Rail
Every good man has a train
That goes towards his mother's house
Sounding its whistle
Blowing smoke.
Kumar, Amitava. The Blue Book: A Writer’s Journal. India, HarperCollins Publishers India, 2022. pg 58
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A photograph is easily printed and reproduced and shared on social media. A drawing, on the other hand, is a more deliberate act. It slows me down. I do it in order to slow-jam the news.
Kumar, Amitava. The Blue Book: A Writer’s Journal. India, HarperCollins Publishers India, 2022. pg 76
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Doodling here is writing’s other self, its shadow form. As much as they tell us about writing, doodles tell us about reading. They get at the heart of the critical act by seeming to solicit interpretation, then skittering away when we get down to the business of studying them. They might, after all, register no more than the inky imprints of the pleasures of mark-making or the necessity of testing the pen. Take a doodle too seriously, and you risk finding only your own desire for meaning bounced back at you.
Draw.
Polly Dickson, “Doodle Nation: Notes on Distracted Drawing,” The Paris Review (blog), July 17, 2024, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/07/17/doodle-nation-notes-on-distracted-drawing/.
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The Rat pushed the paper away from him wearily, but the discreet Mole took occasion to leave the room, and when he peeped in again some time later, the Rat was absorbed and deaf to the world; alternately scribbling and sucking the top of his pencil. It is true that he sucked a good deal more than he scribbled; but it was joy to the Mole to know that the cure had at least begun.
We all need a friend like Mole.
Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. United Kingdom, Welbeck Editions, 2021. p165
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By degrees the Rat began to sit up and to join in. His dull eye brightened, and he lost some of his listening air.
Presently the tactful Mole slipped away and returned with a pencil and a few half-sheets of paper, which he placed on the table at his friend’s elbow. “It’s quite a long time since you did any poetry,” he remarked. “You might have a try at it this evening, instead of – well, brooding over things so much. I’ve an idea that you’ll feel a lot better when you’ve got something jotted down – if it’s only just rhymes.”
At Mole’s behest Ratty returns to poetry. What feeding of the soul do you need to return to?
Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. United Kingdom, Welbeck Editions, 2021. p165
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There he got out the luncheon-basket and packed a simple meal, in which, remembering the stranger’s origin and preferences, he took care to include a yard of long French bread, a sausage out of which the garlic sang, some cheese which lay down and cried, and a long-necked straw-covered flask wherein lay bottled sunshine shed and garnered on far Southern slopes.
Water Rat and Sea Rat sit down for a poetic lunch. Kenneth Grahame’s prose is a counter argument against “simple” prose.
Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. United Kingdom, Welbeck Editions, 2021. p116
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My debt to Plato is a certain number of sentences: the like to Aristotle. A large number, yet still a finite number, make the worth of Milton and Shakespeare, to me. I would therefore run over what I have written, save out the good sentences, and destroy the rest.
He only is a good writer who keeps one eye on his page and with the other sweeps over things. So that every new sentence brings us a new contribution of observation.
Richardson, Robert D.. First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process. United States, University of Iowa Press, 2015. pg 53,54
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“Reason holds the helm, but passions are the gales.”
– John Adams
John Adams was enlightened to the human heart.
McCullough, David. John Adams. United Kingdom, Simon & Schuster, 2001. pg 421
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He was a man of immensely strong faith. A faith that balanced well with his reason.
Malcolm Guite on Dr. Johnson
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That one had to keep a “good heart,” come what may, was Abigail’s lifelong creed. “A merry heart doeth good like medicine,” she loved to say, quoting Proverbs. “I hate to complain,” she now wrote. “No one is without difficulties, whether in high or low life, and every person knows best where their own shoe pinches.
With all of the Richmond Hill house sick, Abigail Adam’s “good heart” endured.
The most formidable first lady of all time?
McCullough, David. John Adams. United Kingdom, Simon & Schuster, 2001. pg 423
Floodlights and Goalposts 