“The conclusion of your syllogism”, I said lightly, “is fallacious, being based upon licensed premises”.

Flann O’Brien (At Swim Two Birds)

A mother and her son were having supper together. When it was time for the pudding (some prunes and cream); the boy refused to eat the prunes. The mother told the boy that he must eat his pudding but he refused. She then tried to coerce him without success.

Now she started to feel cross and said: “If you don’t eat your prunes I am going to get very angry with you”. That had no effect.

Then she said: “If you don’t eat your prunes then your father will be very angry with you when he gets home”. That had no effect either.

Then she said: “If you don’t eat your prunes God will be very angry with you and you can go off to bed right now”. As before, he refused to eat his pudding and so was packed off to bed.

The mother finished supper and went to do the washing-up. A big thunderstorm started-up outside and suddenly she thought to herself that she had been too harsh and that her son would be terrified by the thunder and lightning since she has told him how God would be angry with him.

She rushed upstairs and into his bedroom, where the boy lay. He looked up and calmly, simply said; “What a lot of fuss over five prunes”.

Suddenly, walking along the open road I felt afraid.
I saw the stars and the world below my feet
Became a planet, and I was no longer
In Wiltshire. I was standing
Upon the surface, the edge of the planet
That runs around the sun.
I was in danger.
For all the comfort of the elms, the banal
Normality of houses with their garages, on my right -
All was in danger.
A marble spinning through the universe
Wears on its dizzy crust, men, houses, trees
That circle through cavernous aeons, and I was afraid.

(Mervyn Peake)

There are some men
who should have mountains
to bear their names through time
Grave markers are not high enough
or green
and sons go far away to lose the fist
their father’s hand will always seem

I had a friend he lived and died
in mighty silence and with dignity
left no book son or lover to mourn.
Nor is this a mourning song
but only a naming of this mountain
on which I walk
fragrant, dark and softly white
under the pale of mist
I name this mountain after him.

(Leonard Cohen)

“I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody that will inspire me with passion. You know its’ quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness… There is even a moment right at the start, where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don’t do it.

I know that I shall never jump again”.

J.P. Sartre (Nausea).

When strife is a thing of two
each knows the other in struggle
and the conflict is a communion;
a twoness.

But when strife is a thing of one
a single ego striving for its own ends
and beating down resistances
then strife is evil, because it is not strife.

“The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation”.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

A lizard ran out on a rock and looked up, listening
no doubt to the sounding of the spheres.
And what a dandy fellow!
the right toss of a chin for you and a swirl of a tail!