Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892

*A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.

*A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

*After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains.

*All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.

*And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.

*And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero.

*And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.

*And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

*Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, When I give I give myself.

*Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

*Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.

*Freedom - to walk free and own no superior.

*Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.

*Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.

*Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?

*He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

*Henceforth I ask not good fortune. I myself am good fortune.

The Armful by Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963

For every parcel I stoop down to seize
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns,
Extremes too hard to comprehend at. once
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best.
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load.


Poet Robert Frost was born in San Francisco (1874). His father was a journalist and a hard drinker who died of tuberculosis when Frost was 11 years old. Frost moved with his mother to New England to live near family. He didn't do well in college. He dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard without taking a degree. He wanted to marry his high school sweetheart and tried to impress her with a book of poems he'd written. When she wasn't impressed, he considered drowning himself in a swamp, but decided not to go through with it at the last minute.

He finally married the girl and supported himself as a teacher for a few years, writing poetry on the side. Then, in 1900, he and his wife lost their first child, which sent Frost into a deep despair. So his grandfather took pity on him and bought him a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, in hopes that it would give him a steady income. Frost never really took to farming, but it gave him something to write about, and it was in those years on the farm that he began to write the poems that would make his name.

He published his first two collections, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), the latter of which contains many of Frost's early masterpieces, including "Mending Wall," "The Death of the Hired Man," "After Apple-Picking," and "Home Burial."
Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor

Robert Frost
Fireflies in the Garden

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

Dorothy Parker, 1893 - 1967

What Have I Got to Complain About

David Wolk Budbill 1940-


We've got enough money now not to worry every minute
about where the next dollar is coming from.
We even go to the movies once in a while.
We've got a nice collection of friends.
Our house is sturdy and well built.
It keeps us warm and stands well against the storms.
The larder is full of rice.
There are plenty of potatoes down cellar.
The freezer is full of vegetables I grew myself.

In the face of all that, slights to my vanity
seem frivolous and nonsensical.

What have I got to complain about?

E.B. White, 1899 - 1985

The essayist and children's writer E.B. White, was born Elwin Brooks White in Mount Vernon, New York (1899).
After college, he had a few gigs as a journalist, taking time in between to travel across the country with a friend in a Model T and to work on a cruise ship in Alaska. Then he moved back to New York, and he picked up The New Yorker the year it came out, liked it, and sent some pieces in. He was a regular contributor and a couple of years later became a staff member. He married Katharine Angell, an editor at the magazine.
After 11 years in the city, they moved to a farmhouse in rural Maine. White kept writing for The New Yorker, but he also started publishing a monthly essay in Harper's called "One Man's Meat," about his experience with rural life. He especially liked to write about the animals he kept on his farm.
E.B. White had 18 nephews and nieces, and they were always asking him to tell stories. He wasn't very good at thinking up stories on the spot, so he started working on a children's book so that he would always have a story on hand. He had gotten the idea years before — as he remembered it, "I took a train to Virginia, got out, walked up and down in the Shenandoah Valley in the beautiful springtime, then returned to New York by rail. While asleep in an upper berth, I dreamed of a small character who had the features of a mouse, was nicely dressed, courageous, and questing. When I woke up, being a journalist and thankful for small favors, I made a few notes about this mouse-child — the only fictional figure ever to have honored and disturbed my sleep." So he slowly collected more and more stories about the mouse-child, and after about 15 years he had a real manuscript, and his wife suggested that he send it to a publisher. He did, and that book was Stuart Little (1945), which begins: "When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse."
After a young pig he was raising got sick and he failed to save its life, he wrote one of his most famous essays, "Death of a Pig." Then he wrote a children's novel in which the pig doesn't have to die: Charlotte's Web (1952). It's the story of a runt pig named Wilbur who is saved the first time by a little girl and the second time by a wise spider, and it was inspired by White's observations of the animals on his farm, including the spiders. It is one of the best-selling children's books of all time.
E.B. White said, "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." (less)

Prayer for Our Daughters by: Mark Jarman, 1952 -

May they never be lonely at parties
Or wait for mail from people they haven't written
Or still in middle age ask God for favors
Or forbid their children things they were never forbidden.

May hatred be like a habit they never developed
And can't see the point of, like gambling or heavy drinking.
If they forget themselves, may it be in music
Or the kind of prayer that makes a garden of thinking.

May they enter the coming century
Like swans under a bridge into enchantment
And take with them enough of this century
To assure their grandchildren it really happened.

May they find a place to love, without nostalgia
For some place else that they can never go back to.
And may they find themselves, as we have found them,
Complete at each stage of their lives, each part they add to.

May they be themselves, long after we've stopped watching.
May they return from every kind of suffering
(Except the last, which doesn't bear repeating)
And be themselves again, both blessed and blessing.

