The sea is snotgreen, beauty is pied and the mind is best cleared of cant. Ambition is vaulting; desperation, quiet; fruitfulness, mellow. If books change the world, they do so incrementally, word by word, one reader at a time, not on the barricades but in a chair. In “The Secret Life of Books” (Corrupted Treasures, 1995), the Australian poet Stephen Edgar writes:
“They have you. In the end they have written you,
By the intrusion
Of their account of the world, so when
You come to think, to tell, to do,
You’re caught between
Quotation marks, your heart’s beat an allusion.”
We work in the dark, passionate intensity fills the worst, Jews bleed.
1 comment:
Nice - scrotum-tightening Joyce, dappled Hopkins, singing Dr. Johnson, the o'erleaping Oxford, living Thoreau, misty Keats... We do what we can, for surely some revelation is at hand, if you tickle us do we not laugh, a faithful hand will sift the wheat and chaff...
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