Thinking is mostly a meandering, purposeless activity. Love doesn’t think. Beauty doesn’t think. Consciousness has no thought process. In Ode to a Nightingale, John Keats wrote that “the dull brain perplexes and retards”.
The liquid-eyed poet John Keats, dead at 25 from tuberculosis: “There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music.” In the same vein, from an old hymn often sung at funerals I presided over when I was in religious life: “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, / Bears all its sons away; / They fly forgotten, as a dream / Dies at the opening day.” No-one and nothing stay the same. Not even for an instant.
Men's Work 