Translators From The United States

"I am God's Lion, not the lion of passion.... I have no longing except for the One. When a wind of personal reaction comes, I do not go along with it. There are many winds full of anger, and lust and greed. They move the rubbish around, but the solid mountain of our true nature stays where it's always been."

"Learn from Ali how to fight without your ego participating. God's lion did nothing that didn't originate from his deep center."

"The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said or did about the future. Forget the future. I'd worship someone who could do that."

"Lovers think they are looking for each other, but there is only one search: wandering This world is wandering that, both inside one transparent sky. In here there is no dogma and no heresy."

"There is no reality but God, says the completely surrendered sheik, who is an ocean for all beings."

"From Hallaj, I learned to hunt lions, but I became something hungrier than a lion."

"Disputational knowing wants customers. It has no soul."

"Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absent-minded. Someone sober will worry about events going badly. Let the lover be."

"The place that Solomon made to worship in, called the Far Mosque, is not built of earth and water and stone, but of intention and wisdom and mystical conversation and compassionate action."

"This dance is the joy of existence. I am filled with you. Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul. There's no room for lack of trust, or trust. Nothing in this existence but that existence."

"Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being."

"This heart sanctuary does exist, but it can't be described. Why try! Solomon goes there every morning and gives guidance with words, with musical harmonies, and in actions, which are the deepest teaching. A prince is just a conceit until he does something with generosity."

"All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there."

"Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul? I cannot stop asking. If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks. I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way. Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home."

"Here come the old original Thirteen! Sir Walter ushers in the Virgin Queen; Catholic Mary follows her, whose land Smiles on soft Chesapeake from either strand; Then Georgia, with the sisters Caroline,— One the palmetto wears, and one the pine; Next, she who ascertained the rights of men Not by the sword but by the word of Penn,— The friendly language hers, of "thee" and "thou"; Then, she whose mother was a thrifty vrouw,— Mother herself of princely children now; And, sitting at her feet, the sisters twain,— Two smaller links in the Atlantic chain, They, through those long dark winters, drear and dire, Watched with our Fabius round the bivouac fire; Comes the free mountain maid, in white and green; One guards the Charter Oak with lofty mien; And lo! in the plain beauty once she wore, The pilgrim mother from the Bay State shore; And last, not least, is Little Rhody seen, With face turned heavenward, steadfast and serene,— She on her anchor, Hope, leans, and will ever lean."

"Four hundred years ago the Bible of England was the . Few men could read it, and fewer women. For knowledge of it ordinary people were dependent upon the clergy, who were themselves none too well acquainted with its meaning. It was at such a time that a young Oxford man, William Tyndale, undertook the task of making a translation of the New Testament directly from the into the , and thus laid the foundation of the . The disfavor with which the medieval church regarded the circulation of the Bible among the people had found expression in a regulation of the , passed in 1229 , that no layman should be allowed to have any book of the Bible, especially in a translation, except perhaps the ."

"Devotion to the Bible remains an underappreciated aspect of American religious life partly because it fails to generate controversy. This essay opens a window onto America's relationship with the Bible by exploring a controversial moment in the : the public reception of professor Edgar J. Goodspeed's American Translation (1923). Initially, at least, most Americans flatly rejected Goodspeed's impeccably credentialed attempt to cast the language of the Bible in contemporary “American” English. Accusations of the professor's irreligion, bad taste, vulgarity, and crass modernity emerged from nearly every quarter of the Protestant establishment (with the exception of some card-carrying theological modernists), testifying to a widespread but unexplored attachment to the notion of a traditional Bible in the early twentieth century. By examining this barrage of reaction, “Monkeying with the Bible” argues that Protestants, along with some others in 1920s America, believed that traditional biblical language was among the forces that helped stabilize the development of American civilization."

"Not a few of the experienced times of , when in s they felt themselves in the very presence of God, heard him speak, and saw celestial realities."

"Have you subversive, out of date, Or controversial ideas?"

"Where are the beard, the bongo drums, Tattered T-shirt and grubby sandals, As who, released from Iowa, comes To tell of wondrous scandals?"

"Ah, what avails the tenure race, Ah, what the Ph.D., When all departments have a place For nincompoops like thee?"

