else could it be?
If you want him to do it, you’ve got to change the picture of the world inside his head.
Of course that works the same for us too.