Sound of the Ax: Aphorisms and Poems by William Stafford

Things I Learned Last Week

75 Things I Learned Last Week Ants, when they meet each other, usually pass on the right. Sometimes you can open a sticky door with your elbow. A man in Boston has dedicated himself to telling about injustice. For three thousand dollars he will come to your town and tell you about it. Schopenhauer was a pessimist but he played the flute. Yeats, Pound, and Eliot saw art as growing from other art. They studied that. If I ever die, I’d like it to be in the evening. That way, I’ll have all the dark to go with me, and no one will see how I begin to hobble along. In The Pentagon one person’s job is to take pins out of towns, hills, and fields, and then save the pins for later. 76 Maybe what I see is there. The fiction is that we’re all equally responsible for what our government does. My preference for lies isn’t just for my own—I like other people’s lies too. History is the lies people have agreed on? Mistake: we assume more light will reveal all that there is. We survive by our limitations. People look at my books on Gandhi and say, “He didn’t prevail against his enemies.” These people don’t even consider that there might be some aim other than their idea of prevailing. We should breathe carefully, even if no tigers live here. Most people explore on roads already made. 77 We decided not to climb some of the mountains, because they were there. All poems are found poems. You should go wherever you go as yourself, no more, no less, exactly so. The mistakes you make should be your own, and the perceptions. Even without faith a mountain may move. Are some of the enemy better than others? In a democracy, some of the assumptions require that persons be ready to follow their thoughts and win or lose. What if certain goals are much more important than others—should you practice tactics on minor issues in order to hold true on the major ones? (No. The person you face deserves the full encounter of your true self on whatever the topic is.) Read with your brights full on. Write with a glass typewriter—full disclosure throughout. Listen with sympathy. Speak like a child. Maybe occasions for different assumptions? Irony sometimes, contests to win. But sometimes:—all cards on the table. ...