My blind right eye is somewhat troubling me, so I have resumed wearing an eye patch, which inexplicably because I have no light perception in that eye, seems to help. I don’t know that I will wear it constantly; but if you see it in future photos, you now know why.
One positive result of wearing the patch in public is that people give me more space.
———
Carol and I have been watching the Netflix series, Marco Polo, a reasonably entertaining fabrication, which caused me to look up Coleridge’s poem, “Kubla Khan.”
Although a fragment, it is longer than I remembered. And would have been longer still had Coleridge, after an opium influenced sleep, not been interrupted the next morning by a “person from Porlock.”
———
I have been reading A TIME OF GIFTS, a famous, but uneven, book by Patrick Leigh Fermor, who audaciously set out in December 1933 at age eighteen to travel from London to Constantinople mostly on foot.
In it I just came across a poem allegedly inscribed in chalk in a castle cellar by Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I:
Live, don’t know how long,
And die, don’t know when;
Must go, don’t know where;
I am astonished I am so cheerful.
