[still more things I just don't want to lose]

"Duty is a choice." --PM, on the Aeneid.

And then I wrote this which is totally unedited but here it is anyway:

Duty is a set of strings
taut with my weight
as I dangle, my feet
just off the floor
In that empty space
so much feeling teems
But the strings shift
and I dance
to music not my own.

--thinking of Aeneas's line as he abandons Dido: Italiam non sponte sequor, "I follow Italy not of my own will."

More quotes: Snake

I was about to throw away the aforementioned piece of paper when I found more things written on it that I want to keep/remember:

        The snake is deeply troubling because it has no form.

Scrawled next to this, the word protean. PM also said that the snake evokes for humans our own viscera, and thus distresses us:

        What should be on the inside and hidden [guts, intestines] is,
       in the snake, on the outside.

This exposure, this violation of boundaries, disturbs our sense of security and stability.

Hm.

Writers...

I've been trying to restore order to my life by restoring order to my room, which entails clearing off the layers of paper from my desk and making all the books stand up instead of slouching everywhere. One of the papers had, amidst a bunch of messy syntax trees from when I was tutoring last semester, a quotation that I wanted to preserve. For your enjoyment and my future ease of finding, here it is:

    Writers
      make it possible to bear sorrow,
      make evil intelligible,
      make justice desirable,
      make love possible.

My thesis professor cited this in class during a lecture last semester. (He mentioned the original speaker as a colleague whose name sounded something like Rosenblatt but whom I can't really identify, so... Original author, please don't be offended or feel plagiarized. I just want to remember what you said and share your insight with ten or so people who read this blog.) My professor applied these claims to Paradise Lost, saying the poem aims to make it possible to bear the sorrow of the Fall, to make Satan's evil intelligible (a task at which it is perhaps even too successful), to make the justice of God's intention desirable, and to make the love between Adam and Eve seem possible.

I don't want to be Milton, but I hope I can be this kind of writer.