_______
A Prayer for my Daughter William Butler Yeats 1865–1939

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Helpless

by: Neil Young, 1945-

There is a town in north Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind
I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us

Helpless, helpless, helpless
Baby can you hear me now?
The chains are locked
and tied across the door,
Baby, sing with me somehow.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us

Helpless, helpless, helpless.

Was a Man by Philip Booth, 1925 - 2007

Was a man, was a two-
faced man, pretended
he wasn't who he was,
who, in a men's room,
faced his hung-over
face in a mirror hung
over the towel rack.
The mirror was cracked.
Shaving close in that
looking glass, he nicked
his throat, bled blue
blood, grabbed a new
towel to patch the wrong
scratch, knocked off
the mirror and, facing
himself, almost intact,
in final terror hung
the wrong face back.

_________

Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886

Heart, we will forget him,
You and I, tonight!
You must forget the warmth he gave,
I will forget the light.

When you have done pray tell me,
Then I, my thoughts, will dim.
Haste! ‘lest while you’re lagging
I may remember him!

Ernest Miller Hemingway, 1899 - 1961

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois (1899). As a young man, he wanted to fight in World War I, but he had bad eyesight so he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in Italy. Only one month after he started, he was passing out chocolates to Italian soldiers on the frontlines and got hit by shrapnel from an exploding shell. He spent several weeks in the hospital, where he started suffering from insomnia. He couldn't sleep without a light on for fear that he might die in the night. He traveled back to his parents' home, still recuperating from his injury. He walked around with a cane, read everything he could get his hands on, and taught his sisters Italian swear words. He was a small town war hero, and often spoke at schools and social clubs about his experience in the war. He always passed around his bloodstained, shrapnel-torn trousers. In a letter to a friend he wrote, "They've tried to make a hero out of me here. But you know and I know that all the real heroes are dead." Hemingway continued living with his parents for months, occasionally hunting and fishing with friends. He wrote a few adventure stories about the war and sent them to the Saturday Evening Post, but they were rejected. His parents accused him of "sponging," told him to get a real job, and his mother finally threw him out of the house when he was twenty-one. He got married, moved to Paris, and started hanging out with writers like Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. He was forced to begin over again when he lost a suitcase that carried every manuscript and every copy of every manuscript he had written so far in Paris. Hemingway tried to write as simply and objectively as possible, using very few adjectives or adverbs. After he published For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940, he began to struggle with his writing, worrying that he was repeating himself. He worked for years on a huge manuscript, and finally published just a small part of it as The Old Man and the Sea (1953), about a fisherman who catches a huge fish, only to have it eaten by sharks before he can get home. The book won the Pulitzer Prize, and a year later Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ernest Hemingway said, "All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was."

Blowing In The Wind

How many roads must a man walk down,
before you call him a man?
How many seas must a white dove fly,
before she sleeps in the sand?
And how many times must a cannon ball fly,
before they're forever banned?

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind.

How many years can a mountain exist,
before it is washed to the sea?
How many years can some people exist,
before they're allowed to be free?
And how many times can a man turn his head,
and pretend that he just doesn't see?

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind.

How many times must a man look up,
before he sees the sky?
And how many ears must one man have,
before he can hear people cry ?
And how many deaths will it take till we know,
that too many people have died?

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind.

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind.

Three Perfect Days by Linda Pastan, 1932 -

In the middle seat of an airplane,
between an overweight woman
whose arm takes over the armrest
and a man immersed in his computer game,

I am reading the inflight magazine
about three perfect days somewhere: Kyoto
this time, but it could be anywhere—
Madagascar or one of the Virgin Islands.

There is always the perfect hotel
where at breakfast the waiter smiles
as he serves an egg as perfectly coddled
as a Spanish Infanta.

There are walks over perfect bridges—their spans
defying physics—and visits to zoos
where rain is forbidden,
and no small child is ever bored or crying.

I would settle now for just one perfect day
anywhere at all, a day without
mosquitoes, or traffic, or newspapers
with their headlines.

A day without any kind of turbulence—
certainly not this kind, as the pilot tells us
to fasten our seatbelts, and even
the flight attendants look nervous.

____

We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.

Frank Tibolt

Personal by Irene McKinney, 1939 -

None of this is personal, not the way you'd think.
The moon keeps on traveling and I can see it
from my balcony each night and each night
different but it's not my own, not like we want

things to be our very own. But it sways me
nevertheless and stands in for certain losses
and gains and for even that much I'm grateful.
I stand at the back door and stare.

Norman Mailer, 1923 - 2007

Norman Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey (1923). Mailer wrote The Naked and the Dead (1948), considered one of the best novels about World War II, and helped found The Village Voice, an independent weekly newspaper in New York City. He is the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes.

