Bhagavad Gita - translated by Stephen Mitchell

I loved Mitchell's translation of Gilgamesh, so i decided to check out what he did with the Gita. I enjoyed it. The translation is readable and not intrusive. Mitchell has strong opinions about what he likes and dislikes in the text, but he keeps those in his commentary part. He also includes an essay by Ghandi, which is by itself worth the price of the book.

---

Quotes:

“Renunciation of the fruits of action,” Gandhi wrote, “is the center around which the Gita is woven. It is the central sun around which devotion, knowledge, and the rest revolve like planets.”

the essence of Hinduism is “Let go.”

“I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.” (Second Isaiah)

The healthiest way to begin reading and absorbing a text like the Bhagavad Gita is to understand that ultimately it has nothing to teach. Everything essential that it points to—what we call wisdom or radiance or peace—is already present inside us.

‎"Humility, patience, sincerity,
nonviolence, uprightness, purity,
devotion to one’s spiritual teacher,
constancy, self-control,

dispassion toward objects of the senses,
freedom from the I-sense,
insight into the evils of birth,
sickness, old age, and death,

detachment, absence of clinging
to son, wife, family, and home,
an unshakable equanimity
in good fortune or in bad,

an unwavering devotion to me
above all things, an intense
love of solitude, distaste
for involvement in worldly affairs,

persistence in knowing the Self
and awareness of the goal of knowing --
all this is called true knowledge;
what differs from it is called ignorance. (Krishna)

As unnecessary as a well is to a village on the banks of a river, so unnecessary are all scriptures to someone who has seen the truth.

You have a right to your actions, but never to your actions’ fruits. Act for the action’s sake. And do not be attached to inaction. Self-possessed, resolute, act without any thought of results, open to success or failure. This equanimity is yoga.

The wise man lets go of all results, whether good or bad, and is focused on the action alone. Yoga is skill in actions.

if you want to be truly free, perform all actions as worship

It is better to do your own duty badly, than to perfectly do another’s

You must realize what action is, what wrong action and inaction are as well. The true nature of action is profound, and difficult to fathom.

When a man has let go of attachments, when his mind is rooted in wisdom, everything he does is worship and his actions all melt away. God is the offering, God is the offered, poured out by God; God is attained by all those who see God in every action.

Find a wise teacher, honor him, ask him your questions, serve him; someone who has seen the truth will guide you on the path to wisdom.

The wise man, cleansed of his sins, who has cut off all separation, who delights in the welfare of all beings, vanishes into God’s bliss.

Of ten thousand men, perhaps one man strives for perfection; of ten thousand who strive, perhaps one man knows me in truth.

Meditate on the Guide, the Giver of all, the Primordial Poet, smaller than an atom, unthinkable, brilliant as the sun.

I am the beginning and the end, origin and dissolution, refuge, home, true lover, womb and imperishable seed.

Arjuna, all those who worship other gods, with deep faith, are really worshiping me, even if they don’t know it.

Whatever you do, Arjuna, do it as an offering to me — whatever you say or eat or pray or enjoy or suffer. In this way you will be freed from all the results of your actions, good or harmful; unfettered, untroubled, you will come to me.

Even the heartless criminal, if he loves me with all his heart, will certainly grow into sainthood as he moves toward me on this path. Quickly that man becomes pure, his heart finds eternal peace. Arjuna, no one who truly loves me will ever be lost.

I am death, shatterer of worlds, annihilating all.

Nature, for me, is a womb; in Nature I plant my seed, and from this seed of mine bursts forth the origin of all beings.

Every man’s faith conforms with his inborn nature, Arjuna. Faith is a person’s core; whatever his faith is, he is.

The thing that, in your delusion, you wish not to do, you will do, even against your will, since your own karma binds you. The Lord dwells deep in the heart of all beings, by his wondrous power making them all revolve like puppets on a carousel.

