A Quote by Norman Mailer
Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existance in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is.
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A blade of grass is a commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass is priceless, what is the value of a human being?
A blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another.
If you study Japanese art you see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time how? In studying the distance between the earth and the moon? No. In studying the policy of Bismarck? No. He studies a single blade of grass. But this blade of grass leads him to draw every plant and then the seasons, the wide aspects of the countryside, then animals, then the human figure. So he passes his life, and life is too short to do the whole.
"Humanism" is to be human, to think, to analyze, and to probe. To respond and to be stimulated by all living things - beasts, fowl, and fishes. To respond through touch, sight, smell, and sound to all things in nature - both organic and inorganic-to colors, shapes, and textures - to not only look at a blade of grass but to really see a blade of grass. These things, to me, are what life and living are all about. I would call it "Humanism."
Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I don't want to be just another blade of grass."
Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
Every blade of grass is a blade of grace, a grace note in God's single Song. Nature is not blind and dumb. Nature is eloquent. Human science is blind and dumb if it does not hear this eloquence.
That which interests me above all else is the calligraphy of a tree or the tiles of a roof, and I mean leaf by leaf, branch by branch, blade by blade of grass.
Lo and behold! God made this
starry wold,
The maggot and the mold; lo and
behold!
He taught the grass contentment
blade by blade,
The sanctity of sameness in a shade.
Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.
A grass blade believes that men build palaces for it to grow in. Grass wedges its way between the closest blocks of marble and it brings them down. This power of feeble life which can creep in anywhere is greater than that of the mighty behind their cannons.
That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and impermanent, is the first mark of existence. It is the ordinary state of affairs. Everything is in process. Everything - every tree, every blade of grass, all the animals, insects, human beings, buildings, the animate and the inanimate - is always changing, moment to moment.
Grass is the forgiveness of nature-her constant benediction. Fields trampled with battle, saturated with blood, torn with the ruts of cannon, grow green again with grass and carnage is forgotten. Streets abandoned by traffic become grass-grown, like rural lanes and are obliterated. Forests decay, harvests perish, flowers vanish, but grass is immortal.
The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
I'm not gregarious. I spend a lot of time in the parks when it is fine. I do know almost every blade of grass.
If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive.
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