"Is it, then, your opinion Women are putty in your hands? Is this the face to launch upon A thousand one night stands?"

"You still whispered you would not die. Yet the nights I heard you cry Like a whipped child;"

"Where, where is the long, flowing hair, The velvet suit, the broad bow tie; Where is the other-worldly air, Where the abstracted eye?"

"I happened to find Your picture. That picture. I stopped there cold, Like a man raking piles of dead leaves in his yard Who has turned up a severed hand."

"—All this Dark Age machinery On which we had tormented you To life."

"You must call up every strength you own And you can rip off the whole facial mask."

"Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives, We shall afford our costly seasons; There is a gentleness survives That will outspeak and has its reasons. There is a loveliness exists, Preserves us, not for specialists."

"I taught myself to name my name, To bark back, loosen love and crying; To ease my woman so she came, To ease an old man who was dying."

"—Before we drained out one another’s force With lies, self-denial, unspoken regret And the sick eyes that blame; before the divorce And the treachery. Say it: before we met. Still, I put back your picture. Someday, in due course, I will find that it’s still there."

"You seem to be all finished, so We'll plug your old recalcitrant anus And tie up your discouraged penis In a great, snow-white bow of gauze."

"After experience taught me that all the ordinary Surroundings of social life are futile and vain;"

"It was the nature of the thing: No moon outlives its leaving night, No sun its day. And I went on Rich in the loss of all I sing To the threshold of waking light, To larksong and the live, gray dawn. So night by night, my life has gone."

"In darkness and in hedges I sang my sour tone and all my love was howling conspicuously alone."

"They wear their godhead lightly. They look out from their hill and say, To themselves, "We have nowhere to go but down; The great destination is to stay.""

"I have not learned how often I Can win, can love, but choose to die."

"Up the reputable walks of old established trees They stalk, children of the nouveaux riches; chimes Of the tall Clock Tower drench their heads in blessing."

"The sleek, expensive girls I teach, Younger and pinker every year, Bloom gradually out of reach."

"Riot in Algeria, in Cyprus, in Alabama; Aged in wrong, the empires are declining, And China gathers, soundlessly, like evidence. What shall I say to the young on such a morning?— Mind is the one salvation?—also grammar?— No; my little ones lean not toward revolt."

"And you, whiner, who wastes your time Dawdling over the remorseless earth, What evil, what unspeakable crime Have you made your life worth?"

"I haven't read one book about A book or memorized one plot. Or found a mind I did not doubt. I learned one date. And then forgot. And one by one the solid scholars Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars."

"Contradiction constitutes the diabolical. ... The diabolical presents as essential what it simultaneously denies or renders impossible, so that we could say that it is the very essence of the diabolical, ontologically considered, to make "empty promises." The diabolical proffers an object of desire while at the same time undermining the conditions under which that object could be attained in actuality. It is not only perverse; it is perversity itself, because its turning toward what is other than itself is in fact nothing more than a turning toward itself. This is what we have meant by saying that it points in two directions at the same time: δια-βάλλω. The essential per-versity of the diabolical comes perhaps most intensely to light in the fact that it is, so to speak, precisely the nature of the diabolical to present just itself as the solution to the problem that it itself generates."

"Nietzsche represents an attempt to recover the "self-diffusiveness" of the good in spite of the good itself, because the good itself cannot be separated from the Christian Neoplatonic tradition that lies at the roots of Western civilization. He thus ends up, as Heidegger has compellingly shown, with an emptiness of the will to power, sheer willing, which does not overcome modernity but rather consummates it."

"We will not pursue the question here about ... whether it is in fact possible to find some objective standard for judgments of taste once one has interpreted beauty essentially as an event in the brain. Indeed, if beauty is nothing more than a subjective feeling of pleasure, which occurs under certain conditions, then the question concerning objective standards loses any real urgency. It seems to me that, if the question was still posed with such zeal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is due to a lingering sense that beauty is in fact something important, more than the mere turning of a screw in our mental machinery. If this is true, then the fact that people today seem less inclined to fight about judgments of taste, and show little interest in persuading others about what is beautiful, or learning to make good judgments, educating and forming their tastes, is something that should cause us great alarm. Our alarm ought to grow exponentially if it is in fact true that the way we experience and interpret beauty reveals an understanding of or disposition towards reality in general. In this case, to lose a sense of beauty's connection to reality is, I suggest, to lose a sense of the reality of reality tout court."

