Ship of Fools by Ted Kaczynski **
Let's Review 82: Don't Kid Yourself. They Really Do…
The Parable of the White Whale and the Good Ship…
Now and Forever
Let's Review 53: Old Men Go Exploring Edition
Bungee Dating in New York City
The Plates of Birds of America, Audubon's…
Secret Passages: In the Fog but sailing towards the lightNext post: Our long national nightmare is ______________ (Fill in the blank)
Previous post: “Fear is the little death…”
“The weight of this sad time we must obey. / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” — Lear
Real World Address
My Back Pages
“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
Fire Sale
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
BY WALLACE STEVENS
Your Say
My Back Pages
Search American Digest’s Back Pages
The Vault
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Black Burgers Matter
Just found out about this amazing new restaurant called “Amplifying Black Voices” where you can buy non-racist hamburgers and anti-fascist milkshakes. pic.twitter.com/0JA1mELnYg
— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) July 1, 2020
Comments on this entry are closed.
Before listening, I went and got my Yeats off the shelf so I could read and listen at the same time.
As usual for Yeats, he hammered out the form and format quite precisely; four stanzas, each eight lines of iambic pentameter, stuffed with concepts and constructs,, forcing the reader to pause and contemplate.
I was a bit shocked and startled being reminded of his old man thoughts and laments while in his early sixties but I must allow that when he wrote it, close to a hundred years ago, many, if not most, were old, quite old, in their sixties.
Though thinking back I most allow, that when I first read ‘Sailing to..’ in my late teens or early twenties, I absolutely knew that those in their sixties, those doddering tottering tatter coated sticks, were worn and rusted ancient fossils whose mere continued existence challenged belief.
Needless to say, as I contemplate firing up my chainsaw and cutting some brush after finishing this post, I find myself chuckling at my youthful naivety.