This devotion is not mere lip-worship, it is wrestling with death. (Ghandi)

But renunciation of fruit in no way means indifference to the result. In regard to every action one must know the result that is expected to follow, the means thereto, and the capacity for it. He who, being thus equipped, is without desire for the result, and is yet wholly engrossed in the due fulfillment of the task before him, is said to have renounced the fruits of his action. (Ghandi)

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character (Richard P. Feynman)

What a guy! One of the smartest persons in the world, ever, and one who never shied away from any kind of adventure, from playing the drums professionally, to drawing well enough to put on a one-man show, to picking locks and safes, to figuring out techniques for picking up show-girls in Vegas. He did everything, and anything he cared for, he worked on it until he did it well.

---

Quotes:

It was no secret joke that brought the smile and the sparkle in his eye, it was physics. The joy of physics!

People often think I’m a faker, but I’m usually honest, in a certain way—in such a way that often nobody believes me!

(I often had this problem of demonstrating to these fellas something that they didn’t believe—like the time we got into an argument as to whether urine just ran out of you by gravity, and I had to demonstrate that that wasn’t the case by showing them that you can pee standing on your head. Or the time when somebody claimed that if you took aspirin and Coca-Cola you’d fall over in a dead faint directly. I told them I thought it was a lot of baloney, and offered to take aspirin and Coca-Cola together. Then they got into an argument whether you should have the aspirin before the Coke, just after the Coke, or mixed in the Coke. So I had six aspirin and three Cokes, one right after the other. First, I took two aspirins and then a Coke, then we dissolved two aspirins in a Coke and I took that, and then I took a Coke and two aspirins. Each time the idiots who believed it were standing around me, waiting to catch me when I fainted. But nothing happened. I do remember that I didn’t sleep very well that night, so I got up and did a lot of figuring, and worked out some of the formulas for what is called the Riemann-Zeta function.)

The electron is a theory that we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real.

Another guy got up, and another, and I tell you I have never heard such ingenious different ways of looking at a brick before. And, just like it should in all stories about philosophers, it ended up in complete chaos.

They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.

That’s the trouble with not being in your own field: You don’t take it seriously.

I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I’m trying to understand: I keep making up examples.

I thought to myself, “I’ve gotta be brave. I’ve gotta eat an oyster.”

All science stopped during the war except the little bit that was done at Los Alamos. And that was not much science; it was mostly engineering.

(About the military:) That’s what they’re very good at—making decisions. I thought it was very remarkable how a problem of whether or not information as to how the bomb works should be in the Oak Ridge plant had to be decided and could be decided in five minutes.

The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful.

And Von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of Von Neumann’s advice. It’s made me a very happy man ever since. But it was Von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility!

I’d be in there alone and I’d open the safe in a few minutes. All I had to do was try the first number at most twenty times, then sit around, reading a magazine or something, for fifteen or twenty minutes. There was no use trying to make it look too easy

And then I thought to myself, “You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it’s impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!” It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing. [...] I am what I am, and if they expected me to be good and they’re offering me some money for it, it’s their hard luck.

I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, “Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it’s two to one is…” and I showed him the accelerations. He says, “Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?” “Hah!” I say. “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.”

I noticed a difference: When we’d dig a hole, there’d be all kinds of detour signs and flashing lights to protect us. There [(Brazil)], they dig the hole, and when they’re finished for the day, they just leave.

After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant. [...] One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions.

Since then I never pay any attention to anything by “experts.” I calculate everything myself. ... I’ll never make that mistake again, reading the experts’ opinions. Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that’s the end of you.

I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion. It’s analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the whole universe: there’s a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run “behind the scenes” by the same organization, the same physical laws. It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is.

I knew it was impossible to draw well that way, and therefore it didn’t have to be good—and that’s really what the loosening up was all about. I had thought that “loosen up” meant “make sloppy drawings,” but it really meant to relax and not worry about how the drawing is going to come out.

It’s a funny thing which must make artists, generally, unhappy—how much improved a drawing gets when you put a frame around it.

In the early fifties I suffered temporarily from a disease of middle age: I used to give philosophical talks about science.

So I stopped—at random—and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”

There were a lot of fools at that conference—pompous fools—and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools—guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus—THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible!

I know that’s the way the government works; well, screw the government! I feel that human beings should treat human beings like human beings.

For me, who had never had any “culture,” to end up as a professional musician for a ballet was the height of achievement, as it were.