Mailer was considered very bright as a young boy, and he had so much energy that it was necessary to keep him occupied at all times. According to a story, one summer Mailer's mother handed her son a pad and paper and said, "Here, write something." He wrote his first story at 10 years old. It was called "The Martian Invasion" and reached 35,000 words in length.

Mailer entered Harvard University when he was just sixteen, where he studied aeronautical engineering. He also wrote a short story called "The Greatest Thing in the World," which won Story magazine's undergraduate prize, and he also wrote a lot of fiction in the style of Ernest Hemingway.

Mailer graduated from Harvard in 1943 and found himself in the Army, fighting in World War II, less than a year later. He served as a rifleman with a reconnaissance platoon in the Philippine mountains and, while there, got the idea for his first novel, The Naked and the Dead. He wrote that novel after he was discharged, and it made him famous.

Norman Mailer said, "The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people."

Mailer was also interested in journalism, and in 1954 he helped foundThe Village Voice, and wrote a weekly column for a short time. Mailer was also one of the first to write in the style of "new journalism," which mixes autobiography with journalism. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his "new journalism" book The Armies of the Night (1968), a personalized account of the 1967 march on Washington, D.C., which Mailer participated in and was arrested for. Mailer has also written "interpretive biographies" of such people as Lee Harvey Oswald and the young Pablo Picasso.

And he said, "Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing."

*A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

*Alimony is the curse of the writing class.

*America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

*Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.

*Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.

*Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.

*Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.

*God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.

*Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.

*Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.

*I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

*I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.

*I hate everything which is not in myself.

*If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

*In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.

*It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.

The Golden Speech was delivered by Queen Elizabeth I of England to 141 Members of the Commons, on November 30th, 1601

"Mr Speaker, We have heard your declaration and perceive your care of our estate. I do assure you there is no prince that loves his subjects better, or whose love can countervail our love. There is no jewel, be it of never so rich a price, which I set before this jewel: I mean your love. For I do esteem it more than any treasure or riches; for that we know how to prize, but love and thanks I count invaluable. And, though God hath raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my Crown, that I have reigned with your loves. This makes me that I do not so much rejoice that God hath made me to be a Queen, as to be a Queen over so thankful a people. Therefore I have cause to wish nothing more than to content the subject and that is a duty which I owe. Neither do I desire to live longer days than I may see your prosperity and that is my only desire. And as I am that person still yet, under God, hath delivered you and so I trust by the almighty power of God that I shall be His instrument to preserve you from every peril, dishonour, shame, tyranny and oppression, partly by means of your intended helps which we take very acceptably because it manifesteth the largeness of your good loves and loyalties unto your sovereign.

Of myself I must say this: I never was any greedy, scraping grasper, nor a strait fast-holding Prince, nor yet a waster. My heart was never set on any worldly goods. What you bestow on me, I will not hoard it up, but receive it to bestow on you again. Therefore render unto them I beseech you Mr Speaker, such thanks as you imagine my heart yieldeth, but my tongue cannot express. Mr Speaker, I would wish you and the rest to stand up for I shall yet trouble you with longer speech. Mr Speaker, you give me thanks but I doubt me I have greater cause to give you thanks, than you me, and I charge you to thank them of the Lower House from me. For had I not received a knowledge from you, I might have fallen into the lapse of an error, only for lack of true information.

Since I was Queen, yet did I never put my pen to any grant, but that upon pretext and semblance made unto me, it was both good and beneficial to the subject in general though a private profit to some of my ancient servants, who had deserved well at my hands. But the contrary being found by experience, I am exceedingly beholden to such subjects as would move the same at first. And I am not so simple to suppose but that there be some of the Lower House whom these grievances never touched. I think they spake out of zeal to their countries and not out of spleen or malevolent affection as being parties grieved. That my grants should be grievous to my people and oppressions to be privileged under colour of our patents, our kingly dignity shall not suffer it. Yea, when I heard it, I could give no rest unto my thoughts until I had reformed it. Shall they, think you, escape unpunished that have oppressed you, and have been respectless of their duty and regardless our honour? No, I assure you, Mr Speaker, were it not more for conscience' sake than for any glory or increase of love that I desire, these errors, troubles, vexations and oppressions done by these varlets and lewd persons not worthy of the name of subjects should not escape without condign punishment. But I perceive they dealt with me like physicians who, ministering a drug, make it more acceptable by giving it a good aromatical savour, or when they give pills do gild them all over.

