Hughlings Himwich

Undoing

What rules life is the next thing to be done, death being only the last, wherein every breath is a labor. So we have our marching orders, but who says we must obey. There are glimpses of something else in dreams and song, in love and inspiration. Such things help us through the night, but day comes and reminds us of what is real and of the next thing to be done. But what is more real: this sunlit world or that which makes it possible that there is any world or light at all? And what is that but that same activity of mind that gives rise to dreams and song and to the self that ever longs to return to its source and is ever thrown back? It is not that the world is an illusion; rather, it is that we mistakenly live in the world as if it exists as it does independently of our engagement with it. Dreams, songs, love, inspiration, all the activities of mind, weave themselves into the fabric of things and give it form, color and meaning. It turns out that what rules life is not the next thing to be done but the right thing, the true and beautiful thing to be done. In dying nothing is to be done; it is the undoing the self has earnestly longed for in all its virtue, all its beauty and all its truth.

Fragment 1

There are lemons in the apple tree.   

(From a former student of mine at Casady School in Oklahoma City, whose name I have sadly forgotten. He wrote this as one of his fragments for a newly discovered presocratic philosopher. After more than 25 years, the fragment stills enchants me.)