I think that, perhaps, the interpretation of hallucinations and dreams is a self-propagating process: you’ll have a general, more or less, success at it, especially if you discuss it carefully ahead of time.

Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a hallucination going, but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana beforehand, it came very quickly. But fifteen minutes was fast enough for me.

One time I sat down in a bath [in Esalen] where there was a beautiful girl sitting with a guy who didn’t seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, “Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude babe?”

Diamond Willow (Helen Frost)

This was recommended by my daughter Laura, who got it from her teacher, Miss Seivel. It's a dog-and-girl story told in blank verse shaped as diamonds, each one containing a "hidden message" inside. Nicely done. Very very sad, but it ends well. I liked it very much.

---

Quotes:

I pack snow into the dog pot. Dad gets a good fire going
in the oil-drum stove. He loves these dogs like I do. We're
both out here on weekends, as much as we can be, and every
day before and after school. He loves Roxy most. Willow, go
get the pliers, he say, showing me a quill in Roxy's foot

Super Sad, True Love Story (Gary Shteyngart)

A Clockwork Orange for the 21st Century, where privacy has been surrendered to social networking, Bipartisan Homeland Security is the law of the USA, and the notions of wealth that people grew up with have been blown up into irrelevance. A glimpse of what the world could look like in 10 years.

Of course, the more things change, the more they stay the same, and old Death is still the last enduring certainty - despite what Indefinite Life Extension tells their high net worth clients. But nevermind... one day we will be able to fix the human body and live forever.

All this and also a super sad love story written with a Russian accent.

A lovely book, funny and engrossing. I felt sad when i was done with it. I realized that this is above all a story of growing up, of going from childish negation of death to mature acceptance. That accepting the reality of our death is essential for embracing life and eventually making some sense of it.

---

Quotes:

Why is it so hard to be a grown-up man in this world?

There’s a special terminal for flights to the United States and SecurityState Israel, the most dilapidated terminal at the Roman airport, where everyone who is not a passenger is basically carrying a gun or pointing some sort of scanning gizmo at you.

I guess parents can be really disappointing but their the only parents we have.

The truth is, we may think of ourselves as the future, but we are not. We are servants and apprentices, not immortal clients. We hoard our yuan, we take our nutritionals, we prick ourselves and bleed and measure that dark-purple liquid a thousand different ways, we do everything but pray, but in the end we are still marked for death.

The scale of wealth we grew up with no longer applies.

Forget the dollar. It’s just a symptom. This country makes nothing. Our assets are worthless. The northern Europeans are figuring out how to decouple from our economy, and once the Asians turn off the cash spigot we’re through.

There’ll be plenty of time to ponder and write and act out later. Right now you’ve got to sell to live.

And that’s what immortality means to me, Joshie. It means selfishness. My generation’s belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think.

I wanted to confront her, to make her see the folly of her religion, to change her diet, to help her spend less on makeup and other nonessentials, to make her worship every biological moment she was offered instead of some badly punctured deity.

An American Restoration Authority sign warned us that “IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS CHECKPOINT (‘THE OBJECT’). BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED EXISTENCE OF THE OBJECT AND IMPLIED CONSENT.”

The world they needed was right around them, flickering and bleeping, and it demanded every bit of strength and attention they could spare.

He filmed my äppärät with his äppärät, while I swallowed another mug of triglycerides.

Thirty-nine years of age, lifespan estimated at eighty-three (47 percent lifespan elapsed; 53 percent remaining).

“Lenny Abramov, last reader on earth!”

Back at the synagogue, I gave Barry the willingness-to-live test. The H-scan test to measure the subject’s biological age. The willingness-to-persevere-in-difficult-conditions test. The Infinite Sadness Endurance Test. The response-to-loss-of-child test. ... I knew already that this perfectly reasonable, preternaturally kind fifty-two-year-old would not make the cut. He was doomed, like me. And so I smiled at him, congratulated him on his candor and patience, his intellect and maturity, and with a tap of my finger against my digital desk threw him onto the blazing funeral pyre of history.

I thought of Lenny and this elephant we saw in the zoo and how I kissed his big nose and the look on his face. The look on his face, Pony! I don’t know about temperance or faith, but what about charity and hope? Don’t we all need that?

