Stillness: Ideas for rest and attention. - Page 3

Editor’s note

Stillness

For moments when you want to slow down, reflect or pay attention.

StillnessLiterature

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Lord Darlington says this in Act III of Lady Windermere's Fan, the first of Oscar Wilde's society comedies, which opened in London on 20 February 1892. Men gathered in his rooms at night are joking about women and virtue; when his friend Dumby says they are all good except one, Darlington answers with this line. Teased for being romantic, he admits he loves a woman who is not free. He means Lady Windermere, who is hiding in the same room. The Irish writer Wilde (1854–1900) was famous for such sayings.

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StillnessLiterature

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.

This line comes near the end of The Bell Jar, the only novel by the American poet Sylvia Plath (1932–1963). Its heroine, Esther Greenwood, spends a summer at a New York magazine, then sinks into severe depression and months of hospital care, as Plath did after her summer at Mademoiselle in 1953. The bell jar is Esther's image for her illness: a glass dome that cuts her off from the world. She hears her heartbeat this way at a friend's funeral, shortly before doctors decide whether she can leave hospital.

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StillnessLiterature

The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.

Looking for Alaska (2005) was the first novel by the American writer John Green. Miles, a teenager at an Alabama boarding school, falls for his classmate Alaska Young, who keeps returning to the last words the novelist Gabriel García Márquez gives Simón Bolívar: a despairing question about how to escape a labyrinth. For her, the labyrinth is suffering. After a sudden loss leaves Miles struggling with grief and guilt, his answer at the end is forgiveness. The book won the 2006 Printz Award for young adult fiction.

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StillnessLiterature

I am half agony, half hope.

Captain Frederick Wentworth writes this in a letter to Anne Elliot in chapter 23 of Persuasion. Eight years earlier Anne, then 19, broke off their engagement because her family and her friend Lady Russell persuaded her that a naval officer without a fortune was an unwise match. Now rich, he meets her again, and neither speaks. In Bath he overhears her telling his friend Captain Harville that women love longest, even when hope is gone. Persuasion, Jane Austen's last completed novel, appeared months after her death in 1817.

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StillnessLiterature

There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.

Emma Woodhouse says this to herself in Volume II, chapter 13 of Jane Austen's Emma (1815). Clever, rich and self-assured, Emma spends much of the novel arranging other people's love lives. One plan has hurt her young friend Harriet Smith, whom she convinced that the vicar, Mr Elton, loved her. When Harriet answers a gentle request with tearful gratitude, Emma is moved, reflects that warmth and tenderness of heart outshine any cleverness, and admits she lacks it. Austen reportedly said no one but herself would much like this heroine.

Jane AustenRead card

StillnessLiterature

You will be forgotten either way. So live in such a way that, while you are here, you belong to yourself.

No author has been found for this line; it circulates online. Its first half echoes the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who reminded himself in his private notebook, the Meditations (AD 170s), that he would soon forget everything and everything would soon forget him. The second half recalls the Roman writer Seneca, whose first letter to his friend Lucilius opens “Vindica te tibi”, roughly “claim yourself for yourself”: stop letting others take your time. Both belong to the tradition later called memento mori, “remember that you will die”.

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StillnessLiterature

All my life I've been trying to find a place where I can belong, and all my life I've known that no such place exists.

This wording is widely shared under the name of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), the French philosopher and novelist, but it has not been traced to any of his books, plays or interviews. The feeling is close to his work, though. In his first novel, Nausea (1938), the narrator Antoine Roquentin comes to feel that he, like everything around him, is superfluous: there for no reason and fitting nowhere. Sartre's existentialism starts from that point: since no nature is handed to us in advance, each person makes meaning through their own choices.

Often attributed to Jean-Paul SartreRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

All this struggle just for life to end on a random day.

No author is known for this line; it circulates online as a modern thought. The sting is in the word “random”: a life's effort is long, while its end keeps no appointment. Ancient philosophers argued that facing this plainly is useful rather than gloomy. In On the Shortness of Life, written around AD 49, the Roman philosopher Seneca says life is not short; we waste much of it, and used well it is long enough. The Latin reminder memento mori, “remember that you will die”, belongs to the same tradition.

