The Last of the Romans

On 8 October 1912, during the First Balkan War, Lemnos became part of Greece. The Greek navy under Rear Admiral Pavlos Kountouriotis took it over without any casualties from the occupying Turkish Ottoman garrison, who were returned to Anatolia. Peter Charanis, born on the island in 1908 and later a professor of Byzantine history at Rutgers University recounts when the island was occupied and Greek soldiers were sent to the villages and stationed themselves in the public squares. Some of the children ran to see what Greek soldiers looked like. ‘‘What are you looking at?’’ one of them asked. ‘‘At Hellenes,’’ the children replied. ‘‘Are you not Hellenes yourselves?’’ a soldier retorted. ‘‘No, we are Romans."

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Little Gidding

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Ruth 1:19-21

19 So they two went until they came to Bethlehem. And it came to pass, when they were come to Bethlehem, that all the city was moved about them, and they said, Is this Naomi?

20 And she said unto them, Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.

21 I went out full and the Lord hath brought me home again empty: why then call ye me Naomi, seeing the Lord hath testified against me, and the Almighty hath afflicted me?

All together, they have more death than we, but all together, we have more life than they.

Portraits

What I did not know when I was very young was that nothing can take the past away: the past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

Robinson Jeffers

There is something within us knows our fates from the first, our ends from the very fountain; and we in our nights may overhear its knowledge by accident, all to no purpose.

St. Isaac the Syrian

If you cannot be merciful, at least speak as though you are a sinner. If you are not a peacemaker, at least do not be a troublemaker. If you cannot be assiduous, at least in your thought be like a sluggard. If you are not victorious, do not exalt yourself over the vanquished. If you cannot close the mouth of a man who disparages his companion, at least refrain from joining him in this.

The Grapes of Wrath

The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s a monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

The Baron in the Trees

This gesture of moving the branch as if waiting for another land to appear, this plunging of his gaze deeper and deeper into the undulating distance as if hoping never to see the horizon, but to succeed, perhaps, in making out some place, alas, far too far away — this was the first real sign of exile…

The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.

The Unnameable

[T]hat’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two…

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.

The Martian Chronicles

What did Time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like, it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, one hundred billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing.”

Chapter 38, Dusk

But my whole clock's run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again.

Chapter 114, The Gilder

Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.