Quick thot

Here’s a portrait of me, drawn by my 6-year-old nephew.

So, 

As I detailed in my last entry, I’ve been reading early U.S. poets, trying to figure out why this country is the way that it is. Also, for similar reasons, I keep watching films from early Hollywood.

Should I mention the weather? It’s now December 2024, but let me comment on last year’s winter . . .

The winter of 2023 was strange: it only snowed twice; and, each time, the snow melted in less than a week. The warmest “cold season” I’ve ever experienced. It was a green Christmas.

Now this current winter has barely begun, and there hasn’t been much precipitation; even so, over the week that just passed, we saw more snowfall than we did during the entire prior twelvemonth.

Another year-to-year progression is that, following a bloody 2023, global warfare has intensified significantly. And this is no easier to change than the weather. One can say words about it, and see if they have any effect . . .

May all the inhumanity in the world melt away and never return.

I’m satisfied with my quiet existence; but, at the same time, I yearn for the power to solve all the injustices that I see: to reverse everything that is wrong. I wish that the world were different than it is, and I’m frustrated that I can’t find a way to change it for the better.

“For I am mad with devouring ecstasy to make joyous hymns for the whole earth!” as Whitman always sez.

“Dream, dream, dream . . .”
—The Everly Brothers

“. . . perchance to dream: ay, theres the rub . . .”
—Shakespeare’s Hamlet

I’ll give the title and tell you more about it later, but right now I just want to mention that I’m reading a book whose author (Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty) talks about lovers sharing a dream that brings them together in reality.

Now I leave you with this paragraph spoken by an imprisoned priest named Tzinacán, from “The God’s Script” by Jorge Luis Borges:

One day or one night—what difference between my days and nights can there be?—I dreamt there was a grain of sand on the floor of the prison. Indifferent, I slept again; I dreamt I awoke and that on the floor there were two grains of sand. I slept again; I dreamt that the grains of sand were three. They went on multiplying in this way until they filled the prison and I lay dying beneath that hemisphere of sand. I realized that I was dreaming; with a vast effort I roused myself and awoke. It was useless to awake; the innumerable sand was suffocating me. Someone said to me: You have not awakened to wakefulness, but to a previous dream. This dream is enclosed within another, and so on to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path you must retrace is interminable and you will die before you ever really awake.