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StillnessPhilosophy

I was burning, while you came blaming me for the smell of ashes.

The line opens “I Burn For You”, a poem posted under the name Kamryn Tanner on Poetry.com, a site where anyone can publish verse; on social media it also travels under other, unreliable names. The poem speaks from inside a painful relationship, where the one who is hurt is also blamed. Psychologists call this victim blaming. In the 1960s the American psychologist Melvin Lerner linked it to the just-world belief: wanting the world to be fair, people often decide that those who suffer must have deserved it.

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StillnessPhilosophy

Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.

This line is shared everywhere as a quote from Kurt Cobain (1967–1994), singer and songwriter of the American band Nirvana, whose 1991 album Nevermind brought grunge, a raw, loud style of rock, into the mainstream. It has not been found in his interviews, his lyrics or Journals, the notebooks published in 2002. The idea is much older: the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote in The Sickness unto Death (1849) that wanting to be someone other than yourself is a form of despair.

Kurt Cobain (popular attribution)Read card

StillnessPhilosophy

No one is afraid of heights, they're afraid of falling down.

This saying is widely credited to Kurt Cobain, the singer of Nirvana, but it has not been found in his interviews, lyrics or published notebooks, so it is best treated as anonymous. Most people feel a natural fear of falling in high places; only when it becomes extreme is it called acrophobia, which affects roughly 2 to 5 per cent of people. In 1960 Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk showed that most crawling babies would not cross a glass floor over an apparent drop, even when their mothers called.

Kurt Cobain (popular attribution)Read card

StillnessPhilosophy

Falling down is not a failure. Failure comes when you stay where you have fallen.

No author is known for this saying; it is usually shared without a name. The idea runs through many traditions. Japanese has nana korobi ya oki, “fall seven times, get up eight”. The Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith put a close version in The Citizen of the World (1760–61), letters supposedly written by a Chinese traveller in England: our greatest glory lies not in never falling but in rising every time we fall. Because of that invented narrator, the line is still often credited to Confucius.

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StillnessPhilosophy

Death is beautiful when seen to be a law and not an accident.

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the American writer later famous for Walden, wrote this on 11 March 1842 to his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Both men were grieving. In January Thoreau's older brother John had died in his arms of tetanus, an infection that locks the muscles, after a small cut. Weeks later Emerson's five-year-old son Waldo died of scarlet fever. Thoreau was living in the Emerson household at the time and was close to the boy. The letter goes on: “It is as common as life.”

Henry David Thoreau, letter to Emerson (1842)Read card

StillnessPhilosophy

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was the Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology and named the ideas of introversion and extraversion. The sentence comes from the closing chapter of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, a partly autobiographical book made with his colleague Aniela Jaffé and published in German in 1962, a year after his death. Looking back, Jung writes that the loneliness he felt as a child never left him, because he was aware of things most people around him did not know or care to know, and held views they would not accept.

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StillnessPhilosophy

He who sees too much ends up not fitting anywhere.

No author is known for this line, but the idea is old. In Plato's Republic, written around 375 BC, a prisoner who has only seen shadows on a cave wall is freed and sees the sunlit world; back in the cave, the others laugh and say the journey has ruined his eyes. In Greek myth the Trojan princess Cassandra could see the future but was cursed never to be believed; her own people thought her mad. The Bible's Ecclesiastes puts it most briefly: “he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

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StillnessPhilosophy

Peace does not come to the man who refuses to declare war on what is destroying him.

The line is often shared online as Seneca's, but it appears nowhere in his surviving works, and its wording is modern. Seneca (c. 4 BC–AD 65), a Roman Stoic philosopher and adviser to the emperor Nero, wrote often about peace of mind. When his friend Lucilius found that long travels had not lifted his gloom, Seneca told him in Letter 28: “You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.” Until you lay down the burden you carry inside, he added, no place will please you.

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StillnessPhilosophy

Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.