I have ever used to set the Last Judgement Day before mine eyes and so to rule as I shall be judged to answer before a higher judge, and now if my kingly bounties have been abused and my grants turned to the hurt of my people contrary to my will and meaning, and if any in authority under me have neglected or perverted what I have committed to them, I hope God will not lay their culps and offenses in my charge. I know the title of a King is a glorious title, but assure yourself that the shining glory of princely authority hath not so dazzled the eyes of our understanding, but that we well know and remember that we also are to yield an account of our actions before the great judge. To be a king and wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it than it is pleasant to them that bear it. For myself I was never so much enticed with the glorious name of a King or royal authority of a Queen as delighted that God hath made me his instrument to maintain his truth and glory and to defend his kingdom as I said from peril, dishonour, tyranny and oppression. There will never Queen sit in my seat with more zeal to my country, care to my subjects and that will sooner with willingness venture her life for your good and safety than myself. For it is my desire to live nor reign no longer than my life and reign shall be for your good. And though you have had, and may have, many princes more mighty and wise sitting in this seat, yet you never had nor shall have, any that will be more careful and loving.

'For I, oh Lord, what am I, whom practices and perils past should not fear? Or what can I do? That I should speak for any glory, God forbid.' And turning to the Speaker and her councilors she said, 'And I pray to you Mr Comptroller, Mr Secretary and you of my Council, that before these gentlemen go into their countries, you bring them all to kiss my hand.' "

[edi

Gettysburg Address

The only confirmed photo of Abraham Lincoln (circled) at Gettysburg, taken about noon, just after Lincoln arrived and some three hours before the speech. To Lincoln's right is his bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon.

The Gettysburg Address is a speech by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and is one of the best-known speeches in United States history.[1] It was delivered by Lincoln during the American Civil War, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the decisive Battle of Gettysburg.

Abraham Lincoln's carefully crafted address, secondary to other presentations that day, came to be regarded as one of the greatest speeches in American history. In just over two minutes, Lincoln invoked the principles of human equality espoused by the Declaration of Independence and redefined the Civil War as a struggle not merely for the Union, but as "a new birth of freedom" that would bring true equality to all of its citizens, and that would also create a unified nation in which states' rights were no longer dominant.

Beginning with the now-iconic phrase "Four score and seven years ago," referring to the American Revolution of 1776, Lincoln examined the founding principles of the United States in the context of the Civil War, and used the ceremony at Gettysburg as an opportunity not only to consecrate the grounds of a cemetery, but also to exhort the listeners to ensure the survival of America's representative democracy, that the "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Despite the speech's prominent place in the history and popular culture of the United States, the exact wording of the speech is disputed. The five known manuscripts of the Gettysburg Address differ in a number of details and also differ from contemporary newspaper reprints of the speech.

Sir Thomas More

Sir Thomas More (pronounced /ˈmɔr/; February 7, 1478[1] – July 6, 1535), also known as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman and noted Renaissance humanist. He was an important counsellor to Henry VIII of England and for three years toward the end of his life he was Lord Chancellor. He is recognised as a saint within the Catholic Church and in the Anglican Communion.[2] He was an opponent of the Protestant Reformation and of Martin Luther, William Tyndale, Thomas Cranmer, Thomas Cromwell and King Henry VIII.

More coined the word "utopia" - a name he gave to the ideal, imaginary island nation whose political system he described in Utopia, published in 1516. He opposed the king's separation from the papal church and denied that the king was the Supreme Head of the Church of England, a status the king had been given by a compliant parliament through the Act of Supremacy of 1534. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1534 for his refusal to take the oath required by the First Succession Act, because the act disparaged the power of the Pope and Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. In 1535 he was tried and executed for treason by beheading. More was beatified by the Catholic Church in 1886 and canonised, with John Fisher, in 1935. In 1980, he was added to the Church of England's calendar of saints

William Shakespeare's Famous Short Speeches

The Bard has left behind his legacy in ways more than one. Most of the non-political famous short speeches have been written by William Shakespeare. While there are many, like Hamlet's "To be or not to be...", and Portia's speech in Merchant of Venice "The quality of mercy is not strain'd..." to name a few, the Bard's most famous speech till date by far is the speech by Jaques in 'As you like it', which goes as...

"All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,

His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. "

_____-

9. Apology – Socrates

4th century B.C. Athens, Ancient Greece

Socrates, a great scholar and teacher in Athens, was facing the charges of corruption and misleading the people. People, especially youngsters were greatly influenced by his words and ideas. The rulers found him threatening to their throne. Socrates was arrested and put on trial. Court was set and he was asked to say something in his defense. ‘The Apology’ is what Socrates said in his defense. Instead of pleading for guilty, he chose to die with dignity.

