on my mind
Occasionally, I'll find that I've been repeating something to myself for some time without realizing it. One time, when I was reading, I discovered that the idle tapping my right hand had been doing on the side of the chair was actually the opening and central rhythmic figure of the song "YYZ," which is also simply the letters Y-Y-Z in Morse code, with dits being one beat and dots being two, making a catchy 5/4 rhythm.
On the day of my master's exam, I awoke suddenly and said to myself: "These fragments I have shored against my ruin." I said it over and over, feverishly, under my breath ("These fragments I have shored against my ruin"), as I showered and dressed and ate breakfast. Only then did I see the meaning of what my brain was telling itself, and why on that day of all days. The line is the climax of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." It refers, I believe, to the fragments of the great human thoughts that its speaker has piled up in a personal war against chaos: the great ideas, as never-so-well-expressed by the great thinkers and expressers of the world, are indeed one way of civilizing ourselves against our society's unexamined coziness with the very worst that is thought and said.
So. This morning, after a night of good cigars and better steak with the boys, I awoke with Browning on my mind:
On the day of my master's exam, I awoke suddenly and said to myself: "These fragments I have shored against my ruin." I said it over and over, feverishly, under my breath ("These fragments I have shored against my ruin"), as I showered and dressed and ate breakfast. Only then did I see the meaning of what my brain was telling itself, and why on that day of all days. The line is the climax of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." It refers, I believe, to the fragments of the great human thoughts that its speaker has piled up in a personal war against chaos: the great ideas, as never-so-well-expressed by the great thinkers and expressers of the world, are indeed one way of civilizing ourselves against our society's unexamined coziness with the very worst that is thought and said.
So. This morning, after a night of good cigars and better steak with the boys, I awoke with Browning on my mind:
Then, welcome each rebuff That turns Earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go! Be our joys three parts pain! Strive, and hold cheap the strain; Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe! For thence — a paradox Which comforts while it mocks — Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail:
What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me.
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