Word of the day.

am•ple |ˈampəl|
adjective ( -pler , -plest )
enough or more than enough; plentiful : there is ample time for discussion | an ample supply of consumer goods.
• large and accommodating : he leaned back in his ample chair.
• used euphemistically to convey that someone is fat : she stood with her hands on her ample hips.

DERIVATIVES
am•ple•ness |ˈømpəlnəs| noun
am•ply |-p(ə)lē| |ˈømp(ə)li| adverb

ORIGIN late Middle English : via French from Latin amplus ‘large, capacious, abundant.’

from the New Oxford American Dictionary

and from the SOED:

1 . . .large in amount, extensive, abundant; copious, treating of matters at full length.

2 Large in dimensions, capacity, or volume; spacious; capacious.

3 Enough to satisfy all demands, plentiful; liberal, unsparing.

It was a pleasure just to light his cigarette.

Happy Rapture-seekers.

Happy Christians. They have kept grace for themselves and left charity for us.

Remind Christians. ‘The Christian Fraternity.’ A call to ‘all those who venerated Christ’s holy teaching’. ‘Government existing, all laws based on lies, oppression and the suppression of the free search for truth, should be considered illegal, and opposed to the will of God and the spirit of Christianity.’

Meaning of my work? So many men lack grace. How can one live without grace? We must really get down to it and do what Christianity has never done: concern ourselves with the damned.

ALBERT CAMUS, Carnets 1942-1951

Cartoon: Toothpaste for Dinner

Come, sweet melancholia, come.*

“Desolate,” as it happens, provides the dictionary with one of its most elaborate poeticisms. “Desolate: giving an impression of bleak and dismal emptiness . . . utterly wretched . . . from L. desolat-, desolare ‘abandon,’ from de- ‘thoroughly’ + solus ‘alone.’”**

I for one am afraid that American culture’s overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society’s efforts to expunge melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?

My fears grow out of my suspicion that the predominant form of American happiness breeds blandness. This kind of happiness appears to disregard the value of sadness. This brand of supposed joy, moreover, seems to foster an ignorance of life’s enduring and vital polarity between agony and ecstasy, dejection and ebullience. Trying to forget sadness and its integral place in the great rhythm of the cosmos, this sort of happiness insinuates that the blues are an aberrant state that should be cursed as weakness of will or removed with the help of a little pink pill.

My sense is that most of us have been duped by the American craze for happiness. We might think that we’re leading a truly honest existence, when we’re really just behaving as predictably and artificially as robots, falling easily into well-worn “happy” behaviors, into the conventions of contentment. Deceived, we miss out on the great interplay of the living cosmos, its luminous gloom, its terrible beauty.

ERIC G. WILSON, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy

Melancholia – William Basinski

Artist: JOSHUA JENSEN-NAGLE, Things Will Get Better Soon, 2006, Edward Day Gallery

*or “Against New Age claptrap.”
**Martin Amis

The whole country of love.

Brute physical desire is easy. But desire at the same time as tenderness needs time. We must travel over the whole country of love before we find the flame of desire. Is this why it is always so difficult, at the beginning, to desire what we love?

CAMUS

Spine

The force which feeds you.

Well, it’s called love, you know.

It isn’t even a question of keeping yourself happy. It’s a question of keeping yourself in some kind of clear relationship, more or less, to the force which feeds you. Some days you’re happy, some days you ain’t. But somehow we have to deal with that on the simplest level. Bear in mind that this person facing you is a person like you. They’re going to go home and do whatever they do just like you. They’re as alone as you are.

JAMES BALDWIN in conversation with Nikki Giovanni, A Dialogue

Pictured: Oso, beautiful man.

I cannot cure myself of my heart.

I have lived recklessly off beauty: eternal bread.

I cannot live outside beauty. This is what makes me weak in the presence of certain people.

A world in which there is no more room for human beings, for joy, for active leisure, is a world that should die. No people can live outside beauty. It can live on after itself for a time and that is all.

ALBERT CAMUS, Carnets, 1942-1951

Pictured: Maurizimo @ dudesnude

Perfect solitude.

The urinal of a main-line station at one in the morning.

ALBERT CAMUS

advice for some young man in the year 2064 A.D.

let me speak as a friend
although the centuries hang
between us and neither you nor I
can see the moon.

be careful less the onion blind the eye
or the snake sting
or the beetle possess the house
or the lover your wife
or the government your child
or the wine your will
or the doctor your heart
or the butcher your belly
or the cat your chair
or the lawyer your ignorance of the law
or the law dressed as a uniformed man and killing you.

dismiss perfection as an ache of the
greedy
but do not give in to the mass modesty of
easy imperfection.

and remember
the belly of the whale is laden with
great men.

no leaders, please

invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,
don’t swim in the same slough.
invent yourself and then reinvent yourself
and
stay out of the clutches of mediocrity.

invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,
change your tone and shape so often that they can
never
categorize you.

reinvigorate yourself and
accept what is
but only on the terms that you have invented
and reinvented

be self-taught.

and reinvent your life because you must;
it is your life and
its history
and the present
belong only to
you.

art

as the
spirit
wanes
the
form
appears.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI, The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993

Bukowski: Poetry and Motion