The timeless waves, bright, sifting, broken glass,
Came dazzling around, into the rocks,
Came glinting, sifting from the Americas

To possess Aran. Or did Aran rush
to throw wide arms of rock around a tide
That yielded with an ebb, with a soft crash?

Did sea define the land or land the sea?
Each drew new meaning from the waves' collision.
Sea broke on land to full identity.
-Seamus Heaney, "Lovers on Aran"

A Dubliner in celebration of my upcoming fall! We are only truly defined by our relationships with others; however, the mere existence of these relationships only goes so far. Like the Indigo Girls sing, "We're better off for all that we let in" -- let others affect us as much as we do them.

"may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile"
-e. e. cummings, c. 1938

This poem means more to me every time I read it. Sometimes I think cummings writes just for the sake of putting words on paper, but this poem offers us a little glimpse of his genius. I couldn't pick just a line or two because every line works so well with the next. On the threshold of aging, cummings fears replacing his lust for life and nature with drab intellect: "whenever men are right they are not young".

Youth, being "open to the little birds who are the secrets of living," is a life of inquisition, hunger for experience over impersonal information. To him, age is just a number; as long as we're never satisfied by sitting inside, we will always remain young.

"These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius."
-Michael Cunningham, The Hours, p. 18

This line is just plain beautiful. Where Cunningham could add subtle symbolism to his meditation, he instead says exactly what he means, and what I think we all need to hear.

What if we all gave up the academic discourse for a simple "How are you" or "It's nice to see you"? As much as I love reading, it saddens me when people constantly try to impress each other at cocktail parties with esoteric fluff. It takes far less energy, simply, to be a caring person. Let's take a lesson from this gifted writer and go out of our ways to be thoughtful and compassionate every day. Maybe we can even bring the beauty of literature to real life.

"La belleza es tu cabeza"
("The beauty is your mind")
-Graffiti across Spain, 2008

Just one of the reason Spaniards are great is that even the graffiti is uplifting. Instead of covering their storefronts and park benches with obscenities and gang signs, one common phrase I saw painted across the walls of Barcelona was this:



¡Qué fantástico! Inspirational graffiti! Translated, the phrase means, "The beauty is your mind". What a wonderful reminder of the power of our intellect.



In a city so fashion-forward and image-conscious as Barcelona, seeing this free-spirited every day as I walked to the Metro reminded me that Prada riding boots weren't all it took to succeed.

"I prefer men to cauliflowers."
-Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, p. 1

When I first read this line, I laughed out loud, having just returned from a term in Barcelona living with a woman who considered a plate of unsalted, steamed cauliflower an acceptable dinner.

What always amazes me about Woolf is the incredible clarity in her sentences, even within her sometimes difficult style. We get pages-long paragraphs about seashores and dreams, and then little gems like this pop up. After all, who wouldn't prefer men to cauliflowers? From the mouth of Peter Walsh, humans are far more compelling than strangely-shaped vegetables. From Woolf's own perspective, studying men and women through her writing is far more intense and terrifying than gardening, far spicier than a plate of cauliflower. After all, writing gives us an entry into the psyche, the far reaches of the mind -- a place more daunting than the most overgrown of gardens.

I've been collecting lines from books and poems for as long as I can remember. They're shoved away everywhere, in the pages of notebooks, underneath my mattress, behind photos in frames. I even have one tattooed on my back. This blog is a natural outgrowth of my Linesofbeauty Twitter account, for those passages that last more than 140 characters.

When a shiver and a smile aren't enough, there's also plenty of space here for analysis. I'd love to hear your comments on what each of these passages means to you. The purpose of art, after all, is to learn something new about ourselves.

I'd also like some space to test out turns of phrases that I came up with myself. The link comes from a story I recently completed. I'm a creative writing major at a university that masquerades as a liberal arts college, and I'd love a new forum in which to collect inspirations.

Enjoy!