For what is life? This life? My life?

It is even a vapour,

That appeareth for a little time,

And then vanisheth away

Away dark night, away

I wend my way through windy days

And grope through fearsome night

Eyes shut against the dusty dark

Praying for the light

Groping in the umbral sand

Searching for some light

Dust thou wert and dust thou art

Feeble in the wind

All flesh is as the grass

The flower of the grass

The flower blooms, and fades, and dies

And doesn’t know its end –

Will I? Or will I leave this mortal vale

Taken instantly, not knowing where or when?

And brightly wake in paradise?

What win I if I gain the thing I seek?

A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy.

Who buys a minute’s mirth to wail a week?

Or sells eternity to get a toy?

For one sweet grape who will the vine destroy?

Shakespeare

The Rape of Lucrece

211ff

What is the greatest expression of love? What is the most powerful and meaningful way a boy and a girl can show their love?

Too often, a boy, or sometimes a girl, will say that the way to show love is physical. They will say that the supreme way to prove your love is physical—by having sexual relations. That is a lie. That lie comes from the devil. He puts it into people’s minds and their bodies agree. That act, the act by which spirits enter physical bodies and are born into this world, is a sacred act. True, it is a supreme expression of love between a man and a woman who are legally and lawfully married; but to try to talk someone into doing that sacred act before marriage or outside of marriage is wicked. It is the opposite of love. It is the supreme act of selfishness. It is using another person to satisfy your own lusts. And it is done with another person’s body, not their heart or spirit. If it were right, it would not be followed immediately by feelings of guilt and shame.

The greatest expression of love was said by Jesus: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13) The greatest way we can show love is to be willing to put another person’s well-being above our own. Their comfort above our own. Their happiness should be our purpose, and “wickedness never was happiness” (Alma 41:10).

If we love someone we will not use them to satisfy and gratify our carnal instincts. We will protect them. That’s love. Getting someone to break God’s commandments is not love. It’s being a user. People who use other people don’t love other people: they only love themselves. Yes, they will talk all kinds of “sweet-talk” and give a false sense of caring more for you than for themselves. That’s the user mentality. It’s the con game. It’s not love.

The greatest expression of love, the most meaningful and powerful way a boy and a girl can show their love is to protect one another from harm—physical harm, psychological harm, spiritual harm.

Son visage disait tragédie mais bien cachée, et sinon lointaine au moins profonde, de sorte que son sourire n’atteignait jamais grand succès ; et de larmes elle n’en avait plus, les ayant toutes déjà et, il y a de ça longtemps, épuisées, dépensées sur une histoire que personne, semblait-il, ne saurait découvrir, puisqu’en l’épuisant le rideau du théâtre avant-garde de son être, de son existence psychique, se déchirerait et les mécanismes du drame—les cordes pour faire descendre les rideaux de la mémoire, les roues pour faire élever les panneaux du souvenir—seraient exposés, et peut-être même les acteurs et les actrices en train de faire croire au public que la fiction devient dans la lumière fausse des phares de scène la réalité seraient accablés, et elle crèverait devant tout le monde, vidée de toute atmosphère intérieure de femme spirituelle.

