(102) Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

On January 10th 1994 I thought of the misdemeanours of a spiritual teacher. I had been shocked by the misconduct of a man who had so stressed the importance of correct behaviour.

The last lines of Shakespeare's 94th sonnet http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sonnets/94.html contain a warning about how terrible it is when the advanced lapse -
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; 
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
The guru had oft drawn attention to those lines.

I pictured myself confronting him and quoting them.

That evening I visited my mother. As I arrived, she was watching some police drama on BBC1. At one point a character said to another "sweetest things grow sourest by their deeds." Only that line was quoted.
I am confident that I had never heard it quoted anywhere before.

On March 26th 1997 I again encountered the "lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds" quote on TV, only a few minutes after I had been thinking of that same spiritual teacher's fallings off.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Narrative, plus Epilogues and Appendices

Image
" When a man looks for Truth, Truth looks for him." (Sufi aphorism) "The plura l of anecdote is not data." Introduction The coincidences in this section, mostly from early 1988, seemed to lend themselves more easily to A Narrative exposition.  To those examples which are, to some extent, verifiable,  I have appended a V. And to make the following of it all easier I ́ll begin with a synopsis. Permit me to note my attendance of the Society for Psychical Research Psi/Synchronicity workshop (94) Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge when I heard Dr Caroline Watt Caroline Watt - Wikipedia speak of what she called the " Mine VsYours " syndrome. i.e. that people tend to regard their own coincidences as more cute, amusing and compelling than those of others. Here's a link to work done by Ruma Falk on that topic - Judgment of Coincidences: Mine versus Yours on JSTOR I think this boils down to two reasons: - a) The experiencer ...
Read more

(281) "Are you not entertained?"

Image
At 21:12 on June 29th, 2015 I was flicking through a Youtube version of the 2000 film Gladiator - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbBiXPVKuTA I reached the point just before a particular scene which I wanted to see. Other available versions showed only certain excised scenes, but not the film in its entirety. It is where the gladiator portrayed by Russell Crowe talks with the slave owner played by the late Oliver Reed. The preceding scene, where Crowe takes on and slaughters a half dozen gladiators one by one, I had seen before as one of those excised. I now saw Crowe, after his killing spree, lobbing his sword to hit a distant table and asking of the amphitheatre crowd, "Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here?" He then spits into the dust and walks off as the crowd chant his name. And I had seen that finale before, too.  But the complete film here seemed to show a slightly different cut to that with which I was familiar. A missing b...
Read more

(166) Paula Yates and family and friends. And from the Third to the Fourth

Image
( AMPLIFY ING the above article will make it easier to read.) I first met Fiona in March 1994, marrying her in December 1995 and hence moving to Hastings. I noted that a lot of her arty friends and neighbours had children with unusual names. Judy Neate had a son called Bingo, and Alistair Fairley a son called Paris and a daughter called Carson. Laetitia Yhap had a son called Ajax and Craig Sams a grandson called Mars. Unconventional children’s names automatically prompted thoughts of the TV personality, Paula Yates, and her four daughters - Fifi Trixibelle, Peaches Honeyblossom, Little Pixie and Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Yates More than once, in the first years of our relationship, I joked to Fiona that all we needed now was for Paula Yates to move into the area. Ms Yates had a close friend in Jo Fairley, Alistair’s sister, who had a house just around the corner from us. We had heard that Paula would sometimes be seen in the shops of Hastings...
Read more