Our Lady of the Lakes: This is a lonely town, ours is a lonely life . . .

Saturday, March 8, 2008

This is a lonely town, ours is a lonely life . . .

Crampy, moody, and intensely craving molasses. I am trying my hand at a variation on hermit cookies, which I'll post on the Kitchen Empress if it turns out good. (Edit: it's here!) My version of the old-fashioned spiced raisin bar includes walnuts, turbinado sugar, and molasses. Even though I shouldn't be eating the raw egg, I couldn't help but taste the batter, which tastes really good.

The sun peeked out for a few minutes this afternoon, and the sunset is another one of those lovely ones where the frozen surface of the lake turns a cool purplish shade of pale grey, and the horizon gets dappled with a gentle peachy yellow behind the bare treetops. It's beautiful, but I still am hoping for the spring soon.

I spent the day grading undergraduate papers for Anthro 101, trying to work my way through the stack of 75. Characteristically slowly. I need to get a move on, though, because I have to do some writing tomorrow.

I took a little break to talk to Ali, who just bought a blue Prius, and to watch the last episode of Felicity again, while eating a little lunch of roasted broccoli, sauteed grape tomatoes, and quesadillas.

No comments:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

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