Salva me, ars…

I have noticed something lately. Things have been stressful—I think that’s a fair use of the word—and I have drawn great solace from the pages of the Book of Mormon. (I have been reading it in French.) But also, and in no way comparably, I have noticed that I have drawn great comfort and pleasure from art. My experience with art is limited to listening to CDs of music and turning the pages of art books. But that’s enough. I have been inspired by my new Vivaldi CD that Steve got for me, listening to the scordatura of the cellos, and by Patrick Casaday’s Famine: Remembrance, and other beautiful things. But in a very parallel way I have loved turning the pages of my art books, picture after picture of great paintings. And I have loved reading my new Paul Johnson book, Art: a New History. It’s a reflection as much as a history, and I like how he sees it. I recently purchased Painters of the Wasatch Mountains, collected and edited by three people, but mainly Robert Olpin, who was on late nights on the Utah Education Channel that nobody watches. He was a prof at the UofU, and Utah born, probably a back-slid Mormon, but knew Utah arts and artists from Dan to Beersheba, or Snowville to St George. It has some pretty good paintings, some really great paintings, and some paintings that are incredible. And many of the paintings are of mountains I recognize… which means I’ve seen that mountain, and the artist did it up well enough that I recognize it. Like one called “Lazy Afternoon,” or something, but I could drive you up to the Midway turnoff right before Heber and stop by the river, by Kohler’s dairy farm, and you would see that exact view of Timp. And then to go through a cheap art book called Masters of Modern Painting, or something like that, that I got at the fashion shop that by accident has some odd-lot books, mostly stupid cooking or cocktails or salads books, but then the occasional art book. I have been perusing the greats, and talking about them: Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Fragonard, Gainsborough, then on to the Luminists, the Romantics, the Impressionists, etc. That Modern Painting book has many artists and pictures that I have not seen before, some from famous artists—Caneletto, Caravaggio—but canvases I have not seen before. There has been something soothing and uplifting about searching one corner of a painting to the other, taking it all in for minutes, not seconds, before turning the page, and then going back to it a day later and savoring it again. It has not just been entertaining (“Entertainment is the happiness of those who cannot think”—Alexander Pope), it has been exhilarating, uplifting, and even spiritual. Now that word is so misused today that it begs defining in context, so I mean spiritual in the sense of the New-Age ommmmmm-groaner, but more so spiritual in the sense of uplifting the spirit, giving joy to the soul. As Elder Maxwell said, “After all, brothers and sisters, when we rejoice in beautiful scenery, great art, and great music, it is but the flexing of instincts acquired in another place and another time.” Ars longa, vita brevis, said Goethe, after he read it in Montaigne, who got it from Cicero. There is a rock foundation in art that endures. It may not endure beyond the time of the telestial phase of the world, especially those paintings that are actually untoward, and even those that are perfectly moral, but nevertheless portray the nude, or scenes of a telestial world. But for as long as this level of our existence endures, art will provide exhilaration and elevation. Proust said friendships, love, even family, may fade—only art endures. I’m not of that opinion, or don’t see that what he saw is necessarily so, but in fact many human relations can turn, where art is always there, always what it is.

“While rashness is a crime, boldness is not incompatible with caution. Nay, it is often the quintessence of prudence.”

—Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart, CSA, General Order No. 26, 1863

Am I bold? I sometimes accuse myself of velleity, and certainly others may have thought my ways to fall into a category of timidity. Do I strike while the iron’s hot? Usually not. And if I do, I regret that action. Shoulda waited. So here we are in Christmastime, and I am again the other half of the Grand Dichotomy—the Xcrooge half. I will pay my devotions to heaven, and curse mammon all the while. Curse you, Mammon, in your department stores and big box stores and catalogues and commercials. Curse you all wrapped up in pretty ugly wrapping paper. Come, January, bring me relief. I sink in my own cursings.

How quickly yes it turns from this to this,

and brightest day in sunny glory is a memory, while a chill and bleak snowy scene has its own radiance, numinous apparitions of white on white, what once may have been green or brown, or even scarlet, now white as snow, actually snow, no longer a fence but snow in the shape of a fence, snow in the shape of a tree, snow as pasture, and in the still and chill a calm of dying down and being still, chilled and stilled by winter’s grip, yet pleased with all the equanimity of noncolor that makes us believe again in change, change from our peccant ways to find some level of peace, inner peace with an outward expression.

Both pictures taken within minutes of each other. Just like life, looking up and seeing one thing, looking down and seeing quite another. What do you want to see? How about seeing both, accepting both? I think about what has been, and then I think about what could be, might be, shall be; but then I think about what is. Which one counts the most? Shall I wear a red shirt? Blue? Or White? I grow old, I grow old… shall I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled? Eliot borrowed from Laforgue and made it quite acceptable. And Baudelaire, and Dante, and Wagner, mein irisch Kind; and it’s OK to do that now. He did it.

And flights of angels sing thee to thy …