"Because man has no relationship with anything—other people, the world, God—that is not mediated at some level through the will, a reinterpretation of the meaning of the will and its freedom will inevitably be what Nietzsche called a "revaluation of all values." What is at issue is not simply a new hierarchy of values, a replacement of higher values by things previously held in lower esteem, but indeed a transformation of what it means to value and be valuable tout court, ... a transformation of the meaning of goodness and its principal mode of manifestation. It has been said that Darwin's late modern interpretation of evolution stands as a "universal acid": the inner logic of his idea eats away at all other traditional ideas, not only on the biological level but also on all levels of human existence; it dissolves everything in its wake. One might say that the notion of modern liberty we are discussing is even more radical and therefore more subtle in its effects. It is not so much an acid as a sort of alchemical reagent. Instead of dissolving things, it leaves them standing, but eliminates their original essence, their native goodness, transforming realities into gold—that is, a conventional representation of value without any organic relation to its own given nature. There is nothing at all left untouched by this transformation."

"This is the heart of the diabolical: an image that is not an image, but presents itself as the real thing—indeed, in a certain sense, as better than the real thing precisely because of the immediacy or the lack of transcendence that the dissemblance implies."

"Ours is a decidedly non-philosophical, even anti-philosophical, age. This is not to say that we lack "philosophers," of a certain sort; indeed, we have only too many. ... While it may be the case that our age is more cerebral, more abstract, more preoccupied with brain power, with intellectual capacities and skills, than any other age in history, it remains true that we are not philosophical. Indeed, our very abstraction and preoccupation with intelligence is a sign of the "forgetfulness" of philosophy."

"Instead of enjoyment, there is labor, instead of goods, there are uses, instead of substance, we have property, instead of property, we have money, instead of bonds, we have boundaries, instead of connection, we have contract, instead of order, we have regulation, and so forth. Locke's political theory represents a conquest of the ordering principle of human life, which then allows that principle to retain its rule only if it changes its meaning."

"It is perhaps not an accident that stories often end with a marriage, since this provides a specifically dramatic conclusion that serves to gather together the infinite opposition of personalities into a single form. The fact that those who marry in so many traditional fairy tales disappear from the narrative into an implicit "happily ever after" perhaps betrays a sense deeply rooted in human culture that freedom and form belong together."

"Locke does not deny the existence of God or the truth of religion; indeed, he affirms these as indispensable, to the extent that atheists have to be excluded from toleration. What Locke does deny, ... is the actuality ... of any concrete, historical form that religion might take. But of course a religion cannot exist except concretely in history. If a religion, which means the effective manifestation of ultimate meaning, exists concretely in history, it necessarily makes a claim on me prior to my act of will, because it makes a claim on everything without exception. To recognize this claim is to see that actuality precedes potency, and if this is true ultimately, it will be true, so to speak, all the way down. And this will mean that freedom will necessarily have to be interpreted as sharing in actuality, a response to the good that precedes me and makes my choice of it possible; the actualizing of the will in this case comes to mean being brought into an actual world, a tradition, and a hierarchy of goods. Actual religion is therefore incompatible with an interpretation of freedom primarily as active power. Locke can affirm freedom as power only by transforming at the same time the status of religion. It can no longer be a single truth that precedes political agents, but it has to become an array of possibilities, any one of which individuals are free to accept, at least within the constraints of political order. Within these constraints, I am permitted to affirm any religion as true, and practice it thus in public, as long as I recognize that this has a new meaning that would strike an ancient thinker as confusing, if not simply confused: it is true "for me." Notice that the potentializing of religion in this way allows one to neutralize the implications of the existence of God without having to shoulder the burden of responsibility that would come with rejecting God outright. In short, the precondition for the emergence of the modern concept of freedom is not the denial of God, but the denial of his actual self-revelation in history. Modern liberty, at its core, is a rejection specifically of the incarnation, God's coming in the flesh."