Words&Dirt

“In the Chinese cosmology expressed in the Zhongyong, the lived world is the bottomless unfolding of an always-provisional world order according to the rhythm of its own internal creative processes without any fixed pattern or guiding hand.  And in the absence of any creator ‘God,’ this Confucian cosmology lifts the bar rather significantly with respect to the degree of creativity expected from the human collaborator.  A meaningful world can only be achieved through concerted human effort.”

––Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary, by Roger T. Ames, pg. 237

“Once more the Ghost bore away before the storm, this time so submerging herself that for some seconds I thought she would never reappear.  Even the wheel, quite a deal higher than the waist, was covered and swept again and again.  At such moments I felt strangely alone with God, alone with him and watching the chaos of his wrath.  And then the wheel would reappear, and Wolf Larsen’s broad shoulders, his hands gripping the spokes and holding the schooner to the course of his will, himself an earth-god, dominating the storm, flinging its descending waters from him and riding it to his own ends.  And oh, the marvel of it! the marvel of it!  That tiny men should live and breathe and work, and drive so frail a contrivance of wood and cloth through so tremendous an elemental strife!”

––The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London, pg. 110