I realized, with a quiet gnawing pain, that when you took away my 239,000 yuan-pegged dollars, when you took away the complicated love of my parents and the mercurial comforts of my friends, when you took away my smelly books, I had nothing but the woman in the next room.

“Safety first,” as they say around Post-Human Services. Our lives are worth more than the lives of others.

Unlike others of her generation, she was not completely steeped in pornography, and so the instinct for sex came from somewhere else inside her; it spoke of the need for warmth instead of debasement.

I wanted to get up and address the audience. “You have nothing to be ashamed of,” I would say. “You are decent people. You are trying. Life is very difficult. If there is a burden on your heart, it will not be lifted here. Do not throw away the good. Take pride in the good. You are better than this angry man. You are better than Jesus Christ.”

“I have nothing to wear. And my butt is fat.” “You weight eighty-three pounds. Everyone on Grand Street stares at your ass in wonder. You have three closets’ worth of shoes and dresses.” “Eighty-six. And I have nothing for the summer, Lenny. Are you even listening to me?”

The Indians tell me that in the next two years I’m going to have my heart removed completely. Useless muscle. Idiotically designed. (Joshie)

Today I’ve made a major decision: I am going to die. (Lenny)

I suppose I could have started telling her about all the different ways in which she needed to change in order for us to be happy together, but it would be pointless. I had either to accept the girl cradled in my arms, or to spend the rest of my time searching for something else.

“What happens but once … might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.” (Milan Kundera)

Did you know that each peaceful, natural death at age eighty-one is a tragedy without compare? Every day people, individuals—Americans, if that makes it more urgent for you—fall facedown on the battlefield, never to get up again. Never to exist again. These are complex personalities, their cerebral cortexes shimmering with floating worlds, universes that would have floored our sheep-herding, fig-eating, analog ancestors. These folks are minor deities, vessels of love, life-givers, unsung geniuses, gods of the forge getting up at six-fifteen in the morning to fire up the coffeemaker, mouthing silent prayers that they will live to see the next day and the one after that and then Sarah’s graduation and then …  Nullified.

Moominsummer Madness (Tove Jansson)

Nature is once again unfriendly to the Moomins - this time it's a volcano. Nevermind, they can handle it. Snufkin becomes a daddy (for a while), Moomintroll goes to jail, Little My gets lost in the sea, but in the end everything is OK. We get introduced to Little My and to the fillyjonks. The hemulens (the good and bad kinds) also play an important part in this story.

---

Quotes:

It was quite a long time before he found the bark schooner. The back stay had gotten entangled in a bush, but it was undamaged. Even the little hatch was in its place over the hold.
Moomintroll walked back through the garden to the house. The evening air was cool and mild, and the dewy flowers had a richer fragrance than ever before.
His mother was sitting on the steps. She was waiting for him.
She was holding something in her paws and smiling.
"Know what I've got?" She asked.
"The dinghy!" Said Moomintroll, and burst out laughing. Not because anything was especially funny, but just because he felt so happy.

Christianity for the Rest of Us (Diana Butler Bass)

---

An important book, well written, well researched, graceful, challenging and comforting. A study of the revitalization of mainline churches through intentionally applying classic Christian practices.

Quotes:

Nomadic spirituality, that sense of being alien, strangers in a strange land, is almost a given of contemporary life.

In the New Testament, Jesus asks everyone to change. With the exception of children, Jesus insists that every person he meets do something and change.

At first, it seemed odd that students regularly challenged me with the same statistic. Then, I discovered that the vast majority of them had seen the same video, America’s Godly Heritage, by an amateur historian named David Barton.

is the church “the gathering of the saints” or “a hospital for sinners”

Many mainstream congregations became a kind of Christian version of the Rotary Club, understanding the church as a religious place for social acceptability and business connections. [...] By the time I was born in 1959, church was an extension of postwar middle-class aspirations, run by bureaucracies in the faith business. [...] mainline churches of my childhood had essentially capitulated to American culture—their political practices of charity and social concern were basically secular.

Many people today, religious nomads isolated in time by modern amnesia, are trying to relocate themselves in the past. To get connected with the ancestors. To find their way back to an enchanted world.

