Commonplace Book

Steven Callahan, lost at sea in The Rubber Ducky 3 "In these moments of peace, deprivation seems a strange sort of gift. I find food in a couple of hours of fishing each day, and I seek shelter in a rubber tent. How unnecessarily complicated my past life seems. For the first time, I clearly see a vast difference between human needs and human wants. Before this voyage, I always had what I needed - food, shelter, clothing, and companionship - yet I was often dissatisfied when I didn't get everything I wanted, when people didn't meet my expectations, when a goal was thwarted, or when I couldn't aquire some material goody. My plight has given me a strange kind of wealth, the most important kind.I value each moment that is not spent in pain, desperation, hunger, thirst, or loneliness. Even here, there is richness all around me. As I look out of the raft, I see God's face in the smooth waves. His grace in the dorado's swim, feel His breath against...

Adriano Farinella "More often I looked upwards at the great cathedral piles of clouds that passed along the winter sky, extravagant and erring shapes radiantly rimmed or quite ensilvered by the sun. Once, a broad shaft of light, let out from the clouds, beamed down upon the distant land. It lit up the ground on which it fell and slowly moved from field to field, from hedge to hedge, as if looking for something - like a great searchlight reversed. Then it went out suddenly, as if switched off. The clouds above increased in splendour. ...Clouds are water, and they have weight - we know that much. Then why do they not sink to the ground? They should be continually falling at our feet. Yet they stay up there, though they are not supported from below nor held from above...Another question. How is it that clouds are so complete, so sharp in their outline? We look up into the sky and see these chiselled leviathans swimming through the ocean of air at the bottom of which we ...