Spirituality/Spiritbookword: the breath of the word in the book. I jumped up and down like a four-year-old.Hallelujah! I had found my word. I could now look for spiritbookwords in others. * J.S. Porter, essayist, coining a word to refer to his sense that the spirit inhabits the script of the word that is bound and unbound in the book, Spirit Book Word: An Inquiry into Literature and Spirituality (2001).+
Sleep/Maybe I still harbour the child's fear that, if he closes his eyelids, the lids may not open again. Maybe I have an agitated mind. Maybe in the wiring of the electric city, no one sleeps any more. I just know that, on too many nights, sleep is as hard come by as apples in the Congo.*J.S. Porter, essayist, "Facts and Arguments," The Globe and Mail, 22 Oct. 1999.+
Sleep/One side benefit of sleeplessness, though, is an ever-expanding sympathy for all those with problematic eyelids, those who greet the dawn red-eyed and bagged, those whose turbulent psyches will not allow them prolonged rest. I've learned to look with kindness on tossers and turners, and on all those in twenty-four-hour coffee shops still defying dawn.*J.S. Porter, essayist, "Facts and Arguments," The Globe and Mail, 22 Oct. 1999.+
Sleeplessness/The angel and the gypsy have no trouble sleeping; they've successfully "gone over." Why can't I?*J.S. Porter, essayist, "Facts and Arguments," The Globe and Mail, 22 Oct. 1999.+
Sleeplessness/There's a kind of brotherhood of the sleepless, a fraternity not based on merit or crime, but on a shared affliction. There's a special kingdom for those, like fish, whose eyes seldom close, who want to keep on seeing even when the lights have gone out.*J.S. Porter, essayist, "Facts and Arguments," The Globe and Mail, 22 Oct. 1999.+
Prayer/Prayer is the fundamental human posture: the posture of unknowingness, of uncertainty, of nakedness. It is also our natural response to the universe." J.S. Porter, essayist, Thomas Merton: Hermit at the Heart of Things (2008).+
Language/I am polyglot \ not sure which language is native \ which country is home \ and all my skins are itchy*Lines from J.S. Porter's poem in The Thomas Merton Poems quoted in Thomas Merton: Hermit at the Heart of Things (2008).+
Mystery/If you withdraw the sky from human consciousness, the earth withers. If you remove the possibility of the transcendent in human affairs, the arts - the means by which we express what it is to be human in a particular time and place - wobble and topple. Earth needs heaven for its vision, and heaven needs earth for its articulation. Awe and reverence and mystery are necessary blood vessels in the fully formed human heart.*J.S. Porter, essayist, The Glass Art of Sarah Hall (2011).+
Paper/The paper that you hold in your hand comes from the sun and the clouds and the rain, it comes from soil and trees and workers and pulp mills, and it comes from printers and assemblers and bookstores. Take any one element from the equation--take away the sun and rain to spur the growth of the tree--and you hold nothing in your hand.*J.S. Porter, essayist, The Glass Art of Sarah Hall (2011).+
Spirituality/How does one renew the power of the spiritual in our time? How does one find a place for silence in our daily noise, or a place of solitude in our daily crowdedness? Can the invisible be seen and heard? Are Sarah Hall's windows catalysts for prayer? Experiencing the holy doesn't necessarily mean that one sees it directly or proclaims it boisterously. The Hebrew tradition restrains speech and restricts imaging of the divine. The great mystery of life is not contained by human calculations.*J.S. Porter, essayist, The Glass Art of Sarah Hall (2011).+
Reading/I remember writers the way some remember love affairs. I remember the genealogy of my reading the way the Bible remembers who begets whom.*J.S. Porter, essayist, Spirit Book Word: An Inquiry into Literature and Spirituality (2001).+
Books/I come to a book shyly, as I would a temple. I open it as I would a snake-basket. I'm not sure of the exact nature of the reptile, but I know it might be dangerous, even lethal. I wait expectantly, patiently, for the bite. I pray that it may be life-altering.*J.S. Porter, essayist, Spirit Book Word: An Inquiry into Literature and Spirituality (2001).+
Literature/When you're reading a good story or poem, you're in a storm. Dangerous things can happen. You're in a soulstorm, the Brazilian storyteller Clarice Lispector's translated phrase. Literature, writ large or small, consists of soulstroms. To read is to stand in a storm.*J.S. Porter, essayist, Spirit Book Word: An Inquiry into Literature and Spirituality (2001).+
Words/It matters that certain words may fall off the language-band, that we may be entering a new Orwellian newspeak in which the only real words are the ones that don't look out of place on a computer screen.*J.S. Porter, essayist, Spirit Book Word: An Inquiry into Literature and Spirituality (2001).+
Spirit/I go on then with the faith that the Spirit moves mysteriously; it can straddle a computer chip as it can ride a robin. I go on with the Heideggerian conviction that Being is larger than what any one form of being can do to it. I go on with words in my mouth and with books in my hands, like a perplexed figure from an Edward Hopper painting.*J.S. Porter, essayist, Spirit Book Word: An Inquiry into Literature and Spirituality (2001).+
Reader/I read. I dream. I take notes. I write. Reading is what I do. Reader is who I am. I write books on my readings, books on other people's books, and construct sentences from other people's senences. My words sometimes turn up as anonymous fragments on the covers of other people's books. If I could only declare one item of identification at the border, it would be reader.*J.S. Porter, essayist, Lightness and Soul: Musings on Eight Jewish Writers (2011).+
Books/I like books in the same ways I like dogs. I like the look of them, the feel of them, the smell of them. My heart quickens when I see someone reading. I feel most myself when turning and underlining pages.*J.S. Porter, essayist, Lightness and Soul: Musings on Eight Jewish Writers (2011).+
Reading/We readers, aglow in the word, huddle together like penguins against the world's chill, its indifference and amnesia...When you read, you read against the grain of death. You read stubbornly, defiantly. You read desperately, as if looking for a missing child. You read deliriously, in the hope of ecstasy and the fear of the inevitable misreading.*J.S. Porter, essayist, Lightness and Soul: Musings on Eight Jewish Writers (2011).+