How sad our state by nature is!

by Isaac Watts

How sad our state by nature is!
Our sin, how deep it stains!
And Satan binds our captive souls
Fast in his slavish chains.

But hark! a voice of sovereign grace
Sounds from the sacred Word;
'Ho, ye despairing sinners, come,
And trust upon the Lord!'

My soul obeys the Almighty's call,
And runs to this relief;
I would believe Thy promise, Lord;
O help my unbelief!

To the blest fountain of Thy blood,
Incarnate God, I fly;
Here let me wash my spotted soul
From sins of deepest dye.

Stretch out Thine arm, victorious King,
My reigning sins subdue,
Drive the old Dragon from his seat,
With all his hellish crew.

A guilty, weak, and helpless worm,
Into Thy hands I fall;
Be Thou my strength and righteousness,
My Savior, and my all.

from Manhattan

by Woody Allen

Chapter one. He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion.

Uh, no. Make that: He romanticized it all out of proportion. Better.

To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.

Uh... no. Let me start this over.

Chapter one. He was too romantic about Manhattan, as he was about everything else. He thrived on the hustle-bustle of the crowds and the traffic. To him, New York meant beautiful women and street-smart guys who seemed to know all the angles.

Ah no, corny. Too corny for a man of my taste. Let me try and make it more profound.

Chapter one. He adored New York City. To him, it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity that caused so many people to take the easy way out was rapidly turning the town of his dreams...

No, it's gonna be too preachy. I mean, you know, let's face it, I want to sell some books here.

Chapter one. He adored New York City, although to him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. How hard it was to exist in a society desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage...

Too angry. I don't wanna be angry.

Chapter one. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat.

I love this.

New York was his town and it always would be.

Lay My Burden Down

by Aoife O'Donovan

Going to lay my burden down
Lay my body in the ground
Cold clay against my skin
I don't care at all

Can't seem to find my piece of mind
So with the earth I'll lay entwined
Six feet underground
My feet are warm and dry

When I get to the other side
I'll put your picture way up high
But I'm not coming back to you
It's just too far
It's just too far

If I was cast out on the sea
Would you come and look for me
Or would you just let me sink
Beneath the waves so blue

What if I had learned to fly
I'd fly all night till day drew nigh
I'd perch down upon a branch
And scan the crowd for you

When I touch my feet on the land
I'll kiss your face and take your hands
But you know I'm not here to stay
It's just too far

Can't you hear me cry?
My bones are broke, my tongue is tied
The moon is swaying back and forth
Against the navy sky
It's all that I can see
My body's trembling on my knees
Have a little mercy on me
Run away and hide

When I sleep the angels sing
But I cannot hear a thing
Eyes closed
Dreaming of the better days gone by

When I wake the trumpets play
And I'm standing at the gates
Fall down in joy
I know my race has just been run

When I was young my mom would say
Life is hard, but that's okay
If you can make it through the day
It's not that far
No, it's not that far

from Ulysses

by James Joyce

What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigree: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Major) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of alloted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?

Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds, of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa: of the incalculable trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single pinhead: of the universe of human serum constallated with red and white bodies, themselves universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.

Why did he not elaborate these calculations to a more precise result?

Because some years previously in 1886 when occupied with the problem of the quadrature of the circle he had learned of the existence of a number computed to a relative degree of accuracy to be of such magnitude and of so many places, e.g., the 9th power of the 9th power of 9, that, the result having been obtained, 33 closely printed volumes of 1000 pages each of innumerable quires and reams of India paper would have to be requisitioned in order to contain the complete tale of its printed integers of units, tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, billions, the nucleus of the nebula of every digit of every series containing succinctly the potentiality of being raised to the utmost kinetic elaboration of any power of any of its powers.

Sad and Deep As You

by Dave Mason

Lips that are as warm could be
Lips that speak too soon
Lips that tell a story
Sad and deep as you

Smile that's warm as summer sun
Smile that gets you through
Smile that tells a story
Sad and deep you

Eyes that are the windows
Eyes that are the dew
Eyes that tell a story
Sad and deep as you

Tears that are unspoken words
Tears that are the truth
Tears that tell a story
Sad and deep as you

Shadow of the Sun

by Paul Weller

Do you still feel the same way about it?
Like you always said you would
Or has time rewritten everything?
Like you never dreamt it could

Remember when we wanted to fly forever
On a magic carpet ride
Forever seems a long time
Cutting us down in size
No matter how hard we try

I could see all I had done
Just chasing dreams across the fields
In the shadow of the sun
I plan to have it all while I'm still young
And chase the fields across my dreams
In the shadow of the sun

Once upon a time I might have told you
But now nothing seems that plain
However much we're changing
There are some things the same
And those same things still say

I could see all I had done
Just chasing dreams across the fields
In the shadow of the sun
I plan to have it all while I'm still young
And chase the fields across my dreams
In the shadow of the sun