A Cup of Tea
by Katherine Mansfield
Rosemary Fell was not exactly beautiful. No, you couldn't have called
her beautiful. Pretty? Well, if you took her to pieces.... But why be so
cruel as to take anyone to pieces? She was young, brilliant, extremely modern,
exquisitely well dressed, amazingly well read in the newest of the new books,
and her parties were the most delicious mixture of the really important
people and... artists--quaint creatures, discoveries of hers, some of them
too terrifying for words, but others quite presentable and amusing.
Rosemary had been married two years. She had a duck of a boy. No, not
Peter--Michael. And her husband absolutely adored her. They were rich, really
rich, not just comfortably well off, which is odious and stuffy and sounds
like one's grandparents. But if Rosemary wanted to shop she would go to Paris
as you and I would go to Bond Street. If she wanted to buy flowers, the car
pulled up at that perfect shop in Regent Street, and Rosemary inside the shop
just gazed in her dazzled, rather exotic way, and said: 'I want those and
those and those. Give me four bunches of those. And that jar of roses. Yes,
I'll have all the roses in the far. No, no lilac. I hate lilac. It's got no
shape.' The attendant bowed and put the lilac out of sight, as though this
was only too true; lilac was dreadfully shapeless. 'Give me those stumpy
little tulips. Those red and white ones.' And she was followed to the car by
a thin shop-girl staggering under an immense white paper armful that looked like
a baby in long clothes....
One winter afternoon she had been buying something in a little antique
shop in Curzon Street. It was a shop she liked. For one thing, one usually
had it to oneself. And then the man who kept it was ridiculously fond of serving
her. He beamed whenever she came in. He clasped his hands; he was so
gratified he could scarcely speak. Flattery, of course. AIl the same, there
was something...
'You see, madam,' he would explain in his low respectful tones, 'I love
my things. I would rather not part with them than sell them to someone who
does not appreciate them, who has not that fine feeling which is so rare....'
And, breathing deeply, he unrolled a tiny square of blue velvet and pressed
it on the glass counter with his pale finger-tips.
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Death
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
- William Blake
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Life
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me
as good belongs to you.
- Walt Whitman
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Hope
"Hope" is the thing with
feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all,
- Emily Dickinson,
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Love's gift cannot be given,
it waits to be accepted.
Let
me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Rabindranath Tagore
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Songs
of Experience
O Love, O pure deep Love, be here, be
now,
Be all – worlds dissolve into your
stainless endless radiance,
Frail living leaves burn with your brighter
than cold stares –
Make me your servant, your breath, your core.
William Blake |
Gitanjali
In desperate hope I go and search for her
in all the corners of
my room; I find her not.
My house is small and what once has gone
from it can never be
regained.
But infinite is thy mansion, my lord, and
seeking her I have to
come to thy door.
I stand under the golden canopy of thine
evening sky and I lift
my eager eyes to thy face.
I have come to the brink of eternity from
which nothing can
vanish--no hope, no happiness, no vision of a face seen through
tears.
Oh, dip my emptied life into that ocean,
plunge it into the
deepest fullness. Let me for once feel that lost sweet touch in
the allness of the universe.
Rabindranath Tagore
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Love
Is never afraid
Of fear.
Fear
Is always afraid
Of love
No destruction-fear
In oneness-love.
No oneness-love
In destruction-fear.
Fear beckons danger.
Fear is self-enslavement.
Fear is the eternal loser.
Fear is helplessly founded upon stupidity.
Fear secretly travels with the mind and openly travels with the body.
Because you fear, God the Satisfaction does not hear you and God the
Perfection does not near you.
If fear knows how to grow quickly, then love knows how to glow
soulfully, convincingly and perfectly.
by: Sri Chinmoy
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If
I speak in the tongues of men and angels,
but have not love,
I have become sounding brass or a tinkling symbol.
And
if I have prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains,
but have not love, I am nothing.
And
if I dole out all my goods, and
if I deliver my body that I may boast
but have not love, nothing I am profited.
Love
is long suffering,
love is kind,
it is not jealous,
love does not boast,
it is not inflated.
It
is not discourteous,
it is not selfish,
it is not irritable,
it does not enumerate the evil.
It does not rejoice over the wrong, but rejoices in the truth
Sri Aurobindo |
Hope
Hope abides; therefore I abide.
Countless frustrations have not cowed me.
I am still alive, vibrant with life.
The black cloud will disappear,
The morning sun will appear once again
In all its supernal glory.
Sri Chinmoy
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