Marcus Aurelius was Roman emperor from AD 161 to 180 and a Stoic, following the Greek philosophy that places the good life in virtue and self-control. The Meditations are his private notebook, written in Greek during the 170s, partly while he was at war on the Danube frontier; he never meant it for readers. In 10.16 the Greek says, word for word: stop discussing what kind of man a good man is, and be one. The note just before it reminds him how little of his life is left.

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StillnessPhilosophy

I turn cruel when I am empty. If I cannot be loved, I must be feared.

No author is known for this line. Both halves echo Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), in which the creature, rejected by everyone including his maker, tells Victor Frankenstein: “I am malicious because I am miserable”, and later, “if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear”. Three centuries earlier, in The Prince (1513), Niccolò Machiavelli advised that a ruler who cannot be both loved and feared is safer being feared. Spoken in the first person, the line sounds closer to Shelley's lonely creature than to Machiavelli's cool political advice.

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StillnessLiterature

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.

The saying goes back to al-Jahiz (c. 776–868), a master of Arabic prose who grew up poor in Basra, in Iraq, selling fish to help his family. Praising books in a famous passage, he called the book a vessel filled with knowledge, a garden carried in a sleeve and a meadow turned over in the lap, one that speaks for the dead and passes on the words of the living. Later versions put the garden in a pocket. Legend says he died under a fallen pile of books.

Arabic ProverbRead card

StillnessLiterature

What you sow is what you reap.

Turkish has the proverb in exactly this form; English says “As you sow, so shall you reap.” The image is far older: Cicero's On the Orator (55 BC) records a Roman politician using it as a retort in a debate over a new law, “Ut sementem feceris, ita metes.” About a century later, Paul used it in his Letter to the Galatians. Turkish also has a sharper version, “rüzgâr ekip fırtına biçmek”, to sow the wind and reap the storm: to meet far worse than the harm one did.

Turkish, Biblical, global variants ProverbRead card

StillnessLiterature

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

The line is often shared as a saying of Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, but no reliable source ties it to him. It is usually credited to Ram Dass, reportedly from his book Be Here Now (1971), though the exact source is unclear. Born Richard Alpert, he taught psychology at Harvard, went to India in 1967 and became a disciple of the guru Neem Karoli Baba. It describes a common experience in meditation: as the mind's chatter settles, you notice sounds and thoughts that were there all along.

Attributed to Ram Dass; reported as from Be Here Now (1971)Read card

StillnessReligion & Belief

What you think, you become.

A modern paraphrase, not a quotation. It condenses the opening of the Dhammapada, 423 short verses traditionally held to be the Buddha's words and part of the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism, followed mainly in Sri Lanka and South-East Asia; some scholars trace its core to the third century BC. Its first two verses say that the mind comes before everything we experience: act with a corrupted mind and suffering follows, as the cartwheel follows the ox; act with a pure mind and happiness follows like a shadow that never leaves.

Modern paraphrase after the DhammapadaRead card

StillnessLiterature

Character is destiny.

Heraclitus lived around 500 BC in Ephesus, the Greek city whose ruins stand near Selçuk in western Turkey. Only fragments of his one book survive, quoted by later writers; this is fragment 119, ēthos anthrōpōi daimōn, “for a human being, character is daimon”. A daimon was the guardian spirit believed to decide each person's lot, and Heraclitus places that power in our own character. George Eliot quotes “character is destiny” in The Mill on the Floss (1860), adding that it is not the whole of our destiny.

Ancient Greek, Heraclitus traditionRead card

StillnessReligion & Belief

Pride goes before a fall.

The saying shortens Proverbs 16:18, which the King James Bible of 1611 renders: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” The Book of Proverbs, part of the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament), gathers wise sayings; tradition credits many to King Solomon, but scholars see several collections assembled over centuries. The verse is a matching pair, its second half repeating the first in other words. The ancient Greeks had the same idea: hubris, arrogance that oversteps human limits, and Nemesis, the goddess who punishes it.

Biblical, Hebrew wisdom traditionRead card

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