Some Christians think that faith is like a set of MapQuest directions—that there is only a single highway to God. [...] Christianity is not a map religion. Christianity is a religion of the streets, of signposts on the ground, of people walking along the way.

Next to hospitality, discernment was one of the most widely spread spiritual practices among the research churches. [...] You have to pay attention when you are not entirely sure where you are going.

For my soul’s gonna be a place for God to live and laugh, to heal and love.

Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which to look out
Christ’s compassion to the world;
Yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good; yours are the hands with which He is to bless men now.
(Teresa of Avila)

[S]alvation is a process whereby we enter into God’s saving work—not a single moment of miraculous transformation through which we are rescued from sin. [...] a lifetime of practice, receiving God’s healing grace and power, being changed by it, and offering healing back to the world. The healed heal.

Nothing in all creation is so like God as silence. (Meister Eckhart)

Prayer is then not just a formula of words, or a series of desires springing up in the heart—it is the orientation of our whole body, mind and spirit to God in silence, attention, and adoration. All good meditative prayer is a conversion of our entire self to God. (Thomas Merton)

testimony is the most democratic—and empowering—of all Christian practices

How can a religion that speaks so eloquently of love so brutally destroy its questioners, its dissenters, its innovators, and its competitors?

Tutu explains that Africans believe “a person is a person through other persons.” Fundamental to our humanity is that “we are set in a delicate network of interdependence with our fellow human beings and with the rest of God’s creation.” Tutu says, “The truth is we need each other. We cannot survive and thrive without one another.”

The end is reconciliation, the end is redemption, the end is the creation of the beloved community. (Martin Luther King)

While fairness, equality, and human rights are very good things, they are also primarily secular ideals. As shocking as the discovery may be to many American Christians, that secular language is not found in the Bible or in the vast consensus of Christian tradition. Instead, those ideals emerged during the Enlightenment [...]

This is the foundation of worship. If you can take an hour on Sunday morning and open people to experiencing just a quarter-second of awe, wonder, and surrender you just experienced, it is accomplished.

the object of worship “is not to create anything.” Rather, he says, “the goal is simply to invite people into a sense of openness and attentiveness [...] Worship, Robinson concludes, needs to be an “experience of God,” rather than a “reflection about God.”

Every act of worship, no matter how private or public, how discreet or elaborate, enacts God’s dream for the world.

Worship is much more than something Christians attend on Sunday morning—it is something pilgrims make together.

For more than thirty years, mainline Protestants have fought bitterly about worship. Typically, the argument is about the use of “contemporary” versus “traditional” music, art, and liturgy in church. Yet, as I journeyed through the mainline, I observed that the particular style of music did not necessarily matter to congregational vitality.

Perhaps unexpectedly in this highly technological age, young adults may well have found their way back to an untapped stream of American theological mysticism. Postmodern and ancient at the same time, new and old, innovative and traditional.

As a California Presbyterian said bluntly about art, “It helps move people away from blind literalism” to what is “truly there.”

Through the arts, human beings embody God by imitating God’s creative life—shaping the clay of their experience with voices and hands. In that place, everything becomes new as we participate in God’s continual creation of the universe.

In the churches along my way, change was not gimmicky innovation in search of cultural relevance. Too often, churches think that if they add guitars to worship, put DVDs in Sunday school rooms, or open a food court in the foyer, new people will join. This kind of change smacks of market tinkering—adjusting the product to improve sales. In my journey, churches changed at a much deeper level and for different reasons.

“We don’t do things arbitrarily,” says one woman. “We adopt them as part of our community when it feeds the spirit. When things don’t work, we shed them.”

Because of their unique sense of identity, almost all the congregations expressed reservations about their larger denominational identity.

I had seen an almost entirely different political vision in the study congregations—a nearly wholesale rejection of the definition of politics as systemic change and policy platforms. In the congregations I visited, politics was being redefined as communal practices of service, grassroots social transformation that works “up” toward larger change.

“We come with our own national identity. And that’s okay. But as we gather as God’s people, we need to say that we are something else at least an hour out of the week. We are a liturgical people worshiping God more than a bunch of Americans.”

