The Best Thing I Read This Week Is …

isakdinesenquote
Photo by Todd Hido

… from “The Monkey” in Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales:

The real difference between God and human beings, he thought, was that God cannot stand continuance. No sooner has he created a season of a year, or a time of the day, than he wishes for something quite different, and sweeps it all away. No sooner was one a young man, and happy at that, than the nature of things would rush one into marriage, martyrdom, or old age. And human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment fast, and are up against a force majeure. Their art itself is nothing but the attempt to catch by all means the one particular moment, one mood, one light, the momentary beauty of one woman or one flower, and make it everlasting. It is all wrong, he thought, to imagine paradise as a never-changing state of bliss. It will probably, on the contrary, turn out to be, in the true spirit of God, an incessant up and down, a whirlpool of change. Only you may yourself, by that time, have become one with God, and have taken to liking it.

(via The Dish)

2 thoughts on “The Best Thing I Read This Week Is …

  1. Thanks for your recent likes on my art. I just found Isak Dinesen’s book Winter Tales in a thrift store and have been reading it. It’s interesting that we would be reading the same obscure author at the same time.

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    1. I like your art work a lot and enjoy seeing it in my reader.
      I’m not reading Dinesen’s book. I just read that excerpt online and loved it…I may read something of her’s in the future.

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