Saturday, October 02, 2004

From the Profane to the Sacred, my favorite of all leaps: here are three pellucid (is that the word? anyway) quotes from the Book of Ecclesiastes. I'm cleaning up the study, which means (among other things) sorting through scraps of paper or note cards on which I've scrawled down illuminating quotes. Jamie Foxx is in excellent company.

"... if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone?" -- Ecclesiastes 4:1 (No comment really needed, is there?)

If a man beget an hundred children, and live many years, so that the days of his years be many, and his soul be not filled with good, and also that he have no burial; I say, that an untimely birth is better than he. For he cometh in with vanity, and departeth in darkness, and his name shall be covered with darkness. Moreover he hath not seen the sun, nor known any thing: this hath more rest than the other." -- Ecclesiastes 6: 3 - 5 (This is why people always return to Ecclesiastes and Lamentations and Job -- they're so relentlessly modern in their bleakness. They make Beckett look like a poseur.)

"The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth." -- Ecclesiastes 7:4. (Never read the Wharton novel, but clearly a good title.)

No comments: