In response to my recently writing "I will miss glancing up and seeing water." Douglas in Scotland sent me this video with instructions: Open in emergencies, or when sipping you know what. Lock Ness today.
Not long ago he sent me this photo of a goose taking flight.
Scotland has sublime beauty.
I thank Douglas for sharing it with me and giving me permission to share it with you.
Carol and I landed at O'Hare yesterday just after sunset. 26F/-3C. Normal Chicago January.
Today I had an appointment with the beautiful skin cancer doctor. It is a pleasure to see her. In some ways more than others. She froze enough of me so that full body immersion in liquid nitrogen might be more efficient, and chopped off five bits to be sent for biopsy, a new and undesired record. I expect to have to return for further chopping when the results are known.
From RIVER OF THE GODS about the 'discovery' of the source of the White Nile by Richard Burton, the 19th Century explorer not the 20th Century husband of Elizabeth Taylor, and James Speke:
Of Burton who spoke more than twenty languages and had impartially studied the world's religions while believing in none of them: The only aspect of religion that he scorned was the idea that there existed any true believers. 'The more I study religion,' he wrote, 'the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anyone but himself.'
Burton also wrote: Of the gladdest moment in the human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands.
Burton quoted an old proverb: The world is a great book, of which those who never leave home read but a page.
After shaking hands with Burton, the Dahomey king said, "You are a good man, but too angry." Burton agreed, "Travelers like poets are mostly an angry race."
From: THE CLASSIC TRADITION OF HAIKU.
How I envy maple leafage
which turns beautiful and then falls!
--Kagami Shilo 1665-1731
I sleep...I wake...
How wide
The bed with none beside.
--Kaga No Chiyo 1703-1775
Men are disgusting.
They argue over
The price of orchards.
--Masaoka Shiki 1867-1902
There are many haiku references to butterflies. Permit me one of my own.
Our lives are as brief
as a butterfly's cough.
I like to believe that some of those Japanese poets would have approved, but as always I have never known.
From HORACE: THE COMPLETE ODES AND EPODES
9
...
Avoid speculation
about the future; count the credit the days
chance deals; youth should not spurn
the dance of sweet desire;
this is your green time, not your white
and morose. In field or piazza
now is the proper season for
trading soft whispers in the dark;
the tell-tale complaisant laugh
of a girl in some secret nook;
the pledge removed from an arm
or a helpfully helpless finger.
31
...
Son of Latona, grant me I pray
to enjoy the things I have and my health
and to pass my old age with a sound
mind, with my cithara, and with style.
33
...
This is Venus's way: her cruel humor
is pleased to subject to her yoke of bronze
incompatible bodies and minds.
Even I, when a better love sought me,
was detained in pleasant chains by Myrtale,
a one-time slave girl more stormy than
Adriatic waves rolling round to Calabria.
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