January 2012
38 posts
Matt Bomer (White Collar’s Neal Caffrey) reading Lord Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty”
Anyway, in the end, I don’t really believe in Heaven at all, and I don’t believe in perfect angels. I think that this might be the only Heaven there can possibly be, the world we live in now, but we haven’t quite realized it yet. And I think that the only possible angels might be us. THIS MIGHT BE HEAVEN! WE MIGHT BE LIVING IN HEAVEN RIGHT NOW! AND WE MIGHT BE THE ANGELS!
Is that stupid? No, it’s not! Look at the blackbird, the way the sunlight glistens on it. Look at the way it shimmers, the way its blackness glints with silver, purple, green, and even white beneath the sun. Listen to its song. Look at the way it jumps into the sky. Look how the leaves are coming out from the buds. Feel how strong the tree is and feel the beat of my heart and the sun on my skin and the air on my cheek. Think of the things like the human voice, the solar system, the fur of a cat, the sea, bananas, a duck-billed platypus. Look at the things that we’ve made: houses and pavements and walls and steeples and roads and cars and songs and poems, and yes I know that it’s a long long way from being perfect. But perfection would be very dull and perfection isn’t the point.
!PERFECTION IS BORING! !PERFECTION IS EMPTY! !PERFECTION IS NOTHINGNESS!
Look at the world. Smell it, taste it, listen to it, feel it, look at it. Look at it! And I know horrible things happen for no good reason. Why did my dad die? What the point of famine and fear and darkness and war? I don’t know! I’m just a kid! How can I know answers to things like that? But this horrible world is so blooming beautiful and so blooming weird that sometimes I think it’ll make me faint!
JUST LOOK AT THE MINDBLOWING LIPSMACKING WONDERFUL AMAZING BEAUTIFUL STUNNING MARVELLOUS GORGEOUS LOVELY LOVELINESS OF OUR WORLD!” —David Almond, My Name is Mina
here’s to opening and upward, to leaf and to sap
and to your (in my arms flowering so new)
self whose eyes smell of the sound of rain
and here’s to silent certainly mountainside; and to
a disappearing poet of always, snow
and to morning; and to morning’s beautiful friend
twilight (and a first dream called ocean) and
let must or if be dammed with whomever’s afraid
down with ought with because with every brain
which thinks it thinks, nor dares to feel (but up
with joy; and up with laughing and drunkenness)
here’s to one undiscoverable guess
of whose skill each world of blood is made
(whose fatal songs are moving in the moon
“Ode to the Sea” by Pablo Neruda
Read by Ralph Fiennes