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• RT @capricecrane: T.S. Eliot: "The world ends not with a bang, but a whimper."
  Sadly, so do most of my dates. #

• For nothing in the white hotel but love / Is offered at a price we can afford — D.M. Thomas #
• RT @HiltonHB Waterfront – Come decked out in USC gear & colors this Sat. to watch the game at Shades Lounge and get 10%off your bill #

Master of his days,
Could Sisyphus be happy?
Camus says he is.

Northwood wins 3-2
IHF Finals next week
May the best team win

Grammatically incorrect — “best” should be “better” — but it’s okay because I’ve got a poetic license!

It’s right here in my wallet . . .

Outside my window
Somewhere in the big pine tree
A bird is singing.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

— Walt Whitman

My son has an assignment to read this poem and answer some questions about what Whitman was trying to say.

The academic answer is that he was exploring the tension between romanticism and science in the late 19th century, and acknowledging sadly, based on “much applause in the lecture-room,” that the romantic worldview was dying out.

But just between you and me, he was also saying that overanalyzing things like stars and poems makes them boring . . .

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!”

— Thomas Parke D’Invilliers

This is the epigraph to The Great Gatsby, which my son is reading for school. So beautiful, so sad . . .

(Thomas Parke D’Invilliers is a character in Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, used by him here as a nom de plume.)

I’m looking at these last few posts where I’ve strung together W.H. Auden, John Dewey, Meat Loaf and Franz Kafka, not with any sense of purpose, just things I’ve read or listened to on my winter break.

What a renaissance man I am!

Why, if you were here, we could talk about poetry, education, philosophy, sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll, existentialism . . . and we’d have a good time too, considering we’re all going to die . . .

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

— W.H. Auden, “Lullaby”

Outside the window, snow,
A woman in a hot bath
Overflowing.

— Nobuku Katsura

See the river flow
In a long unbroken line
On the field of snow.

– Boncho

Confined within doors
A priest is warming himself
Burning a Buddha statue.

— Natsume Soseki

Through snow,
Lights of homes
That slammed their gates on me.

— Buson

Originally uploaded by ahp_ibanez

On a withered bough
A crow alone is perching,
Autumn evening now.

— Basho

The wild geese take flight
Low along the railroad tracks
In the moonlit night.

— Shiki

On love, on grief, on every human thing,
Time sprinkles Lethe’s water with his wing.

— Walter Savage Landor

[Lethe is the river of forgetfulness. — Ed.]

Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things.

— Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

If I could only give three words of advice, they would be, ‘Tell the truth.’ If I got three more words, I’d add, ‘All the time.’

— Ibid.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

— Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

Randy Pausch was lucky in that, thanks to the worldwide fame he achieved from his lecture and book, he died knowing that things he did and said would not be forgotten after he was gone.

Without the pancreatic cancer, he couldn’t have achieved that. Let’s face it, you can’t peddle the kind of pabulum cited above as “wisdom” in the absence of a terminal illness.

We own this book because my mom sent it to my son for his birthday. He hasn’t read it yet and probably won’t, but I read it.

I feel bad saying it, but it’s a tiresome collection of warmed-over platitudes. It’s like being cornered by your most annoying advice-giving relative at a family reunion.

Pausch was also lucky in being able to make an early departure from his famously self-absorbed wife, Jai (pronounced Jay), who didn’t want him to give the lecture in the first place because it would mean taking time away from her.

From a Wall Street Journal story last May:

A friend suggested to Jai that she keep a daily journal. She writes in there things that get on her nerves about Randy.

My wife would totally do that, but I bet there are some women would use the journal to record things they cherish about their terminally ill husbands.

“Randy didn’t put his plate in the dishwasher tonight,” she wrote one night. “He just left it there on the table and went to his computer.” She knew he was preoccupied, heading to the Internet to research medical treatments. Still, the dish bothered her. She wrote about it, felt better, and they didn’t need to argue over it.

Hey honey, just put the goddamn plate in the goddamn dishwasher, will ya? It’s part of living with other people. God knows what sort of minutiae this man would be having soul-crushing arguments about over the course of a normal lifespan.

I mean, I’m no saint, but I’ve put other people’s plates in dishwashers hundreds of times, and they were all in perfect health.

R.I.P., Randy Pausch.

I tell my son, “When you call grandma to thank her for the book, tell her you really liked the part about brick walls letting us prove how badly we want things.”

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

— Marianne Williamson

“Get off,” my wife says — but the pug
Just looks at her and doesn’t move.
He’s lying in his favorite spot
Beside his master on the couch.

“Off,” she says — the dog just stares;
He could win a test of wills
But when she moves to pick him up
He concedes defeat and jumps.

“I want to sit there,” she explains.
He looks at her, he looks at me
Then jumps up from the other side,
Lying down across my lap

Sideways, facing down his foe
As if to say “Your move.”

[Heath] Ledger’s ex-fiancée Michelle Williams and their two year old daughter Matilda flew from a film set in Sweden to their home in Brooklyn following the tragedy. . . .

Her father Larry Williams said: “It has just broken everybody’s heart in my family. I think Tennyson got it right in the poem he described someone as having died at a young age but burning the candles at both ends. And oh what a beautiful flame he made. That was Heath.

“The saddest thing is his daughter whom he just loved dearly. The Tennyson poem is just so true. His years were few but he left a beautiful legacy.”

— Daily Mail

Okay . . . Tennyson?!

Tennyson did write In Memoriam A.H.H. about a friend who died young, but the candle poem was written by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light!

He mentions Tennyson twice, in case you missed it the first time. I’m quotin’ Tennyson here! The first and last time anyone will be interested in anything this man has to say and instead of going down in history as a Tennyson scholar, he’ll be remembered as a puffed-up phony . . .

And often you asked me,
“What is the use of knowing the evil in the world?”
I am out of your way now, Spoon River,
Choose your own good and call it good.
For I could never make you see
That no one knows what is good
Who knows not what is evil;
And no one knows what is true
Who knows not what is false.

— Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology, “Seth Compton”

‘Now it might be a very romantic sight to some chaps, a light burning in a tower window. I knew a poem about a thing like that once. Forgot it now, though. I was no end of a one for poetry when I was a kid — love and all that. Castle towers came in quite a lot. Funny how one grows out of that kind of thing.’

— Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

I am reminded of the lines from “The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.

FIGHT ON!

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

[Read more . . .]