To be able to love material things, to clothe them with tender grace, and yet not be attached to them, this is a great service. Providence expects that we should make this world our own, and not lie in it as though it were a rented tenement. We can only make it our own through some service, and that service is to lend it love and beauty from our soul. Your own experience shows you the difference between the beautiful, the tender, the hospitable, and the mechanically neat and monotonously useful. Gross utility kills beauty. We now have all over the world huge productions of things, huge organizations, huge administrations of empire–all obstructing the path of life. Civilization is waiting for a great consummation, for an expression of its soul in beauty. This must be your contribution to the world.
~ from A TAGORE READER ed. by Amiya Chakravarty, as reprinted in AN ALMANAC FOR THE SOUL by Marv and Nancy Hiles
Of all the world's errors, Dr. Paul felt the most fundamental was the "erasing" of people, "the hiding away" of suffering. "My big struggle is how people can not care, not remember." I had wondered if there was room in his philosophy for anyone but the world's poor and people who campaigned on behalf of the poor...Embracing a continuity and interconnectedness that excluded no one seemed like another of Farmer's peculiar liberties. It came with a lot of burdens, yet it also freed him from the efforts that many people make to find refuge and distinction from their pasts, and from the mass of other human beings.
