And a poet-land in this world is a grain of ruby, and a sapling in a soil that loves song and inspires it; it lays into the earth a good that a thousand soils cannot lay — soils with a rasp in their voice, whose children's hearts are coffins.
And what use is it to us to drive our young away from literature, or to drive literature away from them, if the "craft" lives on in their blood..? This bewitching color, this mirage — it deceives! It is opium, and you yourself have said so... Then how shall you find deliverance from opium, when it is glued fast to your ribs and will not be pried loose from them??
Were it a hashish that sinks a man down to the apprehension of filth, the advice would have been gladly received... But it is sacred, O poet; in its taste is the savor of triumph, and in its absorption something divine!!!
"Literature, in this East, is a bringer of poverty, an occasion for insult, and a byword of contempt..."
... Yes, so it is; and poverty does not disgrace, my friend; and the insult debases none but him who spits it; and whoever scorns a man of letters walks the earth accursed all his life...
I am the slave of the true man of letters, the man of letters in the arteries — his slave in his rapture, when he sets down beauty, and creates sweetness and bounty and blessing, and touches with his imagination a woman whose body his imagination has embodied in bewitching melodies...
The slave of the man of letters worthy of that name, on the day he eats his own deprivation and creates out of his deprivation what the demigods among us cannot!!!
And our man of letters, O my poet, is half a god...
Nay — if he wills, and if the word in his blood eats of him and feeds him — he is a whole
god, almighty, who creates his universe and weaves for it its lives before six mornings have dawned upon him...
... This is a word that leapt to the head in a fevered hour, among the noblest hours of a lifetime. And my hand would not have set it down did I not know that in your veins are your words, and in your heart your rhymes, and that in truth you felt no regret for "the hours I squandered composing verse at school while
the mathematics and natural-science classes were in session, in the days of empty enthusiasm and short sight!"
And that the enthusiasm was not empty — rather it alone lifted you up to life's supreme pleasure and the rapture of winning a melody... and that the sight reached far beyond the confines of the folly of dry figures, and of driveling nonsense whose imbecility none but its own people perceive...
Shell Butagaz
Good cooking..
A growing appetite
Perfect health
Thanks to... Shell
Butagaz
'The source of comfort in the home'