When I was a student, in the days before I had covered my walls with art, I used to decorate with words. I would take those cheap 8.5 x 11 frames you could buy at the grocery store, and fill them with nicely formatted blocks of text–poems, quotes, things like that. I’ve always liked to be challenged by art, and that was a very easy and cheap way to do so.
Some of the pieces were things took me to other places, some were sweet and sad, some played into my hopelessly Romantic streak, and some of them… well, they were there to remind me of where I wanted to go, and who I wanted to be. Chief among these were the Santayana bit I’ve quoted here a couple of times, and this:
To live content with small means.
To seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion.
To be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich.
To study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly.
To listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart.
To bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never.
In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common.
This is to be my symphony.—William Henry Channing
This formatting, rather than the more common single paragraph reproduction, taken from the layout in A Personal Book Of Poems which you can search on Google Books.
Every day I fail to live up to this in some way. But I’m all about process, so that’s OK. It’s good to have a goal, like the man said up in the title