Notable Excerpt:

Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know this of a truth -- that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods; nor has my own approaching end happened by mere chance. But I see clearly that to die and be released was better for me; and therefore the oracle gave no sign. For which reason also, I am not angry with my accusers, or my condemners; they have done me no harm, although neither of them meant to do me any good; and for this I may gently blame them.

A Man for All Seasons is a play by Robert Bolt. An early form of the play had been written for BBC Radio in 1954

So, now we'll apply the good, plain sailor's art,
And fix these quicksands on the Law's plain chart!

(Several narrow panels, orange and bearing the monogram "HR VIII" in gold letters, are lowered. Renewed, more prolonged fanfare; during which enter CRANMER and NORFOLK, who sit on throne chairs. On their entry MORE and FOREMAN rise. As soon as the fanfare is finished NORFOLK speaks)

NORFOLK (Takes refuge behind a rigorously official manner) Sir Thomas More, you are called before us here at the Hall of Westminster to answer charge of High Treason. Nevertheless, and though you have heinously offended the King's Majesty, we hope if you will even now forthink and repent of your obstinate opinions, you may .still taste his gracious pardon.

MORE My lords, I thank you. Howbeit I make my petition to Almighty God that He will keep me in this, my honest mind, to the last hour that I shall live . . . As for the matters you may charge me with, I fear, from my present weakness, that neither my wit nor my memory will serve to make sufficient answers . . . I should be glad to sit down.

NORFOLK Be seated. Master Secretary Cromwell, have you the charge?

CROMWELL I have, my lord.

NORFOLK Then read the charge.CROMWELL (Formally) That you did conspire traitorously and maliciously to deny and deprive our liege lord Henry of his undoubted certain title, Supreme Head of the Church in England.

MORE (With surprise, shock, and indignation) But I have never denied this title!

CROMWELL You refused the oath tendered to you at the Tower and elsewhere

MORE (Again shocked and indignant) Silence is not denial. And for my silence I am punished, with imprisonment. Why have I been called again?

(At this point he is sensing that the trial has been in some way rigged)

NORFOLK On a charge of High Treason, Sir Thomas.

CROMWELL For which the punishment is not imprisonment.

MORE Death . . . comes for us all, my lords. Yes, even for Kings he comes, to whom amidst all their Royalty and brute strength he will neither kneel nor make them any reverence nor pleasantly desire them to come forth, but roughly grasp them by the very breast and rattle them until they be stark dead! So causing their bodies to be buried in a pit and sending them to a judgment . . . whereof at their death their success is uncertain.

CROMWELL Treason enough here!

NORFOLK The death of Kings is not in question, Sir Thomas.

MORE Nor mine, I trust, until I'm proven guilty.

NORFOLK (Leaning forward urgently) Your life lies in your own hand, Thomas, as it always has.

MORE (Absorbs this) For our own deaths, my lord, yours and mine, dare we for shame enter the Kingdom with ease, when Our Lord Himself entered with so much pain?

(And now he faces CROMWELL, his eyes sparkling with suspicion)

CROMWELL Now, Sir Thomas, you stand upon your silence.

MORE I do.

CROMWELL But, Gentlemen of the jury, there are many kinds of silence. Consider first the silence of a man when he is dead. Let us say we go into the room where he is lying; and let us say it is in the dead of night-there's nothing like darkness for sharpening the ear; and we listen. What do we hear? Silence. What does it betoken, this silence? Nothing. This is silence, pure and simple. But consider another case. Suppose I were to draw a dagger from my sleeve and make to kill the prisoner with it, and suppose their lordships there, instead of crying out for me to stop or crying out for help to stop me, maintained their silence. That would betoken! It would betoken a willingness that 1 should do it, and under the law they would be guilty with me. So silence can, according to circumstances, speak. Consider, now, the circumstances of the prisoner's silence. The oath was put to good and faithful subjects up and down the country and they had declared His Grace's title to be just and good. And when it came to the prisoner he refused. He calls this silence. Yet is there a man in this court, is there a man in this country, who does not know Sir Thomas More's opinion of the King's title? Of course not! But how can that be? Because this silence betokened-nay, this silence was not silence at all but most eloquent denial.

MORE (With some o f the academic's impatience for a shoddy line o f reasoning) Not so, Master Secretary, the maxim is "qui tacet consentire." (Turns t0 COMMON MAN) The maxim of the law is (Very carefully) "Silence gives consent." If, therefore, you wish to construe what my silence "betokened," you must construe that I consented, not that I denied.

CROMWELL Is that what the world in fact construes from it? Do you pretend that is what you wish the world to construe from it?

MORE The world must construe according to its wits. This Court must construe according to the law.

CROMWELL I put it to the Court that the prisoner is perverting the law-making smoky what should be a clear light to discover to the Court his own wrongdoing!

