various little tidbits of no particular import

Listy sort of day, mostly because I must be brief: Today is only a half-day at work and I have much to do before I take off to visit Hill and John and possibly Eigh Ann in DC!

Books I'm reading (I'm extremely ADD when it comes to reading books, or perhaps whimsical would be a better word: I like a book for each mood, and then I have the books I'm trying to read which I know I should but require more energy than I usually care to spare, and the junk books I know I shouldn't read but require no energy at all and entertain me endlessly):

1. Winter's Tale, Mark Helprin (I've been halfway through this for two years and I don't know why I won't finish it, it's completely gorgeous);
2. Works of Love, Søren Kierkegaard (I've been on this one for awhile too);
3. New Moon, Stephanie Meyer (a re-read, and yes, this is one of the junk brain candy books);
4. From Dead to Worse, Charlaine Harris (pseudo-junk brain candy, but really good pseudo-junk brain candy);
5. Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, edited by Jonathan Cott;
6. John Adams, David McCullough;
7. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, Lynne Truss (I just started this, and oh, boy, am I excited);
8. The Year of Living Biblically, A.J. Jacobs (just started this one as well).

I'm sure I'm missing a couple, but at the moment, that's the list. And that's just my active, I've-actually-cracked-these-books-open queue....I have stacks and stacks awaiting my attention just in the trailer. So many books...so little time...

Oo, and I REALLY want to read (and possess) Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English by John McWhorter. I passionately adore my native language, and anything extolling its power and beauty, and examining its history and trivia, gets my motor running in a fiery way. Also the book is pretty.

Alack, the finances demand just a little more waiting. (I hate wait...)

Music to Which I'm Listening (or to Which I am about to Listen)

Hazards of Love, the Decemberists;
All-Night Vigil, Rachmaninoff;
Gloria, John Rutter.

Etc.

And that's all for now, folks. The past nine days, with their startling intensity and wide range of emotional gambits, have worn me out (but overall quite happily), and so I go to wear myself out further with travel ("There's nothing that the road cannot heal"), fellowship and fun. At Christmas I saw Hill only briefly for a few hours, and we hadn't seen each other in...oh God, at least three years; I haven't seen John in nearly two; and I haven't seen Eigh Ann in approximately two either. And these are three of my nearest and dearest with whom I speak on an extremely frequent and regular basis. (Sometimes I wonder if face-to-face relationships will grow impossible for me to maintain because I'm so accustomed to developing and maintaining my closest relationships over the phone.)

I'm looking forward to the open highway in the sunshine. A few weeks ago I finally tired of boring flat hair and hurled myself into a beauty salon with all the desperation of a thirsty man flinging himself into a stream, and came out with considerably long hair cut in random layers and tumbling about gently with loose styled curls. Immediately thereafter I purchased a bunch of hair products and a flatiron (you can curl hair with it, who knew?), and now I love breezing around with pretty hair. I never wore it down before, and now I wear it down all the time -- in fact, the days when I don't have time to fuss with it, no matter how well-dressed I am I feel like I'm walking around in sweatpants.

The point of that roundabout paragraph is that it's going to be fun to drive along with the windows cracked and my hair blowing in whatever breeze the temperature allows me to enjoy.

And underlying and infusing that happiness is the strange stark sorrow, the strange fierce joy of the paradox of the life that only comes through death, of the wait for salvation, of breath held in three hours of midday darkness, of things finished and things begun, of helplessness and propitiation, of the straining muscles, the broken skin, the blood and sweat of God soaking into temporal wood, temporal soil, of earthquakes and rent curtains, of the shock of holiness laid bare for human eyes, of the soul waiting more than watchmen wait for the morning, of the morning coming, and yet to come.

Exerpt from East Coker, in Honor of Good Friday

IV
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

V
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.
And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.
And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

~ T. S. Eliot, from "East Coker," Four Quartets