Hopes Reads

Hope O_o

PILOTS by William Neely
The Romance of the Air: pilots speak about the triumphs and tragedies, fears and joys of flying

You have to put your faith in something you don’t fully understand or can’t even see - the principle of flight… The fact that I’m in a special world up there, a world where there are no boundaries...

Private pilots, like fighter pilots, are mostly loners. They enjoy being “up there” by themselves. Of this group, probably the loneliest ones are those who build experimental planes. They build them alone and, since most of them are single-seat crafts, they fly them alone...

When I went down the runway that first time and pulled back on the stick, and the thing I’d created out of fiberglass and aluminum and nuts and bolts took off, there was no feeling I ever had that equaled it...

Hope O_o

THE SENSE OF AN ENDING by Julian Barnes
A Novel

We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

Hope O_o

WOMEN IN ARCHITECTURE by Clare Lorenz
a contemporary approach

ELIZABETH HATZ of Sweden

"Architecture has to do with a sense of place and a sense of presence. This, together with its ability to spread and divide light, is perhaps the most fundamental but least explainable impact it has on us."

"I wish to discover what makes some places and buildings more congenial than others -not as objects or sculptures but as places to be in and as the background for people's lives. The timelessness of architecture lies in its ability to offer infinite variety of use in the years to come for people whose needs are as yet unspecified."

"Each new architectural task generates a mixture of joy and fear - a state of internal chaos where gradually a whirl of impressions from within and without gather together... Even if this chaos gives you the feeling of starting from zero each time, it may be a fruitful way of allowing new dimensions to emerge..."

Hope O_o

The Finishing School by Muriel Sparks
A Novel

...it's not what you put in it's what you leave out, and it's the silences rather than the sound... "Watch for details," Rowland often said. "Observe. Think about your observations... Analyze your subject. Get at the Freudian reality, the inner kernel. Everything means something other than it seems. The cat means the mother."

Hope O_o

Under All Silences, An Anthology of Poems Selected by Ruth Gordon
Shades of Love

from Letters from Maine
There was your voice, astonishment,
Falling into the silence suddenly
As though there were no continent
Between its warmth and me at my desk,
Bringing joy to the roots, a giant gift
Across time. Five in the morning there.
Three thousand miles to cover instantly.
How is it done? How for that matter
Did it all happen when we met?
Time telescoped, years cast away,
And primal being finding this present
Where we were lifted beyond age,
outside responsibilities, newfound,
In a way stranded, in a way at home at last?
And in your tender laughter at me
Some total acceptance of all that I am,
Of all that is to be or not ever to be
As time goes on and we are lost
Or found in it over and over again.
~ May Sarton, 1912

Hope O_o

A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman

From far, from eve and morning
And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
Blew hither: here am I.

Now—for a breath I tarry
Nor yet disperse apart—
Take my hand quick and tell me,
What have you in your heart.

Speak now, and I will answer;
How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters
I take my endless way.

Hope O_o

Behind My Eyes by Li-Young Lee
poems

A Voice's Gaze

Wait, wait, wait, what are you saying?
The Wind is principle? The dove is potential?

The dove unseen, but heard
by the one who is hidden

below the eave his own hearing makes?
What are you saying?

Our listening is principle?
Our speaking is potential?

Do you mean our hearing makes a house
for our singing?

Are you saying our singing
indicates the bounds of our feeling,
lays open the laws of our being?

What do you mean a voice walks barefoot
among the names of things?

What do you mean,
pulled from the fire, a voice thrives
undisguised in open season?
Whose voice? What fire? Wait,
wait, wait, what are you saying?

Hope O_o

Echoes by Maeve Binchy

Things will change of course, but in their own time. You can’t rush people and expect them to go at your pace. In terms of absolutes you might be wise to hold off until the growth of acceptance is sufficient…until the ground swell of opinion has become so strong that there will be no doubt and no confusion. That way the hurt is lessened, the debate is less sharp and the lines of love rather than the letter of the law would mold people’s attitudes…

Hope O_o

Bicycles by Nikki Giovanni
Bicycles: Because love requires trust and balance

I AM CONFUSED

I am confused

I am in a not so much fog
As gray cloud

I cannot read
The landmarks

Let alone
The Danger signs

I do not know

Where I am

Or how I got here

I am lost

I want to find myself

In your arms

Hope O_o

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.

Hope O_o

Persuasion by Jane Austen

I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating...

Hope O_o

Night Thoughts by David Gascoyne
A Radiophonic Poem

[VOICE OF THE SOLITARY]

I stand here staring into darkness and see nothing; yet it is not nothing that stretches before me away there for ever in whatever direction I turn my eyes. It is the Universe. It is I myself that am nothing. Through my eyes, nothing gazes at Reality, that utterly unqualifiable Something. And slowly the questions rise out of nothing's depth, Can I be real if I remain unseen?

...I stand here speaking of my nothingness... It is my heart that speaks...overwhelmed by the total evidence that what is there must be. I cannot understand how ever I am able to address what faces me, and yet I know I must respond. From out of that profound night-blue abyss of starry vacancy comes the command "Lift up your heart! ...Let my lost loneliness be illusory.