Yeah. I woke up at 5:00 a.m. At 6:00 I got up to have my hot water and honey while I watched the current episode of Borgen. Another amazing show. The acting is phenomenal. Then I had coffee and breakfast, played with Emmylou, unloaded the dishwasher, and now I am thinking I will try to sleep again. Here's Jeff Nunokawa's thought of the morning.
4463. "poem of life and death" (Jasper Griffin)
Walter Marg called the Iliad 'the poem of death'. I think it will be more appropriate to call it the poem of life and death: of the contrast and transition between the two. This is what the poet is concerned to emphasize, and on this he concentrates his energies and our gaze(Homer on Life and Death).
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, or sometime near enough, you wake to wonder what you are dreading and what you are doing. What battle of life and death, come from near and far, are you fighting or fearing inside of your head?
Maybe it's a nightmare of history--say, the thought of all those decencies deadened by thelongue durée of human war.
They say that the worst weapon of war is memory, a cousin told me at a family reunion this summer. At twenty, he had fought in Vietnam. The war nearly killed him several times over, and the memories of what he had seen and done there made his life for a long time after a kind of living death.
Years later, at that reunion I reported, some decent exchange took place on the family deck as my cousin conveyed his intelligence to those listening to him--something brought back from the land of the dead to the land of the living.
Somehow, it felt a little like love.
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Note: She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved her that she did pity them (Shakespeare, Othello).
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, or sometime near enough, you wake to wonder what you are dreading and what you are doing. What battle of life and death, come from near and far, are you fighting or fearing inside of your head?
Maybe it's a nightmare of history--say, the thought of all those decencies deadened by thelongue durée of human war.
They say that the worst weapon of war is memory, a cousin told me at a family reunion this summer. At twenty, he had fought in Vietnam. The war nearly killed him several times over, and the memories of what he had seen and done there made his life for a long time after a kind of living death.
Years later, at that reunion I reported, some decent exchange took place on the family deck as my cousin conveyed his intelligence to those listening to him--something brought back from the land of the dead to the land of the living.
Somehow, it felt a little like love.
----------------------------------------------
Note: She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved her that she did pity them (Shakespeare, Othello).
I am trying to finish another of the three or four books that are almost finished. I stumbled across this in Sylvia Townshend Warner's Summer Will Show, that I was supposed to have finished for my book group about four months ago.
"But they had spoken together, with every admission re-establishing their liveliness, their power to speak, hear, communicate. It is one thing to speak of death with those one loves, but to think of it alone, walking through the streets, one does that at a different temperature."
I walked a long time yesterday but I did not really get any good photos. This will have to do.
longue durée of human ...
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