Twenty Seven Worlds

1

Eden was never paradise. The scorched eluvium was proof that Mephistopheles was as much its master as anyone, if one would but dig. The virgin topsoil lied.

2

I sometimes wonder why so many places are named after saints. As if holiness could be inhabited without its deathly menace destroying even the most libidinous heart.

3

Dante, in his descent, came across a mausoleum of dead souls which had ceased to exist, as if this were a more horrible punishment than eternal torture.

4

Wherever I have gone, I have never ceased to carry with me homes I have never seen, let alone inhabited. Somewhere in Inverness Lady MacBeth still washes.

5

The past is no foreign country, nor is it fiction. It is a world much like our own, in which the men and women lived despite history.

6

John was also a poet. The origin of man was reason. The foundation was logic. Principally, there were stories. Translation, it seems, is the apotheosis of deception.

7

In Hawaii there is an island called Maui. Before it was covered in fake grass and tourists, it was fished from the ocean by an unsuspecting demigod.

8

Ought they to have called Venus by Aphrodite instead? The longer name makes up in grace what it loses in pith. Love is better graceful than pithy.

9

A symphony can be a love story, battling nations, or the birth of the universe. Even were it all of these, it might put someone to sleep.

10

The same infinite spaces that terrify Blaise Pascal inspire George Lucas to invent aliens with funny heads. But for each man, those infinite spaces are the same.

11

Perhaps so many movies are bland because no one bothered to come up with a better name than "movie." Or perhaps the causality is hard to decipher.

12

Virtual worlds are as real to those who live in them as fictional ones are to those who invent them. Middle Earth and Facebook matter in nonbeing.

13

I do not say that the soul exists, but I equally do not say that it does not exist. Not saying allows me to inhabit either world.

14

Supposing the Earth were a baseball, it would take a very large being indeed to grab and throw it. And what would such a being stand on?

15

A world can be as small as an automobile, if that automobile is sufficiently unusual. In particular, if it orbits a star and is actually a planet.

16

Euphemia is a dangerous place. Everything sounds more innocent than it is. Watching one's tongue can lead to a harsher world because soft words convey less meaning.

17

What would you say if I told you that Eden was not a place, but the psuedonym of a heavily tattoed adult actress of a kinky persuasion?

18

Jack Kerouac was right about women, beauty, and how you have to swing (and swing and so on). But he was wrong about the handkerchief and Buddhism.

19

Two of the wisest people I have known taught me two wise things. Good teachers know how to lie, and good scholars know how to choose failure.

20

Philosophers are good teachers and good scholars. In Artistotle's world nobody ever bothered to drop a boulder and a marble from a window. Maybe he actually knew.

21

I have driven through New Mexico on I-25, noticing that we make reservations for dinner and for the survivors of genocide. We prefer the former whenever possible.

22

If the objective of being is to achieve nonbeing, as our wantonly Westernized readings of the Buddha suggest, then Wagner may have been as wrong as Kerouac.

23

'On the other hand' is a phrase that proves that language has nothing to do with words, and everything to do with gesture, context, and Hegelian dialectic.

24

The best of the great poets have always been those who concealed beneath their flattery of the world equal measure of contempt and lust for its inhabitants.

25

In my dreams I have loved a woman in whom I saw a better me. Awake I love a woman in whom I see a better humanity.

26

Have you caught my meaning? I pray you, let me know if you have, for I fear I have once again tricked myself into believing I meant.

27

The difference between the living and the dead is that the living fabricate endless beautiful, fantastical, fictional worlds, while the dead compose all of our real ones.