Musings on Monday Mornings

I went to the wood because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience and be able to give a true account of my next excursion

Having moved out of home, I often think of the places that I have been and that I will be and am reminded of a line from Out of Africa: "If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?" Maybe I'll wander without ever touching anything, or perhaps these things will beckon of me once I am gone?

The time you won your town the race We chaired you through the market-place; Man and boy stood cheering by, And home we brought you shoulder-high... Smart lad, to slip betimes away From fields where glory does not stay And early though the laurel grows It withers quicker than the rose... Now you will not swell the rout Of lads that wore their honours out, Runners whom renown outran And the name died before the man... And round that early-laurelled head Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead, And find unwithered on its curls The garland briefer than a girl's." A. E. Housman

Word of the Day for Sunday March 12, 2006 parvenu \PAR-vuh-noo; -nyoo\, noun: 1. One that has recently or suddenly risen to a higher social or economic class but has not gained social acceptance of others in that class; an upstart. adjective: 1. Being a parvenu; also, like or having the characteristics of a parvenu. But the favourite's power and influence provoke intense ill-feeling among other courtiers, who regard him as a sinister usurping parvenu with ideas above his station, or perhaps even a sorcerer. -- Francis Wheen, "The whole truth about Peter's friends,"

Just finished with Kennedy’s Unfinished Life , which most ironically was left unfinished for the better part of the year. Finally though, yesterday the last chapter closed with his sad, yet by this time very predictable death in Dallas. (Love that about fiction—the hope that maybe he may live, become a single-woman kind of guy and live happily ever after with his delightfully charming American-royalty wife Jackie. But alas! Only in fiction.) Have now started with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Know . So far, so good. Even while writing things in a medium as public as this, one thinks in one of two ways. A) I am brilliant, my work is brilliant. I will get (relative) fame and recognition from the (two) people who (actually) do read this crap I occasionally spurt out (Azam Noon and of late, though serious Nancy Drew tactics Amal Khan {though I don’t know how much the latter reads. The former has no choice. He is blood. I will hound him with sagging butt skin and fake dentures till he’s 80 ...