Our Lady of the Lakes: Dec 3, 2007

Monday, December 3, 2007

Rruar, baby!

I need to ask my favorite expert on Albanian language: Do you really have twenty-seven different adjectives specifically to describe moustaches? Besim, will you weigh in on this?

ice spreads its wings across the surface at dawn

There's really no doubt about it: This is totally an insane life. After not writing a word all semester for a professor's eyes other than emails, I'm now on my 47th page in a week. Thank God for snack food, no neighbors complaining about my late-night music or observing my computer light on at 2 am or my belly-dancing around the cottage to keep myself sane. Thank God for Regina Spektor and the ability to wear my pajamas without showering all day long while I sit here artificially constructing a qualitative paper as the first step in a hypothetical mixed methods study for university administrators interested in the needs of graduate students in terms of their work spaces for scholarly labor. Thank God for my amazing talent for bullshitting. Thank God I'm almost finished with the phase of my graduate life where I'm working simultaneously on four degrees, and where I'm effectively doing three jobs. Because, um, can I just say again how totally unsustainable this is!?

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862) (Walden or Life in the Woods)

Listener up there! Here, you! What have you to confide to me?
Look in my face, while I snuff the sidle of evening;
Talk honestly—no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large—I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh—I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day’s work? Who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? Will you prove already too late?

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me—he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable;
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me;
It flings my likeness after the rest, and true as any, on the shadow’d wilds;
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air—I shake my white locks at the runaway sun;
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeathe myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

--Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Our Lady of the Lakes

Monday, December 3, 2007

Rruar, baby!

ice spreads its wings across the surface at dawn

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