(CROMWELL's official indignation is slipping into genuine anger and MORE responds)

MORE The law is not a "light" for you or any man to see by; the law is not an instrument of any kind. (To the FoREMAN) The law is a causeway upon which, so long as he keeps to it, a citizen may walk safely. (Earnestly addressing him) In matters of conscience

CROMWELL (Smiling bitterly) The conscience, the conscience . . .

MORE (Turning) The word is not familiar to you?

CROMWELL By God, too familiar! I am very used to hear it in the mouths of criminals!

MORE I am used to hear bad men misuse the name of God, yet God exists. (Turning back) In matters of conscience, the loyal subject is more bounden to be loyal to his conscience than to any other thing.

CROMWELL (Breathing hard; straight at MORE) And so provide a noble motive for his frivolous self-conceit!

MORE (Earnestly) It is not so, Master Cromwell-very and pure necessity for respect of my own soul.

CROMWELL Your own self, you mean!

MORE Yes, a man's soul is his self!

CROMWELL (Thrusts his face into MOREPs. They hate each other and each other's standpoint) A miserable thing, whatever you call it, that lives like a bat in a Sunday School! A shrill incessant pedagogue about its own salvation-but nothing to say of your place in the State! Under the King! In a great native country!

MORE (Not untouched) Is it my place to say "good" to the State's sickness? Can I help my King by giving him lies when he asks for truth? Will you help England by populating her with liars?

CROMWELL (Backs away. His face stiff with malevolence) My lords, I wish to call (He raises his voice) Sir Richard Rich! (Enter RICH. He is now splendidly official, in dress and bearing; even NORFOLK is a bit impressed) Sir Richard. (Indicating CRANMER)

CRANMER (Proffering Bible) I do solemnly swear . . .

RICH I do solemnly swear that the evidence I shall give before the Court shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

CROMWELL Yes?

CRANMER (Discreetly) So help me God, Sir Richard.

RICH So help me God.

NORFOLK Take your stand there, Sir Richard.

CROMWELL Now, Rich, on 12 March, you were at the Tower?

RICH I was.

CROMWELL With what purpose?

RICH I was sent to carry away the prisoner's books.

CROMWELL Did you talk with the prisoner?

RICH Yes.

CROMWELL Church?

RICH Yes.

Did you talk about the King's Supremacy of the

CROMWELL What did you say?

RICH I said to him: "Supposing there was an Act of Parliament to say that I, Richard Rich, were to be King, would not you, Master More, take me for King?" "That I would," he said, "for then you would be King."

RICHARD Then he said--

NORFOLK (Sharply) The prisoner?

RICH Yes, my lord. "But I will put you a higher case," he said. "How if there were an Act of Parliament to say that God should not be God?"

MORE This is true; and then you said--

NORFOLK Silence! Continue.

RICH I said, "Ah, but I will put you a middle case. Parliament has made our King Head of the Church. Why will you not accept him?"

RICH Then he said Parliament had no power to do it.

NORFOLK Repeat the prisoner's words!

RICH He said, "Parliament has not the competence." Or words to that effect.

CROMWELL He denied the title?

RICH He did. (fill look to MORE, but he looks to RICH)

MORE In good faith, Rich, I am sorrier for your perjury than my peril.

NORFOLK Do you deny this?

MORE Yes! My lords, if I were a man who heeded not the taking of an oath, you know well I need not to be here. Now I will take an oath! If what Master Rich has said is true, then I pray I may never see God in the face! Which I would not say were it otherwise for anything on earth.

CROMWELL (To FOREMAN, calmly, technically) That is not evidence.

MORE Is it probable-is it probable-that after so long a silence on this, the very point so urgently sought of me, I should open my mind to such a man as that?

CROMWELL (To RICH) Do you wish to modify your testimony?

RICH No, Secretary.

MORE There were two other men! Southwell and Palmer!

CROMWELL Unhappily, Sir Richard Southwell and Master Palmer are both in Ireland on the King's business. (MORE gestures helplessly) It has no bearing. I have their deposition here in which the Court will see they state that being busy with the prisoner's books they did not hear what was said.

(Hands deposition to FOREMAN, who examines it with much seriousness)

MORE If I had really said this is it not obvious he would instantly have called these men to witness?

CROMWELL Sir Richard, have you anything to add?

RICH Nothing, Mr. Secretary.

NORFOLK Sir Thomas?

MORE (Looking at FOREMAN) To what purpose? I am a dead man. (TO CROMWELL) You have your desire of me. What you have hunted me for is not my actions, but the thoughts of my heart. It is a long road you have opened. For first men will disclaim their hearts and presently they will have no hearts. God help the people whose Statesmen walk your road.