Some congregations along my way leaned toward being blue-purples (especially in urban areas and in the west); others, red-purples (especially in suburbs and in the south). None matched the media stereotype of Christian politics; none was a pure form of any political party. Like their Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, they are somewhat politically unpredictable and do not form a reliably unified voting block.

Lent is not about being sad, not some sort of spiritual penance. Rather, she insists, Lent is about change—the change that God can make in our selves, our faith communities, and the larger world. Lent is a time that opens our hearts to transformation, to becoming God’s people and doing that which God calls us to do.

Transformation is the promise at the heart of the Christian life.

Christianity for the rest of us is not about personal salvation, not about getting everybody else saved, or about the politics of exclusion and moral purity. Christianity for the rest of us is the promise of transformation—that, by God’s mercy, we can be different, our congregations can be different, and our world can be different.

Mainline renewal is, as one Lutheran pastor told me, “not rocket science.” As he said, “You preach the gospel, offer hospitality, and pay attention to worship and people’s spiritual lives. Frankly, you take Christianity seriously as a way of life.”

The Clicking of Cuthbert (P. G. Wodehouse)

I have absolutely no interest in golf, but P. G. Wodehouse is such a great writer, that i find this book surprisingly enjoyable. It consists of a series of short stories set in a golf club, where "The Oldest Member" explains the facts of life (or the facts of golf, which is more or less the same thing) to whatever young'un happens to be within earshot.

---

Quotes:

"No novelists any good except me. Sovietski--yah! Nastikoff--bah! I spit me of zem all. No novelists anywhere any good except me. P. G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad. Not good, but not bad. No novelists any good except me."

that is how it goes in this world. You get a following as a celebrity, and then you run up against another bigger celebrity and your admirers desert you. One could moralize on this at considerable length, but better not, perhaps

"And so," (concluded the Oldest Member), "you see that golf can be of the greatest practical assistance to a man in Life's struggle.

Love (says the Oldest Member) is an emotion which your true golfer should always treat with suspicion.

Few things draw two men together more surely than a mutual inability to master golf, coupled with an intense and ever-increasing love for the game.

They were real golfers, for real golf is a thing of the spirit, not of mere mechanical excellence of stroke.

Fate is a dramatist who gets his best effects with a small cast

All over the links, happy, laughing groups of children had broken out like a rash.

Golf, like measles, should be caught young, for, if postponed to riper years, the results may be serious.

Talking of danger, the time when things really did look a little nasty was when the wounded gongo cornered me in a narrow tongo and I only had a pocket-knife with everything in it broken except the corkscrew and the thing for taking stones out of horses' hoofs.

A lifetime of observing my fellow-creatures has convinced me that Nature intended us all to be golfers.

Their friendship ripened rapidly, as friendships do in the South of France. In that favoured clime, you find the girl and Nature does the rest.

Mary, will you be mine? Shall we go round together? Will you fix up a match with me on the links of life which shall end only when the Grim Reaper lays us both a stymie?

It was a pathetic, a tragic letter, the letter of a woman endeavouring to express all the anguish of a torn heart with one of those fountain-pens which suspend the flow of ink about twice in every three words.

From now on, we start level, two hearts that beat as one, two drivers that drive as one.

The ideal golfer never loses his temper. When I played, I never lost my temper. Sometimes, it is true, I may, after missing a shot, have broken my club across my knees; but I did it in a calm and judicial spirit, because the club was obviously no good and I was going to get another one anyway.

He had a great gift of language, and he used it unsparingly.

in one or two other matters, like the choice of a putter (so much more important than the choice of a wife), I had been of assistance to him.

"Keep the head still--slow back--don't press," I said, gravely. There is no better rule for a happy and successful life.

"The only way," I said to Alexander, "of really finding out a man's true character is to play golf with him. In no other walk of life does the cloven hoof so quickly display itself. I employed a lawyer for years, until one day I saw him kick his ball out of a heel-mark. I removed my business from his charge next morning. He has not yet run off with any trust-funds, but there is a nasty gleam in his eye, and I am convinced that it is only a question of time. Golf, my dear fellow, is the infallible test. The man who can go into a patch of rough alone, with the knowledge that only God is watching him, and play his ball where it lies, is the man who will serve you faithfully and well. The man who can smile bravely when his putt is diverted by one of those beastly wormcasts is pure gold right through. But the man who is hasty, unbalanced, and violent on the links will display the same qualities in the wider field of everyday life.

