A Jean Toomer Reader, Selected Unpublished Writings
“Life, human life, we must use, but its use should be accompanied by dimensional transformation.”
“Without denying a single element in me, with no desire to subdue one to the other, I have sought to let them function as complements. I have tried to let them live in harmony.”
“It may be begging hunger to say that I am staking my life on my work. So be it. The mould is cast, and I cannot turn back even if I would.”
“Peace, an active repose rests on this valley, wells up from it as dawn and twilight rise up from horizons. When bands of cloud hang over it or drift slowly like great airships, the scene is magical. Particularly is it so if looked down upon from a mountain top when the sun rises and strikes these clouds, causing them to lift, turning them to mist and iridescence.”
“Be with us always, earth
Let us not fall below,
But hold our wingless feet
As they rest upon you.”
“Music is an almost instantaneous evocator of inner-experiences not being had, not being thought of as possible, until the music begins.
Add music, and you can instantly transport yourself, Through inner-experience, into a different world…What man, full of song, wants to keep it to himself? There are no misers in music. There are no misers anywhere in the inner-world. Inner fullness must overflow, by the same law which governs the out-pourings of birds, reservoirs, and rivers.”
“The earth, just as it is, is sufficiently wonderful. If with even partially opened eyes we view its lands and waters and the things growing from the soil we have reason to feel that the earth is enough. Heaven and earth, I surmise, are already married. It is our world, the world we have built apart from Nature, apart from our own true natures, apart from the radiant reality which some call God-it is this so-called human world that is,in large spots, in large blots, so drab, so ugly, so malicious, so unfit for life. It is this world and its wars and wastes, its depotisms, its organized enslavement of people, its propagated prejudices and hates, that ravage the earth and mutilate men. Anyone who fits into it dies as a man. Anyone who merely seeks to escape from it dies as a man. But to know that one does not and will never fit into it as it is, is a sign that the man still lives. And those who live work for change, growth, transformation. They create.”
Filed under: Mystic, Unpublished writings