NORFOLK Then the witness may withdraw.
(RICH crosses the stage, watched by MORE)

MORE I have one question to ask the witness. (RICH stops) That's a chain of office you are wearing. (Reluctantly RICH faces him) May I see it? (NORFOLK motions him to approach. MORE examines the medallion) The red dragon. (To CROMWELL) What's this?

CROMWELL Sir Richard is appointed Attorney-General for Wales.

MORE (Looking into RICH'S face, with pain and amusement) For Wales? Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . . But for Wales! (Exit RICH, stiff-faced, but infrangibly dignified)

CROMWELL Now I must ask the Court's indulgence! I have a message for the prisoner from the King. (Urgently) Sir Thomas, I am empowered to tell you that even now--

MORE No no, it cannot be.

CROMWELL The case rests! (NORFOLK is staring at MORE) My lord!

NORFOLK The jury will retire and consider the evidence.

CROMWELL Considering the evidence it shouldn't be necessary for them to retire. (Standing over FOREMAN) Is it necessary?

FOREMAN (Shakes his head) No, sir!

NORFOLK Then is the prisoner guilty or not guilty?

FOREMAN Guilty, my lord!

NORFOLK (Leaping to his feet; all rise save MORE) Prisoner at the bar, you have been found guilty of High Treason. The sentence of the Court

MORE My lord! (NORFOLK breaks off. MORE has a sly smile. From this point to end o f play his manner is o f one who has fulfilled all his obligations and will now consult no interests but his own) My lord, when I was practicing the law, the manner was to ask the prisoner before pronouncing sentence, if he had anything to say.

NORFOLK (Flummoxed) Have you anything to say?

MORE Yes. (He rises; all others sit) To avoid this I have taken every path my winding wits would find. Now that the Court has determined to condemn me, God knoweth how, I will discharge my mind . . . concerning my indictment and the King's title. The indictment is grounded in an Act of Parliament which is directly repugnant to the Law of God. The King in Parliament cannot bestow the Supremacy of the Church because it is a Spiritual Supremacy! And more to this the immunity of the Church is promised both in Magna Carta and the King's own Coronation Oath!

CROMWELL Now we plainly see that you are malicious!

MORE Not so, Master Secretary! (He pauses, and launches, very quietly, ruminatively, into his final stock-taking) I am the King's true subject, and pray for him and all the realm . . . I do none harm, I say none harm, I think none harm. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith I long not to live . . . I have, since I came into prison, been several times in such a case that I thought to die within the hour, and I thank Our Lord I was never sorry for it, but rather sorry when it passed. And therefore, my poor body is at the King's pleasure. Would God my death might do him some good . . . (With a great flash o f scorn and anger) Nevertheless, it is not for the Supremacy that you have sought my blood-but because I would not bend to the marriage!

(Immediately the scene change commences, while NORFOLK reads the sentence)

NORFOLK Prisoner at the bar, you have been found guilty on the charge of High Treason. The sentence of the Court is that you shall be taken from this Court to the Tower, thence to the place of execution, and there your head shall be stricken from your body, and may God have mercy on your soul!

(The trappings of justice are flown upwards. NORFOLK and CRANMER exit with chairs. The lights are dimmed save for three areas: spots, left, center, and right front, and a black arch cutout is lowered. Through this arch-where the ax and the block are silhouetted against a light o f steadily increasing brilliance-comes the murmur o f a large crowd, formalized almost into a chant. The FOREMAN doffs cap, and as COMMON MAN he removes the prisoner's chair and the two benches. CROMWELL pushes the table off, takes a small black mask from basket and puts it On COMMON MAN. The COMMON MAN thus becomes the traditional Headsman. He ascends the stairs, sets up the block from its trap, gets the ax and then straddles his legs. At once the crowd falls silent. Exit CROMWELL, dragging basket. NORFOLK joins MORE in the center spot. CRANMER takes his position on the rostrum. The WOMAN goes under the stairs) I can come no further, Thomas. (Proffering a goblet) Here, drink this.

MORE My Master had easel and gall, not wine, given him to drink. Let me be going.

MARGARET Father! (She runs to him in the center spot and flings herself upon him) Father! Father, Father, Father, Father!

MORE Have patience, Margaret, and trouble not thyself. Death comes for us all; even at our birth- (He holds her head and looks down at it for a moment in recollection) even at our birth, death does but stand aside a little. And every day he looks towards us and muses somewhat to himself whether that day or the next he will draw nigh. It is the law of nature, and the will of God. (He disengages from her. Dispassionately) You have long known the secrets of my heart.

(MARGARET exits with NORFOLK)

WOMAN Sir Thomas! (He stops) Remember me, Sir Thomas? When you were Chancellor, you gave a false judgment against me. Remember that now.

