Books Read in 2019

I was thinking that if Jesus knew, really knew, about this thing in our country, He could have stopped it.

It’s strange. It’s strange how you do fear something because your heart is already prepared to fear because maybe you were brought up to fear that something, or simply because you found others fearing...

I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.

I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.

I've never been a coward at heart, although I've always been a coward in action;

an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”

Such splendor man's mind can craft.

Do not swear by the moon, for she changes constantly,then your love would also change.

Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

O serpent heart hid with a flowering face!
Did ever a dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant, feind angelical, dove feather raven, wolvish-ravening lamb! Despised substance of devinest show, just opposite to what thou justly seemest - A dammed saint, an honourable villain!

Come, gentle night; come, loving, black-browed night;
Give me my Romeo; and, when I shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night...

One could go on after forever with the richness of this play, especially the third act but alas.

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

False. Everything by which you have lived and live now is all a deception, a lie, concealing both life and death from you.

Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.

It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up. And that is really what it was. I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all done and there is only death.

Suddenly some force struck him in the chest and side, making it still harder to breathe, and he fell through the hole and there at the bottom was a light…Just then his schoolboy son had crept softly in and gone up to the bedside. The dying man was still screaming desperately and waving his arms. His hand fell on the boy's head, and the boy caught it, pressed it to his lips, and began to cry.

“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore?"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!" —
Merely this, and nothing more”

"Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee--by these angels he hath sent thee--
Respite--respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!"
Quothe the Raven, "Nevermore.”

"I am tired of submitting my will to the caprices of others—of resigning my own judgement in deference to those to whom I owe no duty, and for whom I feel no respect."

Most enjoyable and thus easiest read of the year so far.

Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough---as most wrong theories are!

Finally we took what we wanted, and it turned to ashes in our
hands. We made our men playthings; we made them slaves. And after that they weren't men any more. But what we stole isn't the sort of thing you can hand back on a silver platter; you men have to get enough courage to take it away from us.

"and he would have passed a pleasant life of it, in despite of the Devil and all his works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches put together, and that was—a woman.”

“Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart - one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?”

30.9

There is a sweetness in being the sole source, the autocratic
and irresponsible cause of the greatest joy and profoundest pain to another.

She tore herself away, and went out. And I went away. I cannot describe the emotion with which I went away. I should not wish it ever to come again; but I should think myself unfortunate had I never experienced such an emotion.

Take for yourself what you can, and don’t be ruled by others; to belong to oneself—the whole savour of life lies in that

29.9

Psalm for Kingston
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem --Psalm 137

City of Jack Mandora--mi nuh choose none--of Anancy
prevailing over Mongoose, Breda Rat, Puss, and Dog, Anancy
saved by his wits in the midst of chaos and against all odds;
of bawdy Big Boy stories told by peacock-strutting boys, hush-hush
but loud enough to be heard by anyone passing by the yard.

City of market women at Half-Way-Tree with baskets
atop their heads or planted in front of their laps, squatting or standing
with arms akimbo, susuing with one another, clucking
their tongues, calling in voices of pure sugar, come dou-dou: see
the pretty bag I have for you, then kissing their teeth when you saunter off.

City of school children in uniforms playing dandy shandy
and brown girl in the ring--tra-la-la-la-la--
eating bun and cheese and bulla and mangoes,
juice sticky and running down their chins, bodies arced
in laughter, mouths agape, heads thrown back.

City of old men with rheumy eyes, crouched in doorways,
on verandahs, paring knives in hand, carving wood pipes
or peeling sugar cane, of younger men pushing carts
of roasted peanuts and oranges, calling out as they walk the streets
and night draws near, of coconut vendors with machetes in hand.

City where power cuts left everyone in sudden dark,
where the kerosene lamp's blue flame wavered on kitchen walls,
where empty bellies could not be filled,
where no eggs, no milk, no beef today echoed
in shantytowns, around corners, down alleyways.

City where Marley sang, Jah would never give the power to a baldhead
while the baldheads reigned, where my parents chanted
down Babylon--Fire! Burn! Jah! Rastafari! Selassie I!--
where they paid weekly dues, saving for our passages back to Africa,
while in their beds my grandparents slept fitfully, dreaming of America.

City that lives under a long-memoried sun,
where the gunmen of my childhood are today's don's
ruling neighbourhoods as fiefdoms, where violence
and beauty still lie down together. City of my birth--
if I forget thee, who will I be, singing the Lord's song in this strange land?

28.9

“I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel…”

“Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be his world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”

I do not know you, woman!

I look down and feel a sort of distant horror as I see a body that is mine but not mine. My limbs are bent at odd angles. Shards of bone poke out though my skin. When I try to move, I realize that I feel no pain because I feel nothing. Nothing at all.

Finally the year I managed to read the Holy Bible cover to cover. Never would have thought it possible before.

Must I Wait All My Life; or, The Misery Song
"Must I wait all my life for a certain thing to happen?
Must I spend all my days just in dozin', just in nappin'?
Isn't there to be a fire? Won't some color come?
Am I blind? have I no luck? am I just plain dumb?
Must I wait all my life for a certain person's comin'?
Will I die, my life gone, and still a love tune hummin'?
Is my life to be empty? Won't some real love come in it?
Is my life just to be one grey minute after minute?
God, I could scream. God, I could tear myself to pieces—
I'm the boredest human of the whole damn human species.
I could bite, I could cry, I am hell tired of waitin'—
When the Lord made me he did some bum creatin'.
I listen for a sound but all I do is listen;
What other people get it always seems I'm missin'.
I'm in a deep unhappy ditch, I'm as miserable as sin.
Must I wait all my life for life just to begin?"

Took me so long to finish, some good short stories but most of it I had to drudge through, days on end and here I am at the end of February just starting this diary.

"husband and wife did not need to speak words to one another, not just from the old habit of living together but because in that long-ago instant at least out of the long and shabby stretch of their human lives, even though they knew at the time it wouldn't and couldn't last, they had touched and become as God when they voluntarily and in advance forgave one another for all they knew the other could never be."