Rules are rules, my boy, and must be kept.

One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.

"Breakfast," said Rupert, firmly. "If you don't know what it is, I can teach you in half a minute. You play it with a pot of coffee, a knife and fork, and about a hundred-weight of scrambled eggs. Try it. It's a pastime that grows on you."

He was one of those men who marry early and often.

"What I want to know is what a fellow does when he plays golf. Tell me in as few words as you can just what it's all about." "You hit a ball with a stick till it falls into a hole."

The main difference, we are told, between the amateur and the professional golfer is the fact that the latter is always aiming at the pin, while the former has in his mind a vague picture of getting somewhere reasonably near it.

A young woman of singular beauty and rather statuesque appearance came out of the club-house carrying a baby swaddled in flannel. As she drew near the table she said to the baby: "Chicketty wicketty wicketty wipsey pop!" In other respects her intelligence appeared to be above the ordinary.

Golf humanizes women, humbles their haughty natures, tends, in short, to knock out of their systems a certain modicum of that superciliousness, that swank, which makes wooing a tough proposition for the diffident male.

Yes, in his twenty-ninth year, Ramsden Waters had sunk to the depth of becoming a secret golfer.

She did not speak at all apologetically, but rather as a goddess might have spoken to a swineherd.

Why, the very instant that Eunice appeared in the place, every eligible bachelor for miles around her tossed his head with a loud, snorting sound, and galloped madly in her direction.

women are women, and I doubt if any of them really take up golf in that holy, quest-of-the-grail spirit which animates men. I have known girls to become golfers as an excuse for wearing pink jumpers, and one at least who did it because she had read in the beauty hints in the evening paper that it made you lissome. Girls will be girls.

The mind of a man in love works in strange ways.

Men are as a rule idealists, and wish to keep their illusions regarding women intact, and it is difficult for the most broad-minded man to preserve a chivalrous veneration for the sex after a woman has repeatedly sliced into the rough and left him a difficult recovery. Women, too--I am not speaking of the occasional champions, but of the average woman, the one with the handicap of 33, who plays in high-heeled shoes--are apt to giggle when they foozle out of a perfect lie, and this makes for misogyny.

Their eyes met. Hers were glittering with the fury of a woman scorned. His were cold and hard. And, suddenly, as she looked at his awful, pale, set golf face, something seemed to snap in Eunice. A strange sensation of weakness and humility swept over her. So might the cave woman have felt when, with her back against a cliff and unable to dodge, she watched her suitor take his club in the interlocking grip, and, after a preliminary waggle, start his back swing.

Even as her driver rose above her shoulder she was acutely aware that she was making eighteen out of the twenty-three errors which complicate the drive at golf.

Finn Family Moomintroll (Tove Jansson)

Finn Family Moomintroll (original Swedish title Trollkarlens hatt, ‘The Magician's Hat’) is the third in the series of Tove Jansson's Moomins books, published in 1948. It owes its title in translation to the fact that it was the first Moomin book to be published in English, and was actually marketed as the first in the series until the 1980s. (Wikipedia)

A nice book, perhaps a gentler introduction to the world of the Moomins than "Coment in Moominland", but still, if you read "Comet" first, you get to know most of the main characters as Moomintroll did.

---

Quotes:

Far out to sea lay the Hattifatteners' Lonely Island, surrounded by reefs and breakers. (Once a year the Hattifatterners collect there before setting out again on their endless foraging expedition round the world. They come from all points of the compass, silent and serious with their small, white empty faces, and why they hold this yearly meeting it is difficult to say, as they can neither hear nor speak, and have no object in life but the distant goal of their journey's end. Perhaps they like to have a place where they feel at home and can rest a little and meet friends.)

Moomintroll was left alone on the bridge. He watched Snufkin grow smaller and smaller, and at last disappear among the silver poplars and the plum trees. But after a while he heard the mouth-organ playing "All small beasts should have bows in their tails," and then he knew that his friend was happy. He waited while the music grew fainter and fainter, till at last it was quite quiet, and then he trotted back through the dewy garden.