MORE Woman, you see how I am occupied. (With sudden decision goes to her in the left spot. Crisply) I remember your matter well, and if I had to give sentence now I assure you I should not alter it. You have no injury; so go your way; and content yourself; and trouble me not! (She exits. He walks swiftly to the stairs, then stops, realizing that CRANMER, carrying his Bible, has followed him. Quite kindly) I beseech Your Grace, go back. (Offended, CRANMER does so. The lighting is now complete, i.e., darkness save for three areas o f light, the one at cutout arch now dazzlingly brilliant. When MORE gets to head of stairs by the Headsman, he turns to Headsman) Friend, be not afraid of your office. You send me to God.

CRANMER (Envious rather than waspish) You're very sure of that, Sir Thomas.

(He exits)

MORE (Takes off his hat, revealing the gray disordered hair) He will not refuse one who is so blithe to go to him.

(Kneeling. Immediately is heard a harsh roar o f kettledrums. There is total blackout at head of the stairs, while the drums roar. Then the drums cease)

HEADSMAN (Bangs the trap down, in the darkness) Beholdthe head-of a traitor! (The lights come up)

COMMON MAN (Comes to the center o f the stage, having taken off his mask) I'm breathing . . . Are you breathing too? . . . It's nice, isn't it? It isn't difficult to keep alive, friendsjust don't -make trouble-or if you must make trouble, make the sort of trouble that's expected. Well, I don't need to tell you that. Good night. If we should bump into one another, recognize me. (He exits)

Curtain

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). Chicago Poems. 1916.

Happiness

I ASKED the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion. 5

Six years I worked in a knitting mill at a machine
And then I married Jerry, the iceman, for a change.
He weighed 240 pounds, and could hold me,
Who weighed 105 pounds, outward easily with one hand.
He came home drunk and lay on me with the breath of stale
beer
Blowing from him and jumbled talk that didn't mean anything.
I stood it two years and one hot night when I refused him
And he struck his bare fist against my nose so it bled,
I waited till he slept, took a revolver from a bureau drawer,
Placed the end of it to his head and pulled the trigger.
From the stone walls where I am incarcerated for the natural
term
Of life, I proclaim I would do it again.

1. Chicago


HOG Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning. 10
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse. and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

Hog Butcher: Seller of pig meet---Freight: goods sent by rail or road--- brawling: street fighting

Paul Theroux, April 10 1941 -

Novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts (1941). After college he decided to join the Peace Corps in 1963. He later said, "I had thought of responsibilities I did not want—marriage seemed too permanent, grad school too hard, and the army too brutal." He said the Peace Corps was a kind of "Howard Johnson's on the main drag to maturity."

The Peace Corps sent him to live in East Africa. He was expelled from Malawi after he became friends with a group that planned to assassinate the president of the country. He continued traveling around Africa, teaching English, and started submitting pieces to magazines back in the United States. While living in Africa, he became friends with the writer V.S. Naipaul, who became his mentor and who encouraged him to keep traveling.

He had published several novels when he decided to go on a four-month trip through Asia by train. He wrote every day on the journey, and he filled four thick notebooks with material that eventually became his first best-seller, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (1975).

*Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.

*Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

*Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.

*The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume

*It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.

*Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation; and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.

*You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.

*The train passed fruit farms and clean villages and Swiss cycling in kerchiefs, calendar scenes that you admire for a moment before feeling an urge to move on to a new month.

*I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.

*It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians.

*Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

*The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriate's career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter.

*Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

*Riding the Iron Rooster.

*The kind of travel I do is a reaction to that. Instead of going to meet gorillas or Bhutan, I prefer to go [my own way] and do things the wealthy wouldn't dare to do.

*Banks and donors and charities claimed to have had successes in Mozambique. I suspected they invented these successes to justify their existence.

*The drug tour he had hoped would be unique, his own, ... was apparently a widely known trip down a well-traveled path, in the sort of full-color brochure that also described gorilla encounters in Africa and white-water rafting on the Ganges and treks to the Everest base camp and birding in Mongolia.

*There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment.

*The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.

*As Calcutta smells of death and Bombay of Money, Bangkok smells of sex, but this sexual aroma is mingled with the sharper whiffs of sex and money.

Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886

I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The Stars about my Head I felt
About my Feet the Sea.

I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch -
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience.

Stereotyping The British

There are four kinds of people in the UK -

First, there were the Scots who kept the Sabbath - and everything else they could lay their hands on.

Then there were the Welsh - who prayed on their knees and their neighbors.

Thirdly there were the Irish who never knew what they wanted - but were willing to fight for it anyway.

Lastly there were the English who considered themselves self-made men, - thus relieving the Almighty of a terrible responsibility.