stumbled upon in Stuart Sovatsky’s “Eros, Consciousness, and Kundalini”:

Whoever you are holding me now in hand, Without one thing all will be useless, I give you fair warning before you attempt me further, I am not what you supposed, but far different. Who is he that would become my follower? Who would sign himself a candidate for my affections? The way is suspicious, the result uncertain, perhaps destructive, You would have to give up all else, I alone would expect to be your sole and exclusive standard, Your novitiate would even then be long and exhausting, The whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the lives around you would have to be abandon'd ... Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold! Already you see I have escaped from you. ... –Walt Whitman, from "Whoever You are, Holding Me now in Hand"

googled via the “noodling” dead man soundtrack by neil young:

Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you. Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth. The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow. The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion. Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night. He who has suffer'd you to impose on him, knows you. As the plow follows words, so God rewards prayers. The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. –William Blake, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

bjork, “all is full of love”:

you'll be given love you'll be taken care of you'll be given love you have to trust it maybe not from the sources you have poured yours maybe not from the directions you are staring at trust your head around it's all around you all is full of love all around you all is full of love you just ain't receiving all is full of love your phone is off the hook all is full of love your doors are all shut all is full of love! all is full of love all is full of love all is full of love all is full of love all is full of love ...

i was getting this error repeatedly on boxes in my home domain. i would set up a system and then, seemingly at random, i would try to ssh to it and it would spout several “/dev/null: Permission Denied” as i tried to fire up an ssh-agent. looking at /dev/null, it showed a file mode of (if i remember correctly,) 600 and owned by root. i had no idea what was even accessing /dev/null - i certainly didn’t have any cron jobs set up to alter it. googling the problem didn’t really enlighten me, but i did check my .bashrc scripts and noted that i had set MYSQL_HISTFILE to /dev/null. a-ha! some reports on the web showed that various apps like to set files’ permissions in a sneaky sort of way, so i theorized that perhaps mysql sets the perms on that file to something sensible for a history file (to the detriment of other apps, of course, but mysql isn’t really expecting to write to a file other people will need, anyway. and mysql isn’t suid root, so this is still just a guess.) removing this line seems to work, for now, so hopefully i will have solved this. and hopefully this will have helped you, too!

"Perhaps truth by its nature makes communication between people impossible, in any case, communication by the intermediary of words. Everyone may know it for himself, but in order to enter into relations with his fellow men he must renounce truth and adopt any conventional lie." –Leo Shestov, Penultimate Words